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The book was right, it's a very popular aire. While Nick uses the free wifi Ali goes back into town for a look around and finds there is a market today. There are the usual clothes, foods and regional produce plus some live music, pot bellied pigs and a few donkeys ready to take people on the RLS tours.
We leave Florac on the D207, a road known as the Corniche Cevennes, which sounds like a southwest rugby tournament. There is a long climb out of the gorges up onto a vast limestone plateau where there is little but grass and shrubs plus vistas to distant ridges, blue and mauve in the haze.
The road twists and drops to meet the river Gardon and we enter the town of St-Jean-du-Gard and stop for lunch. After lunch we decide to use the town's service point and then we decide to stay and look around.
The aire is by a steam railway station and many of the MoHo slots are double parked with cars - frustrating. Nick parks in a coach bay while Ali walks around to see how some vans got down to the river. While he is waiting some people approach the van; it is Jordan, Mary and their boys, tha family we met back in St Amand sur Sevre. By coincidence they too were in Florac last night.
Ali returns with the route to the riverside parking and a few minutes later we are there and disembarking to go into town.
It's a simple sort of town with an attractive main bridge over the river, which at the moment is very low, with white pebbled islands and shores. A few hundred yards upstream is a Roman bridge, quite high and pointed similar to one we saw near Lucca in Italy. There are narro streets with little ope-ways occupied by artists' studios and the place has a bit of a hippy-trail feel about it.
The steam railway runs to Anduze. We watch a big 0-8-0 tank engine bring in the train then find a bar for a cold drink.
We hang around for the evening market, but it's not like the one in Martel last week; instead of food and drink this is cheap plastic toys, home-made jewellery and wood craft items, knives, sunglasses and watches and a tattooist. There are crepes and candyfloss but no meals so we find Brasserie de l'Europa and get a 1/2 litre picher of red wine, seved chilled for €4.50. We look at the menu and choose a pizza for Ali and chicken salad for Nick. Both are very good, the staff are friendly and the terrace fills quickly.
Afterwards, wandering about we meet Jordan and Mary again and chat for a while exchanging details of our journeys since we met three weeks ago.
Back at the van the carpark is noisy and busy as people come and go for the market but by 23:00 it has settled down and so do we.
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