Just The Caffeine Talking

Vacation in France, Day 10

We spent our day in Paris by walking. First we passed the (rather untidy) grounds of the Paris Observatory, then crossed the University district, went around the Grand Mosque, and finally arrived at our destination: the Jardin des Plantes.

Originally created as a place to cultivate medicinal herbs for the King's health, during the age of exploration it turned into a kind of botanical NASA, sending out expeditions all over the world to bring specimens back to France for study. Along the way it acquired a zoo, a large collection of minerals, and a Museum of Comparative Anatomy. No points awarded for figuring out which museum the comparative anatomist in the party wanted to visit.

Said Museum is a great old-school science museum. No "interactive" exhibits, no electronic bells and whistles, no cartoon characters. It's a warehouse full of skeletons, with a few densely-printed placards about where the specimens came from and their place in the history of life.

We learned something at the Jardin des Plantes: parents all over the world prefer to lie to their kids and make stuff up rather than stop and read the signs or admit ignorance. This is something we've seen at zoos and museums in the U.S., but apparently French parents do it, too.

Among the bones were some modern surreal sculptures of giant skulls, and in the entrance hall was an (unintentionally surreal) Beaux-Arts era sculpture of an orangutan strangling a native of Borneo. Now that's a museum!

With a camera full of images of bones we walked along the Seine and crossed over to the Isle St.-Louis and wandered about in search of lunch. Quite by accident we found a great place, where Diane got a strawberry gazpacho and a seafood salad, while I had a tomato salad (in which each wedge was from a different variety of tomato) and a sort of veal ratatouille which was delicious.

From there we crossed over onto the Right Bank in search of Mariage Freres, the tea shop which supplied Monsieur Guérard's restaurant in Gascony with tea. We found it on the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg and bought some fancy tea, then walked along the Rue Saint-Merri westward past Parisian hipsters to the famous Aurouze rat-catchers' shop on the Rue des Halles.

From there we crossed to the Ile de la Cite with the vague intention of looking in at Notre Dame cathedral, but the line to get in stretched halfway down the island so we kept on going back to the Left Bank for a stop at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore.* Then a look at the comics shops of the Rue Dante before stopping at a brasserie for lemonade and Kronenbourg.

By now we were getting rather footsore, but we struggled gamely on through the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace and finally back to our hotel for a shower and a rest. We covered approximately 10 miles during the day (including walking through the museums) so we rewarded ourselves with crepes and cider at a Breton restaurant near our hotel, and then collapsed into bed.

*Nope.

Vacation in France, Day 9

On July 7 we packed up our clothes, had a final breakfast at the Chateau Bellevue hotel, and drove back to Bordeaux. After a little hunting around in the neighborhood south of the railway station, we found the rental agency office and handed in our Corsa, then dragged our bags into the Gare St. Jean and boarded the TGV for a quick non-stop run to Paris.

We got off at the crowded and sprawling Gare Montparnasse and walked to the Hotel Apollon, where we had a reservation. The gentleman who checked us in was friendly and helpful, although he was practically obsessed with the idea of telling us how to get to the Eiffel Tower. Both of us had already seen it, but that didn't dissuade him. Can't have too much Tower, apparently.

After a rest up in our room, we resolutely ignored the helpful gentleman's advice and walked around the Latin Quarter of Paris, in a brief stroll lasting only five hours or so. We had an excellent Vietnamese dinner in a place on the Rue St.-Jacques, discovered a whole "Nerd Quarter" of Paris on the Rue Dante near the river, where there are half a dozen comics and game shops, and circumnavigated the cathedral of Notre Dame before turning back.

By that point all of Paris was gathering in cafes and brasseries to watch the France vs. Germany soccer match on big-screen televisions. Again, security was heavy, with roving patrols of the Army's "Vigipirate" units. We stopped for a snack at a sushi place (sushi is everywhere in Paris) on the Rue des Gaités, and listened to the cheers get louder and more excited as the French team built up an unstoppable lead over the Germans. The crowd counted down as the clock ran out and then erupted in a frenzy of singing "La Marseillaise" and team fight songs, whooping, blowing car horns and trumpets, and cheering.

