Joigny

Rural France has a charm like no place I have ever been. It’s slow, it’s peaceful and just fantastically beautiful. Joigny has this in bucketloads. It’s just amazing. We’d booked into le Rive Gauche, a hotel on the River Yonne, with rumours of a good restaurant. The river flowed so slowly, we didn’t know which way it flowed.

First port of call was a shop. For clothes. Seems that the duty free hadn’t sated my and Cris’ appetite for threads… We hit the shop, but not as hard as we should have in hindsight, seeing as the luggage delivery isn’t going to happen.

It turned out to be a rather eclectic shopping experience. A mix of toiletries, clothes, USB powered speakers (gotta have Buena Vista Social club on a barge) and cheese.

That night, our accommodation reservation included a table for 4 at Hotel le Rive Gauche. It was rumoured that this was a neat spot for dinner. We broke our impromptu game of petanque early (Chris was winning, some would say unfairly) and headed for dinner. The consensus was the menu for 20 Euros that would include an entree, mains and dessert. We chose a bottle of Beaujolais to go with that and finished it off with coffee.

The upshot of all this: believe the rumours!!! They are all true. This was confirmed early in the evening when loads of locals started trickling and soon the place was full of patrons in a feeding frenzy.