Only the length of it changes when you reserve a sixteen night stay in the Aveyron causses

Eight nights, doubled, and nothing else touched

The part taken out is the length. The house shape runs eight nights; this one runs sixteen, and everything else stands where it was: one base you unpack into once, a hire car on the drive, about two hours between the plateau and the airport you fly into, out each day and back to the same bed, shoulder season, two of you. Doubling the nights does not buy twice the sightseeing, and the office is not going to pretend it does. This corner of France gives up its obvious days in about five: the walled villages the military orders left on the Larzac, the cellars cut into the fallen cliff at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, one gorge road end to end, the wrecked-looking dolomite towers at Montpellier-le-Vieux, a market morning in Millau. After that the second week has to be made of something other than arrival, and what it is made of is repetition: the same baker, the same lane taken the other way, an afternoon that produces nothing. Some people ask for the change precisely for that. Others find day eleven long, and it is better read here than discovered in a rented kitchen a long way from home.

Drystone, sinkholes and stored water

The causses are limestone tables, mostly between 700 and 900 metres, standing over gorges the rivers have cut 400 to 500 metres down into them. Rain does not stay on top. It is gone through the rock within hours, which is why there are almost no streams up there and why every old settlement is arranged around water it had to keep: roofed cisterns, and lavognes, shallow ponds lined with stone and sealed with clay so the flocks could drink. What is built is built dry, without mortar, because stone is what there is: field walls that run for a kilometre and stop at nothing in particular, sheepfolds with barrel roofs, small corbelled huts a shepherd could sit a storm out in. Soil collects only in the sinkholes, so a white stony plain will suddenly hold one round ploughed field forty metres across. The sheep are milked for cheese that ripens in fissured rock at Roquefort. Between the walls it is thin grass, box, oak scrub no higher than your waist, and in the last week of May, orchids in numbers that surprise people who came for the buildings.

Week one drives, week two walks

Week one drives. Out at nine and back by six covers most of it: the Tarn gorge from Le Rozier upstream, twenty five minutes to the mouth and then an hour to do thirty kilometres of it properly; the Jonte, where vultures put back in the early 1980s now nest in the cliffs in the hundreds and need no skill at all to see; Millau down in its bowl at 370 metres, with market mornings on Wednesday and Friday; Rodez an hour and five minutes north for the red sandstone cathedral; Conques if you want it, a hundred and ten kilometres each way and a whole day gone to it. Week two shortens. Most of it starts on foot from the door, since long distance paths cross the plateau and a farm lane will do as well. The shape of a day is set by other people's hours: lunch is served from twelve until half past one and not at twenty five to two, village shops shut on Sunday afternoon and again all Monday, the nearest supermarket is twenty to thirty minutes off, and the bakery in your village closes one day a week which is not the day the next village closes.

Shoulder season at eight hundred metres

Shoulder season here means the back half of May and the stretch from mid September into the first week of October. The plateau runs five to eight degrees colder than Millau below it, so a September afternoon of 22 degrees on the causse is 28 in the town, and the same night drops to seven or eight. In May the plateau can still take a frost. Nothing breaks the wind up there; it is a condition rather than an event. Two things are worth planning around. Storms build over the higher ground to the east through the afternoon and arrive quickly, so a morning start is not a discipline, it is how you keep hold of a day. In autumn the same weather can turn into a serious deluge, a hundred millimetres or more inside a day, which shuts gorge roads for a day or two. Sixteen nights takes the sting out of that: one day lost from sixteen is a day, not the trip. The caves and the smaller monuments on the plateau begin closing from the middle of October.

Why sixteen nights is not twice the money

From $3,880, sixteen nights, two sharing, one base and a car for the whole of it. That works out at $242.50 a night against $292.50 a night on the eight night shape. Both figures are printed and neither length is ranked above the other anywhere on this site; the arithmetic is here so you can see what you are choosing between, not to push you at one of them. The reason it is not simply twice is dull and useful. Houses here let Saturday to Saturday, and sixteen nights is two weeks plus two, which owners refuse in July and often allow in May or late September. Car hire is priced by the week, so the days on the end are not charged like the days at the start. The fixed pieces, the drive up from the airport and the first big shop, happen once at either length. Outside the figure: your own travel to France and home again, fuel, the toll on the motorway bridge, food, entry to anything, and the deposit the owner will want held.

Who should leave the extra week alone

This change suits people who cook, who can spend an afternoon producing nothing, and who are not spending their only fortnight of the year on it. It suits time you control: a sabbatical, a retirement, work you can do from a table by a window, with the warning that a connection solid enough for real work is not everywhere on the plateau and has to be asked about house by house rather than assumed. It does not suit everyone, and the office would rather say which. If two weeks is your whole leave and you want three countries inside it, take the eight night shape and put the rest somewhere else. If you need a restaurant open every evening within ten minutes, this is the wrong plateau in the wrong season. If nobody in the party drives, this is the wrong change altogether: buses up here run for schoolchildren and almost nothing else, and the office will point you instead at the item that takes the car out rather than the calendar.

Awkward questions about this change

Is this the eight night week simply run twice?

No, and it would be a poor use of the extra money if it were. The first week takes the drives that are worth doing once, the gorge, the walled villages, the cellars, the market town. The second is built on a smaller radius, mostly under thirty minutes, and on days that begin on foot. If what you actually want is the same week twice with the same drives in it, say so in writing and the office will price two separate trips instead, which is a different thing with a different figure.

Can the sixteen nights start on a day that is not Saturday?

Sometimes. Letting weeks here run Saturday to Saturday and the changeover is real work for the owner rather than a formality, so in July the answer comes back no from everybody. In the shoulder weeks it is worth asking, and the office asks: a mid week start is granted more often at the front end than the back, and now and then at the cost of one night paid for and not slept in. Give the office the dates your own travel makes sensible and it will come back with which houses will take them.

Are the flights part of what you arrange?

No. This office puts nothing in the air and nothing on the water, and has signed with no carrier and will not be putting anybody on anything. You buy your own tickets, in your own name, on your own dates. What the office will do is tell you which arrival airports leave roughly two hours of driving to the plateau, and which arrival times let you pick up a car and reach the house before the owner would rather be asleep.

Sixteen days is a long time. Does the place run out?

The obvious days run out around day five, and this page has already said so. What does not run out is ground: paths leave most hamlets, the gorges have several roads and many more tracks, and there are villages two ridges over that nobody writes about. Whether that is enough depends on you. Some people are bored by day eleven, and if you suspect you are one of them the eight night shape exists at $2,340 and nobody here will think anything of the choice.

We would like a second base halfway through. Can we add that?

That is a second change, and this page carries one. Two parts of the shape can usually be moved together, and the book already has an item that moves the length and the number of bases at the same time, at its own figure. Ask, and the office will tell you what the pair costs in money and in the two half days you will lose to packing and driving. What it will not do is quietly bolt one change onto another and hand you a figure with no working shown.