Our first port of call today was a visit to the Palace of Fontainebleau, one of the residences of all the Kings of France since it was built. It was very strange to find it in the middle of the town or city surrounded by very unimpressive and sometimes quite rundown, shabby buildings, we had expected either for it to stand alone in a large estate or to have an imposing entrance similar to Buckingham Palace in London. Just shows you shouldn't always have pre-conceived ideas about what you are going to see! The Palace itself was absolutely vast and our tour only covered a fraction of it but still took nearly 2 hours, by which time we were suffering information overload, although some of the rooms were very impressive and richly decorated and there were rooms that were furnished as they had been when not only royalty but also Napolean had occupied them. Unfortunately we didn't have time to visit the gardens which will have to wait for another day. Next stop was in Noyers in Burgundy, a typical medieval fortified town, another of the Beaux Villages. The town had an impressive gateway entrance and used to be surrounded by ramparts in which there were 16 towers, although unfortunately there are now only 12 standing and some of these are falling into disrepair. We saw a sign advertising a "tour de ramparts" which we thought would allow us to walk around the village on the ramparts, unfortunately this was not the case, but when we followed the sign through an archway in the ramparts we found ourselves in a garden where we were met by Georges - what a character!! He spoke no English so again my mediocre linguistic skills (?) were called into play. He told us he had tried to keep the ramparts and the towers open so that visitors could see them and had battled over a number of years to provide guided tours etc for visitors and had eventually been awarded the Medal of Tourism. He had many photos and newspaper cuttings of himself in medieval dress, including some in suits of armour !! He now was pretty old and looked rather dishevelled, but was obviously still very proud of what he had achieved and quite rightly so. He showed us a little grotto in the garden which had been the home of St Agathe who had also tended the small garden. When we asked if it was still possible to go up onto the ramparts and the remains of the tower he said we could - for 5 euros each. However we were very pleased to pay this as he then closed the gate where we had entered, to stop anyone else getting in and took us up the steps to a small room in the tower which had several suits of armour (which he said he had worn!!) shields and some old halbards, swords and other weapons displayed. He encouraged Phil to hold one of the shields (Phil chose the English one of course!!) and a halbard to have his photo taken. We then climbed onto the roof of the tower, which wasn't very high up but with crumbling steps which Georges left us to negotiate on our own, to admire the view. When we went back down the stairs Georges took us down into an undercroft which housed some wines and local produce where he said he sometimes did wine-tastings for visitors. I'm not sure if he was hinting we should taste some wine or not, but by this time we were wondering if we would ever escape, as every time we thought he'd finished showing us things he found something else!! However he was a lovely old boy who obviously loved his town and was very proud of it and we were very glad we had visited him. Back outside we wandered back into the town centre which was lovely, and bought an ice-cream as we finished our tour and had a walk around. One last stop for the day in Vezelay where we climbed a steep hill up to a church on the top and after a look inside and some refreshment we made our way back downhill again. Our accommodation that night was a little difficult to find, in a very small village called Barbirey-sur-Ouche, a B&B run by a lovely lady we think was an artist, who spoke excellent English. She suggested some places for us to go to eat in nearby Chateauneuf, another Beau Village we could cross off our list!! Although we arrived too late to visit the large castle (and unfortunately no time the next day either) we had a little look around the village which was very nice. Whilst we were eating, there were 3 Harley trikes (or similar - forgive my ignorance of bikes!!) which came into the place and parked up whilst the riders and their pillions came into the area outside the restaurant where we were eating to have a drink. Phil decided to take a photo to show Alex so she could try to persuade Colin it might be an improvement for their next trip as there would be more luggage space!!