On that note, we went to bed, with one full day in Paris remaining ahead of us.

Vacation in France, Day 8

We spent a relaxed morning hanging about Cazaubon, doing laundry at the local Intermarché supermarket, which has coin-op washing machines right in the parking lot, so everyone in town can evaluate the condition of your underwear. (To get change I had to make some purchases, and discovered that, at Intermarché anyway, beer is cheaper than bottled water in France.)

While our clothes finished drying in our room because we ran out of things to buy at Intermarché to get change for the dryer, we went out to drive around the vicinity, eat lunch, and stop at an Armagnac distillery, the magnificently-named Domaine de Guilhon d'Aze. They let us taste several different products, and we wound up buying a bottle of wine, a bottle of Floc, and a package of three small bottles of Armagnac. Total cost: 25 Euros. From which I conclude that the markup on wine as it crosses the Atlantic is crazy.

What is Floc, you ask? Floc is the signature aperitif of the Armagnac region: it's Armagnac brandy combined with fresh-pressed unfermented grape juice at a roughly 1:4 ratio, so it's as strong as wine but with a sweet, brandy-like flavor. I liked it so much I bought a bottle, and when that's used up I'll have to figure out a way to get some more.

After that modest buying spree we went back to the hotel to rest and tidy up before driving off to Eugenie-les-Bains, a spa town off to the southwest of us near Aire-sur-l'Adour. Eugenie-les-Bains is the home of the legendary restaurant Les Prés d'Eugénie, run by the legendary chef Michel Guérard. We had a reservation made weeks earlier by the power of the Internet; since we arrived a little early we amused ourselves by wandering about the gardens until it was time to go in and have a drink before dinner.

We both ordered the "Terroir Sublime" menu, which is based on traditional Gascon dishes and local ingredients. To begin, I had a soup of crawfish with a sort of tomato mousse, while Diane had what amounted to a giant wonton filled with morels and other wild mushrooms. This was accompanied by a white Chateau de Bachen wine from nearby (the Tursan region).

For my main course I had a sort of terrine of pork trotters and shrimp, served on paper-thin slices of fried bread with an eel salad accompaniment. Diane got a little duck and pigeon pie. Both were superb. The wine with this course was called Barocco, and was the softest red wine I've ever drunk.

Dessert for Diane was strawberries Melba with ice cream and dabs of herb sorbet. Mine was a whole peach poached in (I think) raspberry sauce, with verbena ice cream. We finished up with coffee and tea in the restaurant's lounge, under the quizzical gaze of a portrait of Napoleon III.

Feeling very satisified, we drove back through the darkened countryside and were in bed by midnight.

Vacation in France, Day 7

On July 5 we woke feeling better — Diane wasn't completely well, but she said she was about 80 percent recovered, and didn't want to miss that day's planned expedition. So we piled into the car and headed east, following a rather zigzag route because the roads didn't want to go the way we did.

By midday we reached Cahors, a pleasant small city tucked into a loop of the Lot river. We had a good lunch at a sidewalk cafe, but didn't really have time for sightseeing in Cahors because we were on a mission.

From Cahors we followed the river upstream, as its valley got narrower and steeper-sided until it was like a canyon — a green and fertile canyon full of farmland and picturesque villlages. At Bouzies we took a side road up out of the valley of the Lot, to our destination: the Caves of Pech-Merle.

These aren't just any caves. About 20,000 years ago someone (several someones) drew some impressive pictures on the walls of the cave, but then the entrance was blocked by a landslide until 1922, when a local teen found a way in. He told the local priest about the cave pictures, and the priest, a well-educated fellow, did an exhaustive survey of the cave and brought it to public attention.

