Day 30 - Wednesday 11th October - Cruise

This morning we didn't need to be on the coach til 9.15am so it felt like a real sleep in treat! So morning routine - up, shower, down to breakfast, up to brush teeth, get hearing contraptions & ear phones, up to get bottle of water, log off ship and get on bus. The excursion we chose for today was to visit Château de Cormatin. We travelled through beautiful picturesque countryside and saw a few castles along the way. The Château de Cormatin is a castle in the heart of southern Burgundy built in the early 17th century by the Marquises of Uxelles to impress and show their power and prestige. What a magnificent place! The place was abandoned for many years and went up for sale in 1980 when it was bought by 3 friends who have done a fabulous restoration job and all live in apartments they've restored for themselves. The castle is surrounded by a wide moat that they had to dig out because it had been filled in, it has turrets, dungeon, gorgeous kitchen garden,  formal English garden, maze, a wide straight staircase copied from the one in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris and original painted wooden panels in all of the rooms we saw. The kitchen was huge and full of all things kitchen from the middle ages (or maybe a bit later - they had a coffee roaster that worked with coals). The gardens spread over 11 hectares and have flower beds, box maze, aviary,groves, theatre garden, fountains and water features. The ones who originally lived here were Jacques du Blé, 35, his 13 year old bride Claude and eventually their 4 children. She was widowed at an early age when Jacques was killed in a battle and continued to live there with her children. We were taken through this beautiful beautiful castle by our guide who told us stories and history related to the place. All the guides we've had with Scenic are brilliant. We wandered through the kitchen garden that we both fell in love with, through the formal garden but didn't have time to go through the maze, we saw the photographic timeline of the renovations which looked very expensive but oh so rewarding to see the castle come back to life and we visited the dungeons which weren't so terrible. What a wonderful place to visit. We made the very best choice. Then it was a stroll through the town, back on the bus and back to the ship through more beautiful countryside. Back on the ship in time for lunch, so more food, more wine and we were sailing to Mâcon in the afternoon. We had put our names on a waiting list to do the bike tour from Chalon-sur-Sâon to Mâcon, while the ship cruised there and apparently we'd been bumped off the waiting list but noone had told us so we were unprepared when we got a call in our room to tell us. My foot was very painful after our cobblestones in the morning, John said he didn't want to go without me, so we declined. It would have been a 3 hour ride so I think i made the right decision. We did wonder how some of the people who took off would go but they all got back in one piece. Instead of the bike ride we sat and sipped cocktails and watched the world go by and docked in Mâcon at about 6pm. Tonight was the Captain's Welcome Drinks in the lounge before dinner, so more drinks and we all got dressed up for that, then more drinks with our delicious dinner. I think we'll have tried most of France's wines by the time we've finished. Then more drinks and dancing and fell into bed again.