Wine has been made in Provence since the Greeks settled Marseille, before the Romans arrived. The greatest part of provençale wines are part of the Côtes du Rhône appellation. This appellation is a perfect example of the French system of…
What’s different? All the photos are professional shots, not my usual point-and-click rubbish. Some of them are beautiful. When we’d finished plotting and planning the revisions to our new tour in Provence, I asked the local Office du Torisme for…
It’s hard to gather together photos for a new tour. We have thousands of photos from Dordogne, or Tuscany, or Provence – I mean literally thousands – but none, yet, from Languedoc. So I enlisted the help of the French…
We’re looking ahead to 2018. We have a new tour – Languedoc. That’s the region to the west of Provence, with mediterranean coast, fabulous food and wine, and fascinating history. Our dates are now live on the website. Our first…
Our Itinerary How hard is it? It ain’t. A fairly flat tour, with some modest hills at the end of the week. We start and finish in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, next to Avignon. 8 Days / 7 Nights. An Introduction to the…
Maps. Can you ever have too many maps? All our tours are mapped on a website called www.mapometer.com You can look at our routes in minute detail, zoom in to see every turn and path we take, and you can…
I spent all of September in Italy, running our Tuscany and Umbria tours back-to-back. This year some of my favourite Chain Gangers joined me over the course of the month, and it really reminded me that I don’t rave about…
TUSCANY Back in September, my good friend Mike Pattenden joined The Chain Gang in Italy for a month to help out with, well, with everything. By profession Mike’s a journalist, so inevitably he wrote a short piece for us about…
The Highlight of our Languedoc Tour. I don’t think our new tour of the Languedoc is on our website yet (it might be, check it out, it will be any-day), but I am thrilled with it, and I want to…
For many years, The Chain Gang have been regular visitors to the Pont du Gard, the spectacular Roman aqueduct near Uzes in the Languedoc. But, in 2018 we decided to design a new tour of the Languedoc, so inevitably the…