For our purposes, a cave discovered in the 1920s is the "sweet spot" for looking at cave pictures: if it was opened earlier, some local promoter would have blasted a road into it, or "improved" the cave paintings with touches of his own, or mined it for limestone or something. A few decades later and it would not have been open to the public at all. Pech-Merle is about right: there are stairs, handrails, and electric lighting, but that's all. No smoking, no snacking, and no photography allowed.

What the cave does have is cave paintings. Elegant brush-sketches of mammoths and bison, using just a few lines to depict an animal. Elaborate spotted horses, making use of the natural shapes of the rock like geological sculpture. A bear's head chiseled into the side of one passage, showing an understanding of perspective because the image is elongated on the wall but looks right from the entrance.

It also has some natural curiosities: spots in the wall gouged by cave-bear claws; some astonishing calcite "pearls" the size of ping-pong balls, formed in a natural basin where flowing water kept them turning as they grew so they're perfect spheres; footprints of a 13-year-old in 10,000-year-old mud, preserved by a thin calcite layer; and the root of an oak tree which grew down through the cave roof to the floor in search of water.

That last item suggests why this cave is still open to the public: I don't think Pech-Merle is going to last much longer. A few dozen rainy summers and an earth tremor or two are likely to turn the chamber of the oak root into a sinkhole open to the sky. The cave is very damp, and I suspect the pictures we see now are only the survivors of a much larger gallery erased by moisture.

You can find out more at the Pech-Merle Web site.

The tour of the cave lasted a couple of hours (if you go, bring a sweater — it's a steady 50 degrees F in there, and damp). We rested up in the car for a few minutes, then meandered for a couple of hours through the countryside until we found a way onto the autoroute. We stopped for dinner in the surprisingly delightful town of Sos, just a few miles away from our base in Cazaubon. We dined at a cafe on the arcaded old square, and returned to our hotel very content.

Next time: Dinner!

Vacation in France: Days 5 and 6

About 3 a.m. on July 3, Diane started feeling bad. Her abdomen hurt, she threw up several times, she couldn't urinate, and nothing we did made her feel better. At about 6:30 I asked the hotel manager where the nearest emergency room was. She told me: Hopital Landye in Mont-de-Marsan. Oh, and the French word for emergency room is urgénces.

I drove to the hospital (you can go really fast on French country roads at dawn on a Sunday), and explained via broken French, gestures, and international scientific jargon what was the matter. They gave Diane some opiates, which made her stop moaning in pain, she had a CT scan, and then we waited for a urologist to come have a look at her.

A urologist, because the CT scan identified the problem: a kidney stone (calcule) lodged in the ureter between the kidney and the bladder. Hence the excruciating pain, which caused all the other problems. (The urgences nurses had suspected that from the start; given the amount of foie gras the folk of Gascony eat, I guess those nurses see more kidney and gall stones than broken arms.)

They decided to keep her overnight for observation, and if the stone didn't pass they'd go fishing for it via a catheter. I decided to head back to Cazaubon for a shower and to pick up some things for Diane — now that she wasn't in agony, she was getting a little bored.

The drive back took a bit longer than expected, and not because I wasn't speeding on empty roads. I got lost, and the detailed Michelin maps I bought in Bordeaux were safely back in our hotel room. So I had to navigate by dead reckoning — which in practice meant driving into each village hoping to see a sign pointing to a place I'd heard of. (American highway signs focus on the route number: State Highway 116, next right, and so forth. French signs are all about the places: this way to Aire-sur-Adour, and never mind what the road number is. So in the center of every town there's a roundabout with signs to all the neighboring towns.)

Consequently it took about two hours and most of a tank of gas for me to find my way back to Cazaubon. In theory, I spent a lovely Sunday afternoon driving through beautiful Gascon countryside, but I barely noticed any of it and was sick with worry the whole time. At the hotel I got cleaned up, packed an overnight bag for Diane, and drove back — paying a bit more attention to the route so I could avoid detours, and making sure I had the map.

