Those of you who follow my Instagram may have noticed that I recently went away for a short visit to the countryside. More specifically, I went to a tiny village called Les Deschamps in Burgundy, one of France’s winemaking regions. It’s about a half-hour away from the smallish city of Mâcon in east-central France, which itself is 70 km north of Lyon and 150 km west of Geneva, Switzerland. This is where my friend Yukiko (the one who taught me how to make that amazing ramen dish) and her boyfriend were staying temporarily while housesitting for some friends. As the first blossoms appeared on the trees and a definite hint of springtime began to infuse the air, they invited me (with the owners’ blessing) to come and spend a few days with them surrounded by nature. Living as I do in a city and with zero green things visible through my windows, I could not resist!

You will undoubtedly remember how much I love traveling in Europe by train (less so in the US, but that’s a story for another time). The ride from Paris to the Mâcon-Loché TGV station took only an hour and a half, the perfect amount of time to read a few articles in the new Véganes magazine. My friends then picked me up and we headed for the house.

I was captivated by both the old-timey charm and immenseness of this home, which is composed of two wings each with two or three storeys and an uncountable number of rooms. For someone like me who lives in a tiny city apartment (frustratingly without even a closet or storage space), it was somewhat disorienting, but in a thrilling way, to suddenly be surrounded by so much space. For perspective, my entire apartment could have easily fit into this house’s combined kitchen and dining room. It was a nice change.

The owners are in the process of preparing the house for sale, so I of course began daydreaming of what it would be like to live there.

Here are a few shots of the exterior.

I believe the plaque in the above photo means that one of the previous owners of the home won 1st prize for their Beaujolais. About 95% of the land in and surrounding this village is covered with grapevines. The rest is covered by roads and random grassy plots. You’ll see the vineyards in a moment—first, let’s take a peek inside the house. I didn’t take too many photos indoors, but here are a few of the details that caught my attention.

A beautiful old rug…

The guest bedroom I occupied, with its beautiful ceramic tile floor and a spacious built-in armoire that took my breath away (remember, I’m someone without a closet at home). All these vintagey details made my heart sing.

Sésame would have liked this regal chair, which has a certain air de famille. He’s not big on traveling (or even leaving the apartment at all), so I left him in Paris with a mountain of dry food and a friend coming to check on him.

During the house tour, we took a quick look into the house’s attic, which was suitably timeworn and full of antique things. It’s mainly a finished attic, with a series of rooms that seem to have been used as bedrooms at some point. The patterns of the fading, crumbling wallpaper suggest that this continued up until about the 1950s or 60s. Indeed, stepping into this attic felt like entering a time portal back to another era. I think that if I were to buy this house, I might leave these attic rooms as is, to preserve this window onto the past.

If these walls could talk, I wonder what tales they could tell, and how many years of life they have seen…

After a very delicious lunch of spinach soup seasoned with cumin and accompanied by potato salad, green salad, whole-wheat bread and various homemade tapenades, we set out for a walk among the vineyards.

The overcast sky and misty hilltops created an interestingly ominous mood, as if nature were not quite ready to let us enjoy this early bit of springtime. The moors of Wuthering Heights somehow came to mind, and rambling along the paths in spite of the slight chill in the air and the threat of rainfall became a defiant act of adventure.

We happened upon this friendly horse in a nearby field. We weren’t sure what she was being kept “for” and speculated that it could be to pull a plow through the vineyards, but a neighbor later told us that tractors can do all of that these days, even on steep slopes.

A bit later, the sun decided to poke its face through the clouds for a bit, allowing me to get some warmer shots.

Looking back at the entrance to the tiny village, which is composed of only some 20 houses. You no sooner enter it by car than you go past the “leaving” sign, which is the same sign with a red cross through it.

To my great delight, this house (which seems also to be a winery) had a miniature replica of it out in front, complete with real terra-cotta steps and the frame for a gate without any gate. The only difference between the two is the addition over the garage on the life-size one. Can you guess what this little house was doing there?

That’s right! It’s the mailbox.

