Dijon to Beaune

It's been a whole week at Coco's Dijon apartment but it's time to leave. We've enjoyed our stay. Coco came to say goodbye and brought some culinary delights for our drive to our next destination. Her husband sent a bottle of white wine as he knew we enjoyed our food and wine. We brought the bottle of local wine back home to Australia so we could enjoy it while reminiscing about our time in Dijon.

There's so more we could have told you about our time here but it was time to move on. Where to next?

I just had to stop after leaving Dijon to take this photo.
Isn't this service for your bread delivery?

A little Australia in Burgundy!!

The next leg of our journey took us from Dijon to Bourg-en-Bresse via Beaune and Macon. Sue wanted to go to Bourg-en-Bresse because of the blue legged chickens. Blue legged chickens you say?

We'll leave that for another post soon.

Beaune was such a delight that I found it so hard to select photos for this post and we might just have to  make it a two post subject. Had we known what was in store for us, we would have made it an overnight stay. Its known as the epicentre of Burgundian wines and there is an annual wine auction for charity held there every November - We were much too early being there in May. Bids come from all over the world in an effort to add wine to both personal and commercial cellars.

We also missed out on a festival that several posters around the village promoted as "24 hours in Beaune Australia". I have no idea what this was all about other than the poster had characters depicting Crocodile Dundee on a penny farthing bike, emus, koalas and kangaroos. Maybe it was a good time not to be there!!!!

The Hospices de Beaune or the Hotel Dieu was our main reason for the visit, oh yes, and lunch.

The Hotel Dieu was founded in the mid 1400s during the time of Duke Phillip the Good. It was a place of refuge for the sick, disabled, the poor and the destitute. It was a haven for young women about to give birth and the aged.

Check out the multicoloured and geometrical tiled roof. Just one of those special attractions of Burgundy.

Rows upon rows of beds within curtained cubicles.

As you enter the courtyard of the Hotel Dieu, you are hit with this array of colour. red, yellow, green and brown from the tiled roof which is part of the Burgundian architecture. Entering the buildings you are gobsmacked by the vastness of the "Room of the Poor" with its many curtained small bed chambers.

This looks more comfortable that some of our overnight stays travelling France. 

In a darkened room we witnessed the many panelled painting of the "Last Judgement" by Rogier van der Weyden. If you arrive at the right time you can take in the presentation of a viewing each individual panel while magnified glass panes pass by each painted oak panel, both enlarging and illuminating the images.

Beaune has many interesting features and its history takes in early Gallo Roman times to Medieval architecture but with a sense of now with the locals and the festivals that are organised throughout the year. What a shame we didn't do an overnight stay. It was time to move on after lunch as we were only a third of the way to Boug-en-Bresse.

 Scenes from Beaune

See you next Wednesday as we travel further into Burgundy.