Diane was much better when I found her in her room. Even without opiates, the pain had diminished considerably (we suspect the stone broke up and came out in little bits). They were giving her Paracetemol (=acetominophin, i.e. Tylenol) for the pain, but since that doesn't play nicely with her glucose monitor device, she asked for Ibuprofen instead. It was amusing to discover that in France, at least, Ibuprofen is regarded as Serious Stuff. You need a prescription for it, and the nurses gave her grave warnings about overdoses.

Turns out hospital food is better in France — big surprise, right? She had a veal patty and some nice bread. The vegetables were still overdone, because apparently every hospital in the world has to overcook vegetables. Feeling a bit worn-down myself, I went back to the hotel (getting it right this time) for the night, and had a sandwich and some wine before sleeping soundly.

Monday Diane felt better, and had gone without anything stronger than Ibuprofen for 18 hours. We spent the day sitting in her room, reading and chatting. The urologist decided to let her go, so by late afternoon she was discharged. (We did have to explain to the hospital office staff that the reason they couldn't get hold of anyone at our insurance company was that it was July 4 and all the offices in America were closed.) To fill her prescriptions we stopped at a Carrefour hypermarché (think Wal-Mart but with all sorts of little satellite businesses included, like a bank, an optical center, a real-estate office, and of course a pharmacy).

As consolation for losing two days of our trip, we had a second lovely dinner at our hotel, dining on the terrace as a rainstorm passed a little too near. Wisely or not, we shared the Whole Potted Foie Gras appetizer, and wound up leaving about a quarter of it, which our waiter promised to put aside for breakfast.

Next Time: Caves!

Vacation in France, Day 4

A note on the photos: I didn't even take a camera on this trip, and if I relied on the pictures Diane took these posts would have nothing but pictures of bones and beetles. The world is well-documented, so I've been using freely-available pictures rather than our own snapshots. Welcome to the new millennium.

On July 2 we drove along sycamore-lined roads to the town of Nerac, northeast of Cazaubon, where they were holding a big Saturday morning outdoor market. It was a combination farmers' market, flea market, and yard sale, sprawling through several blocks in the town center.

I did see one odd item at a used bookseller's stall: a 1920 French edition of Wilde's Salome. What was interesting was that the book didn't have the famously decadent Aubrey Beardsley illustrations; instead it had pictures by someone signing himself "Alastair" in what could only be described as a pseudo-Beardsley style. I didn't quite understand it: if you don't want to use the iconic Beardsley illustrations, why go for a style which is almost exactly like them?

We assembled a lunch out of ingredients from the farmers' market: fruit, bread, cheese, and duck rillettes. We ate beneath the statue of Henri IV (him again), which had the inscription "Nostre Henri" (our Henry) on it. Gascons are apparently very proud of having given France one of its few non-incompetent, non-psychopath kings.

From Nerac we drove to the microscopic village of Larressingle, a fortified town so small the town hall and World War I memorial had to be built outside the walls because there wasn't room. We had a crepe and drinks inside the town, then strolled down to a meadow nearby to see a demonstration of medieval siege engines.

The demonstration was hosted by a young Frenchman named Giraud, or something like that, who wore a medieval steel helmet and kept up a rapid-fire stream of French puns as he showed us his collection of working siege engines: a couple of trebuchets, a mangonel, a ballista, a crane powered by a giant human hamster wheel, and an ornery goat who had to be rounded up a couple of times during the demonstration.

The best thing about the demonstration was Giraud's complete lack of concern for his own or anyone else's safety. He let kids ride in the sling of the trebuchet, he gave halberds to drunk middle-aged French tourists, and when four men (including me) worked the big mangonel he took the time to warn us that usually the projectiles go downrange, but sometimes they just go straight up and come back down onto the operators. (In a rare concession to sanity, the projectiles were soccer balls reinforced with duct tape.)

