Turn Around in Tournon

Cold, rainy, dreary - that's what Sunday has wrought for us in France.  Docked in Tournon, we skipped the thirty minute walking tour at 8:30 a.m., opting instead to wait for the bus ride to the Train de l'Ardeche.  Tournon is  a small town lying between the Rhone River and nearby vineyard-blanketed granite slopes, and well known as an excellent wine-producing region (Tain-l'Hermitage).   A hermit returning from the Crusades planted the original vines here and invited travelers to drink with him.

Steam from the engine shrouds a
bridge over the gorge

The Tournon steam train tour was about 40 minutes up a mountain aboard the Train de l'Ardeche, powered by a steam locomotive built in 1903.   The entire region is inaccessible by road, making it a pristine wilderness along the Doux River.  The weather kept us from dropping our train car's glass windows down and made me think it would be a really beautiful experience in the fall, but today was, again, cold and dreary.

The locomotive on the turntable

One interesting thing about the steam train tour was seeing a canal built alongside the river by German POWs during World War I to help provide a regular water supply for people of Tournon.  Our guide said "In the first war, they were our prisoners.  In the second, we were theirs!"  Another was watching (in the rain) the steam locomotive detach itself at the halfway point, move forward about a quarter mile then back up along a nearby track and onto a turntable . . . . .after spinning around 4 or 5 times to the delight of the crowd, it backed up again and onto another track to get to the front of the passenger cars (the back of the train on the ride up) to guide us back down the mountain. A few toot toots of the whistle and we were back on our way down.

After lunch, we resumed sailing toward Viviers where we'll dock later this afternoon.  Viviers was founded as a Roman settlement in the fifth century.   We're set to take a walk around town after dinner tonight, so more on it later.