I now have a new reason for not being able to wait to have a house of my own: to create a miniature version of it!

Strolling down the village’s mostly empty streets, we happened upon this sociable orange fellow. Shortly after shooting us this rather grumpy look, he flopped down on his back to show his readiness for belly scratches.

The next day, after spending the afternoon working on our respective freelance projects, we began to prepare the evening meal. A neighbor was invited to join us, so we wanted to be sure it was extra-nice. Yukiko made pasta with a homemade red sauce and a vegetable soup for the starter (they were divine).

No ideas for dessert that matched our somewhat limited ingredient supplies were coming easily to mind. But we did have a lot of bananas, and I recalled a photo of a dessert with sliced bananas on top that I had seen somewhere in the meanders of social media. Chocolate was another thought, since we had cocoa powder, so we decided to combine the two. It was something of an experiment, as I had never actually baked anything with bananas in it like this, and we were also working with certain restrictions because we had less sugar than we initially thought and no vanilla. But the main ingredients were there (whole-wheat flour, baking powder, cocoa powder and oil), and with the addition of some chocolate chips, the outward appearance at least was quite promising.

To our relief and satisfaction, it tasted pretty good too! The banana chunks inside the cake (barely visible in this shot) helped add sweetness and are probably a good solution for using even less sugar. I may recreate the recipe for a future post if people are interested.

We asked the neighbor about the area’s special attractions, to see if there was something we could do the next day before my departure. He told us there was a wine museum nearby, but also mentioned a rocky hill where some prehistoric remains had been discovered in the late 19th century. There was a small museum of prehistory there, he said, and a hiking trail. As we’d all been on winery tours before and are not much into wine these days, the choice was clear: the prehistory place!

La Roche de Solutré is located in the municipality of Solutré-Pouilly (you might recognize the second part of this name—this is indeed where Pouilly-Fuissé wine is produced). The limestone escarpment visible for miles around is famous both as a geological curiosity and as the site where, in 1866, vestiges of Upper Paleolithic homes, tombs and animal bones had been discovered. The site has even lent its name to a span of time in the Paleolithic era, the Solutrean period, and a controversial hypothesis suggesting that Europeans, not Native Americans crossing over from Asia, were in fact the first humans to settle the Americas (!).

At the foot of the rock, built right into the hill, is a small bunker-like museum of prehistory. Staffed by a very pleasant receptionist, the museum offers a number of artefacts inside glass cases, an audioguide in several languages and a series of short films showing excavations over the years. There’s an outdoor area behind the museum where you can stroll among some orchids if you’re there at the right time of year (we weren’t, but we didn’t mind).

After the museum, we set off on the hike up to the top of the rock. As we climbed higher and higher, we enjoyed increasingly beautiful views of the countryside below, all vineyards and cute houses. They looked more and more like a toy train town as we ascended. These photos sadly do them no type of justice.

I’m such a city-dweller that I cannot even guess at the names of the plants we walked among as we made our way up and down the paths, but the air was scented with a lush fragrance of fresh balsamy vegetation that did me a world of good.

The view from the very top, more or less. So beautiful. The top is as pointy and slippery as it looks from down below, by the way, and is actually a bit dangerous if someone is not completely looking where they’re going (a sheer drop on one side, and no guard rails on this kind of thing). Don’t let that stop you from visiting, but be a bit careful if you do.

Solutré is also famous because former French president François Mitterrand (1916-1996) made a vow at the end of the Second World War to climb it once every year, around Pentecost, and kept this promise from 1946 until 1995, the year before his death. The hard-to-read monument above testifies to his pilgrimages. In this video, you can see some parts of his 1976 climb. Note that he is climbing the very steep path; today there is also a longer, much more gradually ascending path for less avid hikers and those of us who arrive without the right shoes.

The rock viewed from another side.

Soon after we descended, it was time for me to get on another train and return to Paris, where an impatient Sésame awaited. It was a very relaxing and re-energizing little trip, exactly the kind I’ve been telling myself I should make more often. 🙂