Slightly sunburnt and tired, we refreshed at the Chateau Bellevue and then had dinner at what can only be described as "the local joint" in Eauze, not far away. Best day to the trip, so far . . .

Next time: The worst day of the trip.

Vacation in France, Day 3

After a final breakfast at Le Boutique Hotel in Bordeaux (and a brief look at the Public Garden nearby), we packed up and took a cab to pick up our rental car. But there was a small problem: the rental agency was no longer at the address on the confirmation sheet we printed out. The only thing there was a locked warehouse.

Fortunately, our cab driver was the Nicest Cabbie Ever. He whipped out his own cell phone (ours don't work in Europe) and called the agency to find out where they were, then gave us a lift there at no extra charge. He was from Cambodia, and my desire to visit Angkor has now increased considerably.

Equipped with a newly-washed Opel Corsa, we navigated our way out of Bordeaux and onto the Autoroute heading south. Once out of the urban sprawl and the wine growing region we entered the vast pine forest which covers most of the Landes Department. If you've ever driven through the pine forests of southern Mississippi and Alabama, it's a lot like that — except that the trees are planted in a precise grid pattern. This is not a wilderness area, it's a farm.

We did stop off to see the Chateau de Cazeneuve, a charming little place which was one of Henri IV's vacation homes. We're going to run into Henri a lot on this trip, as Gascony was his home turf before he became King of France. I can say that he had good taste in houses: Cazeneuve looks like a nice place to spend some time away from the bother of Court life. The gardens are done in a wild, English/Italian style rather than the numbingly formal French style favored by Henri's grandson. The forests around it were probably great for hunting. There's a river running right below the castle, including a little swimming-hole called "the Queen's Grotto." (No snickering in the back of the class!)

The inside of the castle wasn't open yet and we had kilometers to cover, so after a walk around the grounds we drove through more of Cartesian Mississippi and had a decent lunch in a tiny town whose name I forget.

From there we turned east into the hills of Gascony. It's lovely countryside, a patchwork of (non-grid) forest, vineyards, and cornfields. In histories and historical novels one often hears Gascony described as harsh, poor country. It doesn't look that way now. Maybe the French have done a good job of reforesting and amping up the rainfall over the past century, or maybe there are harsher parts of Gascony we didn't see, but the parts we visited looked about as harsh as the North Carolina piedmont.

We got to the little town of Cazaubon in mid-afternoon. This was to be our home base for most of the rest of the trip. Our hotel was the Chateau Bellevue, a charming place with a first-rate kitchen. The hotel has nice gardens, and there's a donkey next door who came up to the fence for a nose-scratch. The neighbors on the other side have peacocks. Loud peacocks.

The name is a little misleading. It's not a chateau. At one time it may have been someone's country house, or (more likely) the house of a prosperous farmer with social aspirations. It has certainly been a hotel for more than a century, to judge by the antique phone cabinet in the lobby. The Web site tries to promote it as a luxury hotel, but it's more accurate to say that it's a nice old-fashioned French hotel in the country.

After tidying up we took a stroll around Cazaubon, checking out the old half-timbered buildings in the center of town, the church (built in the 19th century), the "Rue des Cagots," and the bull-ring. Yes, they do bullfighting in Gascony, though from what I understand it's a nonlethal form more akin to Minoan bull-dancing than the Spanish corrida. Sadly, we were apparently visiting just before the season got underway, and weren't able to watch one.

Dinner was at our hotel, and was superb. We had some lovely little amuse-bouches with our drinks (I tried an aperitif called a "Pousse Rapiere" which is kind of like a "French 75" cocktail made with orange-flavored Armagnac instead of gin). The appetizer was a cream pea soup with prawns, and for our main course we shared a small rib roast of the Black Pig of Bigorre. It sounds like something from a fantasy novel, but the Black Pig of Bigorre is a Gascon breed of hog which is very tender and delicious. My dessert was a plum-cake with a scoop of the most intense lemon sherbet I've ever had.

