X BARRE continues to plague us

Saturday 31st August
Another glorious Lyonnais day dawned and our first task was to relocate our car from  the  5 star garage into the street near Kelly’s Irish bar for ease of loading. We funincular up the hill again and walk down to our illustrious garage where we easily find the black beast and set off for a service station for fuel. Once more we hit  the big X BARRE  road closed. We go round the block and start again with a revised destination and voila we reach our destination and fuel up. Luckily we return to the street and find a park out the front so after depositing the suitcases in the car, via two traboules ( as the first one led to an underground ?? and we nearly lost Flashy) we meander over the bridge to the local market. Plenty of fruit, flowers, cheese, meat and fish so we pick up some supplies for the pique-nique we plan to have en  route to our overnight Chateau stop. We head down the A7 for St Etienne, sit in a car park on the freeway for 5 kms (I guess everyone heads of town for the weekend) and to keep us amused tag a tiny red fiat decorated with ribbons and flowers forming the lead vehicle in a wedding entourage. Horns tooting as only the French can, it at least makes up for the boredom of sitting stationary on a freeway. Amelie tells us to take route A47 to St Etienne but of course in keeping with our current luck the major freeway exit is X BARRE. We, along with streams of other cars are advised to continue straight for 6kms. Oh well, we say. Can't really argue so we drift further south beside the Rhone river before being able to do a legitimate U turn. We are now destined to return from when we came and Amellie really wants us to get back onto the A7 and repeat said journee. Oh no says Lady P I’m not going to fall for that, so she spies a bridge, two in fact that are crossing the Rhone which she thinks will give us some hope of getting to our destination in the West. Voila, much to Flashy's amazement, she is right and through a series of different address entries we snake away through the French countryside toward the Monts du Forez. And then we climb, through the National park on hairpin bends, passing potential Le Tour de France winners, future LeMans drivers and stopping briefly to observe the  twitchers seeking to ‘observe the migration du Col de Barachuchet'. We have 1 refreshing bier as we desperately needed a loo stop and reaching an altitude of 1200 metres  the temperature plummets to 18 degrees. It was an amazing drive, albeit not planned but ultimately far preferable to sitting in a car park on the freeway. We still have no idea why the road to St Etienne was closed but hundreds of others were in the same boat. Finally after an hour longer than anticipated we arrived at Chateau de la Vernede in the valley where our delightful hostess, Laurence, offered us a refreshing chilled rose in the garden.
Le pique-nique you may wonder. Well, as we are in the country and can hear the sounds of barking dogs and gunshots, we decide we have travelled far enough today so we will, partake of our pique- nique in the lovely rambling garden that surrounds us.