Eating Well on your Camping Vacation in Burgundy.

I am getting up to look out the open porthole window and am met with a friendly squawk.

After a shower in the tiled bathroom and rub-down with a thick nautical blue towel, I head upstairs. La Belle poque is an example of many luxury canal barges operated in France by ECU Waterways. Once a working canal barge, it's been re-designed with both magnificence and passenger comfort in mind.

Nick, our guide, had picked us up in Paris the day before before the Hotel Ampre. We enjoyed a champers welcome accompanied by freshly-baked popovers. At the junction of the Canal du Nivernais and the Stream Yonne, Auxerre was a vital city on the traditional north-south road thru France. It was a large market city for lumber and wine as well as a crucial religious center. Its a hideous image, but thankfully something that is now a thing of the past as many of Europes quality campsites boasts all sort of hotel style features from restaurants to bakeries to quality shops on site. Nonetheless, if you are still left worried about the standard of the food on your trip, then why don't you consider one of Burgundys campsites? This area of France is famous for its high living and gourmet eating, so you are certain to be in for a culinary treat. These are some of the appetising treats you should expect whilst camping in Burgundy. Frequently this will be mixed with fine wines, like in the eponymous boeuf bourguignon, a conventional recipe of the area mixing these 2 fine elements with baby onions, bacon and carrots. This style is repeated with plenty of other dishes, and if your French isnt that good, keep an eye open for the phrase "a la Bourguignonne". There are lots of other meats if you are not a chicken or meat eater, varied hams, hare, calf head and even some stream fish sometimes poached in white wine, with bacon, onions, garlic and butter. The best ones are Chaource ( creamy and white ), St-Florentin, the orange skinned poisses and numerous kinds of goats cheese from Morvan. Barge speed is restricted to three miles per hour on the canals and ten miles per hour on the streams. Potted flowers and a quaint stone house indicate where the clusier ( lock keeper ) lives. It was built originally to move wood from the Morvan forests to meet the firewood demands of Paris. Nick takes us to St-Bris le Vineux, a little wine town above a network of medieval passages.

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