Our GPS system guided us safely to our little village in the hills in the French Pyrnees. We are staying in a 300 year old farm house with a big vegetable garden in front.

Last night we joined our hosts and another couple around a huge table in the kitchen. Everything was home cooked with produce from the garden.  We talked in French and English for hours over excellent food, wine and liqueur. Our hosts have welcomed us as if we were old friends and we feel that we are lucky to have picked this place out of so many we might have stayed at.

Breakfast this morning was another feast of home  produce including home pressed apple juice. After eating we decided to walk around the village and came across a tiny Sunday food market of local produce.  We wished we could have taken a suitcase full of produce home!

There are many tiny villages scattered around the hills and we set off to explore. We didn't get very far as the first village we came to looked as it it had a market as well. It turned out to be a 'Fête Voisin' where villagers come together in the square once a year to eat and drink together. Everyone brings some food or drink  as a contribution.

At first we were a bit reticent about gate crashing their party but everyone we talked to welcomed us and were suitably impressed that we had come all the way from New Zealand. In next to no time we were being offered all sorts of delicious food.

One woman insisted I try some pâté de foie gras and it would have been churlish to refuse. A man appeared and offered me some delicious black pudding. Someone arrived with a huge pot filled with rabbit in mustard sauce. The table was full of a variety of local wines as well as locally pressed apple juice and Pernod. I couldn't help feeling I had wandered onto the set of some Netflix movie set in the depths of rural France. As if to reinforce this impression I was brought over to meet an Irishhman who had lived in the village for over a decade. He was a carpenter who turned out to be a fan of Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh.

When we told our new Irish friend that the cheesecake we had eaten was about as good as we ever had, his wife rushed off to bring the baker over so she could hear the compliment directly.  She seemed surprised that anyone would think her cake was anything other than ordinary.

We stayed about three hours in the end, finding out a little about what what life was like in a small pyrneean village. We were touched by the kindness and generosity of the people who had welcomed strangers to their fate.