Campervan Therapy

Two days’ drive takes us from the Lot’s mellow country roads to the hairpin 10% slopes of the Cévennes Mountains and the mighty gorges of the Tarn and Ardèche.

Aveyron’s Recoules Prévinquières

The N88 passes Laissac, famous as a cattle market. You can watch the auctioneers at work and have a slap-up steak for breakfast. We stop in  Recoules Prèvinquiéres.  Le Plô Campsite is surrounded by hills and woods. Horned cattle chew meditatively in the meadows.

An Ode to Steak Hâché

The owners of the campsite café are welcoming. We devour goat’s cheese salad followed by steak hâché – a genius invention – so much better than a burger. A cheap cut of beef, like skirt, tenderised by inside two spiked metal plates – the result? Maximum taste, the tough beef now succulently tender.

Recoules Village

We stroll around the darkened village, the odd cat slinking out of the shadows.

Through open shutters, a  group crowd round the stove, discussing the merits of this or that flavour. This is France, after all, where food is a religion.

Dreaming of Château Living

The château is romantic behind its high walls, its iron gates open, its child’s empty swing swaying. A private house, it brings on my favourite ‘what if?’ game. What if I’d been born here in a house full of ancestral spirits? My ‘what if?’ game is an essential ingredient to any jourey.

The Cévennes – In R.L. Stevenson’s Footsteps

As the Tarn gorge’s rocky teeth soar above us, the N88 snakes through Cévenne’s mountains. In Pradelles, we take the N102 into the mighty Ardèche valley. Kites circle above a field, one swoops and carries off a tiny creature, legs dangling from the razor beak.

I think of writer, Robert Louis Stevenson walking through these mountains, from the cold north to sun-soaked south, as he wrote his travelogue Travels with a Donkey.  Modestine, a recalcitrant donkey, carried his equipment, often refusing to move before bolting on a cliff-edge. His only protection from the elements being a rudimentary, sheepskin sleeping bag.

Even more poignant, he walked these mountains while waiting for the woman he loved to decide whether she’d marry him. On his return, I’m happy to say she did. Modern day followers in the writer’s footsteps can hire a donkey from Florac, but we leave that for another trip.

Coux

A bronze silhouette of Stevenson and Modestine tops the final pass out of the Ardèche Valley into the Ouvèze’s dramatic gorge.

Camping du Moulin d’Onclaire, an old flour mill, sits by the Ouvèze river.  Hundreds of walking trails start here.

We stroll around Coux, with its ancient arched bridge, narrow alleys, cobbles,  old stone cottages, many of them I’d guess renovated by artists, quirky sculptures and paintings staring from the windows.

Night brings a downpour of biblical proportions. As the thunder shakes the earth and lightning rips through the sky, Nature’s tempestuous outburst marks our last night in France.

The Money?

Camping du Moulin d’Onclaire – €28.22 per night.