2013 Euro Vacation: France

Bordeaux and Chateau la France

After great difficulty locating the rental car drop off location at Lisbon, we caught an Easyjet flight to Bordeaux to meet up with a group of friends for the next phase of our trip. Bordeaux was much more interesting than we expected, with the old part of the city containing many fine buildings, housing lots of restaurants and up-market shopping.
Having picked up a large mini-bus next day
to carry everyone, we headed off to Chateau La France, near Beychac-et-Caillaux, about 30 Km from Bordeax, and not far from St Emilion. The Chateau was excellent, and had a Cave underneath with all of the wines produced by the vineyard on which it is located. We managed to sample all of them on the first night and continued to do so for the remainder of the stay. Some excellent meals were enjoyed, thanks in large part to Roland and his gift for shopping and cooking, and despite his execrable command of French! The winery has adopted a giant rooster (le grand Coq in French) as their emblem, and a lot of pixels were consumed photographing it from various angles.

A day trip to Arcachon on the coast was interesting, and included a walk up and down a huge sand dune which is engulfing the forest.

We had two excellent lunches organised by Bev - one at Chateau Grand Barrail about 2 Km from St Emilion, was outstanding. We also had a wine tour of Chateau Lascombes in the Margaux appellation, followed by a lunch in the nearby village. Too much to write up in detail, but some photos below give a flavour of this part of the trip.