Wined, dined and rested.

[“Emotion recollected in tranquility” – this is one of a few entries that I’ve written several months later about our trip to France and Spain in that pandemic-smitten summer of 2020. We travelled with extreme caution, often changing our route according to regional news stories that we checked every morning and evening, and we stayed only in very small places off the beaten track. We were even more grateful than usual to be travelling by car, in our own personal bubble.]

So there we were, caught between the NEED to visit one of our favourite wine shops just outside a little town with the unlikely name of “Nissan” (from the Latin Anicianum, not from Tokyo) ……..

…. and the equally acutely felt NEED to visit another of our favourite wine shops, the wonderful Vinopolis in the sleepy little town of Florensac not far inland from Agde.

And THAT trip would require a visit to the seafood café on the beach at Marseillan Plage because there is a little cut through from Florensac among the dunes , skirting the edge of the Étang de Thau, which gets you round most of the tourist traffic even in August. And if you head for the car park at the end of that road there is ALWAYS space even in the height of the season.

Razor clams and a glass of Picpoul de Pinet is all I have to say. Sigh.

So that brings us to the need for a hotel somewhere between these places, and somewhere slightly out of the way. Also, even in quite a small town I am careful about choosing somewhere that has a closed parking area; it always seems to me that a laden foreign car stands out and if there are any thieves prowling then British plates make it rather a target. That kind of hotel was hard to find when we were doing our research, and we ended up choosing the Hotel du Mas in another sleepy small town the other side of the large area of vines behind the busy beach area.

 It had looked from our research like a small tourist hotel, the kind that families go to for a week on a full board basis and where they keep your wine bottle from one evening to the next…. And we were right. It was fine, we only needed somewhere to stay the night, we were able to eat safely outside and the sponged blue walls of the room were cool and peaceful.

Then we turned on the lights and the bathroom area sprang into glorious technicolour life, eclipsing the cool blue calm and imprinting its bright colours on our retinas.

The basin seemed to have been hewn out of a whole block of red marble; it sat there looking huge and smug as the jolly line of Provençal-style tiles skipped around it shouting “Look! We’re Provençal tiles!  Wheeeeee!” and the surrounding blue and yellow tiled walls took up the chorus, slightly out of tune like someone singing more with gusto than skill.

After a good deal of blinking and wondering whether to don sunglasses, we dared take a look at the shower and loo. The loo really should have been furnished with a crowbar and a jar of Vaseline because folding oneself into and out of it took the skills of an under-fed Houdini, while still coping with the sensory overload of the colour scheme.

The shower however presented a different issue; it caused several minutes of hilarity and one of us trying to explain to the other why they were laughing while simultaneously being rendered speechless by the taps……

Just look at the picture carefully, and call upon your teenage French…..

Having recovered we went downstairs and had a very simple but tasty supper on their wooden decking terrace. How is it that when you try and find a simple supper in England you end up with Brake Brothers’ finest, but a simple supper in France involves cheap but fresh ingredients presented simply and convincing you just by their flavour?  This was far from being a complicated starter…….

… but it pinged off the taste buds like a ball bearing in a game of Baby Foot.

As always we ordered a bottle of local wine and discovered one from the local area which is called, rather unfortunately for an English speaker, “La Clape”; we sniggered, of course, but enjoyed this Syrah, grenache and carignan mix so much we visited the producers the next day to buy some more.

This was just an overnight stay for us, our only stop this year that wasn’t in the middle of nowhere; we never expected it to offer more than a place to rest our heads, and it served that purpose well.  I would only return if I had the same needs again, it’s not really our kind of place.

But I’m still chuckling about those taps……