Hello,

I've heard this board is the best place to get great recommendations on places to stay in France. I am meeting my 21 year old daughter in Montpellier in late May, where she is studying this semester, and we’re going to explore southern France and Corsica for two weeks. We’re very interested in visiting wineries and sampling the local cuisine—and want to experience the country way of life—staying as much as possible in small towns and villages. Also, we’re trying to keep our lodging costs to approx. $100-$125 per night–sharing a room (is this doable?). We don’t need or care about anything fancy— charming, quaint and simple will do nicely. Also, if anybody has any experience with staying in country homes or farmhouses this sounds pretty appealing to us. If you have suggestions about restaurants we’d love to hear about those too. We like to eat well and can splurge on a couple of special dinners. Here’s the areas we hope to visit.

1) Montpellier: I need a hotel for a couple of nights, as my daughter will be staying with her host family. Good restaurants?

2) Southern Rhone: We want to find a place to stay for 2-3 nights so we can explore the area around Avignon, St. Remy, Arles and the Chateauneuf de Pape and Gigondas wine regions. Good restaurants?

3) Bandol/Cassis area: We want a place to stay for 2-3 nights so we can explore wineries here and also visit Aix-en-Provence. Good restaurants?

4) Corsica; We plan to take the ferry from Marseille to Bastia, staying our first night there. Then circumambulating the island by car for 3 more nights—staying somewhere different each night. If you had to pick three towns/hotels to stay that would give us a great sampling of the island where would they be?

I feel like it’s too much to ask anybody to comment on the whole trip. But if you have a good overview on any of the four areas we want to visit—I’d be most appreciate of your recommendations.

Thanks very much!

Scott

ScottSouth: Two suggestions:

Sunday is generally the least active day on the board, so you might want to top your message -- add a new message that simply says "To the top...) -- tomorrow morning;

There are many people who post regularly on the board about Provence. (I am not one of them.) You might try to put each of the town names with hotel or restaurant -- e.g., <Avignon +hotel>, without the arrows -- into the search box. I'm fairly sure some useful posts would come up.

Actually, three suggestions:

Have you looked at

http://www.gites-de-france.fr/eng/index.htm

It lists accommodation of the kind you are looking for. You can always come back here for feedback on anything that appeals to you.

If you put the name of the villages in Provence in the search engine here, you will find these charming places.

In Montpellier, we stayed at Hotel Le Guilhem and found it to be quite nice. Price was somewhere between 100 and 110 euros in spring 2003. Our French friends highly recommended a restaurant called Sequoia, but it was in another part of town and we were exhausted so we didn't get there. Ended up eating at a Vietnamese place just off the Egg.

In the Southern Rhone, check out L'Eveche in the Haut Ville section of Vaison-la-Romaine. Lots of character and convenient for the wine towns you've mentioned. There's a place called Les Florets in Gigondas that may be worth checking out--I had heard that it was a little on the tatty side, but my source is very very fussy so it may be just fine. We didn't stay there because they required that you take one meal there, which wasn't going to work for us.

elle, I didn't see the rooms but we dined at Les Florets several years ago.
It was like finding a secret place in the wilderness.

To the top--I was advised yesterday that Sunday is slow on this board and that I should get it back to the top so more of you would see it and could make recommendations. Since yesterday I found what looks to be a wonderful gites near Carpentras that we can stay in for three nights. That's a great location for the Chateauneuf wineries we want to visit. It looks centerally located enough to easily visist the Luberon, Aix, St Remy during day trips. Would you agree?