We had taken a wrong turn. We realized this as we turned another corner on a slow, gruelling uphill stretch of path. After asking an elderly man for directions and the equivalent of performing two Buns of Steel tapes, we reached the town of Le Poet Celard, another perched village. The chalet was in ruins and the town had taken it upon itself over the past 20 years to refurbish it. The views were amazing.
We headed out of town towards the direction of our goal for the night: a small U-shaped turn in a highway a few kilometers outside of town. We were told that our bed and breakfast would be right off the highway. Walking past farms, roaming cattle, and chicken farms (read: stinky), we discovered too late that we had been making one too many left hand turns. Over the course of about 3 hours, we had managed to circumnavigate a small mountain that we had intended to traverse. Standing 50 meters from the place we were 3 hours previously, we took out our cell phones and wandered around like the Verizon guy looking for signal. Our French-speaking American made the call and attempted to sound as pitiful as possible - low and behold, the owner piled into her car and picked us up. On the drive back to Le Debat, we discovered that we were nowhere near where we needed to be.
The bed and breakfast was beautiful. Surrounded by a small stream, fields, and a whole lot of open space, we sat down at the dinner table and hungrily devoured the homemade meal of local (read: slaughtered less than 2 kilometers from where we sat) lamb, inhaled the potato/cauliflower/cheese casserole, and downed two bottles of red wine. Local strawberries, a cheese plate, and a lively debate about the French CPE issue finished us off and we headed straight for bed.
It was smooth sailing until sometime around 4am when my annoying habit of snoring awoke my American friend who was in the twin bed next to me. This wasn't an annoying gentle crescendo of a snore - rather a startling, sudden, and acute snore which emanated from the depths of my nasal cavity and caused my roommate to be roused out of a deep sleep, let out a huge, shocked "aaaaggh", get up on all fours in bed - staring at me. This, in turn, caused me to wake up and for a total of about 10 seconds, we shared a strange awkward moment staring at each other in the middle of the night. He would later tell me that it sounded to him like I had rolled out of bed and hit my head on the nightstand. Our Spanish siesta master stayed asleep through the entire ordeal. The next morning, we ate breakfast with our other B&B'ers, took a photo for the Drome Tourism Board a la Brokeback Mountain, and headed towards Francillon - our first stop of the day.
It wasn't that big of a dog. In fact it looked pretty cute. But the way the muscles were rippling off of this uncollared, unleashed boxer/pitbull was frightening. In our infinite wisdom, we had determined that dogs could smell fear and attempted to appear as a jovial, laughing group as we marched down the road to Francillon. It was at this moment that our Spanish friend showed his one true hate: country dogs. It followed us into Francillon. It followed us into town. It even picked a fight with another dog, then returned to us to continue wandering through the village. We managed to ditch it amongst a group of local children who seemed to be familiar with it. We didn't stick around to see the carnage that might have ensued.
Our hike got immensely more interesting on the road to Saou. We crossed scarred rock faces and followed paths built from the falling debris. We wandered into Saou fell in love with a restaurant called "Cherries and Vinaigrette". Don't let the name fool you - it doesn't suck. Established by a chef who worked and saved in Geneva for two years to buy the location, it looked like a converted gas station. It's large bay doors had gigantic curtain partitions to separate the outdoor patio from the indoor dining. The food was fantastic and cheap, although its marketing campaign could have used some work. You couldn't have asked for a better lunch or view.
We stumbled up from the table, wandered through fields for about 15 minutes, and found a suitable siesta location in the middle of a remote field and fell asleep on top of our bags. As the bright, hot sun pounded down on our sleepy-from-the-Rose bodies, I thought to myself, "this is what every Easter Sunday should be like". We had one more day in our vacation and we had intended to make the most of it.
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