Le gîte du Riou, au Puy-en-Velay en Auvergne

In early March 2019, Walt and I drove down to the Haute-Loire area, at the source of the Loire in the mountainous Auvergne region of central France, for a short stay there in a gîte rural. A gîte [zheet] is a vacation rental out in the country. Most gîtes are not really luxurious; they are usually fairly rustic and full of character. The one at Le Riou in Le Puy was one of the nicer gîtes ruraux we've ever stayed in, and we've been staying in them all around France since 1993. (Of course, we always joke that our house in Saint-Aignan is the nicest gîte we've ever stayed in — we've been here for 16 years now.)

We arrived on a Monday late in the afternoon, and we checked out on a Saturday morning, meaning we had five nights in the gîte. It cost us less than $500, and the owners welcomed us with our dog Tasha. We could cook, so we didn't go to restaurants at all (we take prepared, frozen, or easy-to-prepare food with us in a cooler). As you can see, we had a full and fully equipped kitchen and a big living room downstairs, as well as a WC (half-bath). The gîte has under-floor heating downstairs along with a wood-burning stove (wood supplied for free). There was covered parking, and a set of patio furniture was available but it wasn't warm enough in early March for us to be tempted to use it. Oh, and there was satellite TV and a fast and very stable internet connection (fibre optique!)

Upstairs there were three bedrooms, two of which we didn't need to use. One had two single beds. The full bathroom with a good shower (and another WC) was upstairs too. I liked the way two of the bedrooms had built-in closets — I think they might have been old wooden wardrobes that had been fitted into the walls. The third bedroom had a nice wardrobe too. Everything was spotlessly clean and comfortable. We never needed to use the electric radiators in the bedrooms upstairs, but we did use the towel warmer in the bathroom. We ended up not paying anything extra for electricity.

The house, we learned, was the house that the owners — a brother and sister in their 60s, I'd say — were born and grew up in, and it's attached to an old stone barn. The brother lives in the more modern house you can see across the way in one of the first photos in the slideshow. He was available to help us with things if we needed him, but we didn't, and the only time we saw him was on arrival and again on departure. The sister lived in a village a few miles away, she said. The owners don't speak English, and they were relieved to find out that we spoke decent French. In the big yard between the gîte and the one owner's house there was a flock of chickens. We enjoyed farm-fresh eggs during our stay. However, we were only about two miles from the center of the city of Le Puy-en-Velay, and close to a modern shopping area.