 And so to bed. Tomorrow: catapults!

Vacation in France, Day 2

 

We had a full day in Bordeaux between our travel day and when we were to pick up the rental car and start touring Gascony. Diane and I spent that day doing one of the things we both enjoy: walking around a city.

In the morning we breakfasted at our hotel, put on some walking shoes, and headed generally south through the old heart of the city. We stopped in at Librarie Mollat, the biggest bookstore in Bordeaux*, and passed by the old cathedral (but were unable to find our way in due to restoration work).

From there we hiked south through the raffish former University section (the University has mostly decamped to modern campuses outside the city) to the Marche des Capuchins, the city's big modern food market. By the time we reached it most of the fish and produce vendors were cleaning up and shutting down, but the oyster bar was still open so we had the lunch special. For six Euros you can get half a dozen oysters on the half shell. For seven-fifty you get half a dozen raw and a glass of white wine. For eight Euros you can even pick the wine you get.

I went with the generic white and it was fine. Refueled with oysters, bread and butter, we turned north again, passed the basilica of St. Michel and its gothic detached bell tower, then along the riverfront by the old custom house and the Place de la Bourse, before finally looping back to our hotel for a rest.

In the evening we wandered over to the Place des Quinconces, where the city had put up a huge screen so that soccer fans could watch Poland play Portugal. Security was heavy and ubiquitous: not just private guards, but plenty of police and squads of soldiers in no-kidding combat gear. We admired the monument to the Girondins (the Revolutionary faction who got massacred for not being properly psychopathic like the Jacobins), had dinner across the street from the Opera House and watched the crowds — including people wearing Portugese or Polish flags as capes.

Then back to our room for a sound sleep.

Things I learned about Bordeaux:

• Wine really is a big deal in that town. I think there's a fancy wine store or wholesale wine merchant office in every block. Even our hotel had a tasting room.
• The architecture of the city is very uniform, at least in the old section. Central Bordeaux looks like it was all built one week in 1690 with stone from the same quarry.
• It's a little confusing to remember that you're on the west coast of France, but the city fronts on the river, which is to the east.
• The oysters are very salty, much more so than in Louisiana, New England, or Brittany. Don't know why.
• Don't bother looking for dinner before 8 p.m. or so.

Next time: Gascony!

*Which does not carry any of my books, alas. All I needed to do was sign one title page and this whole vacation could have become a deductible business trip.

 

Vacation in France, Day 1

Diane and I set out on the morning of June 28 on a trip to France to celebrate 25 years of marriage.

Our first stop was the town of Byfield, Massachusetts, in the coastal marshes near Newburyport and Rowley, north of Boston. That's right: we dropped our son off at summer camp in Innsmouth. Actually it was a very sciencey "nerd camp" where like-minded youngsters could study robotics, video-making, drones, rocketry, and other neat stuff.

Having deposited him there in batrachian comfort we made our way south to Boston, stopping for lunch and taking our time as we went because we had several hours to kill before our evening flight out.

The extra time turned out to be a lot handier than we had anticipated: the original plan was to park the car at the Alewife garage and ride the "T" to Logan Airport. But Alewife, it turns out, has a 7 day parking limit, and we were going to be gone for 11 days. Problem. Now, maybe we could have just ignored the time limit and gone ahead with our scheme, but neither Diane nor I wanted to have to deal with ransoming our car from some impound lot when we got back.

So, we used up some of that extra time driving through Boston to the airport and hunting for the "economy" lot. The name of that lot is a damned lie, just so you know.

Got ourselves checked in on Icelandair, had a light supper at the "Vino Volo" wine bar in the airport, and finally boarded the plane. The last light of twilight had just faded from the New England summer sky as we took off.

A flight aboard an Icelandair plane is basically a long series of ads by the Icelandic tourism bureau. In order to use any of the entertainment options, passengers have to sit through a 15-minute video promoting things to do, see, and buy in Iceland.

Three hours after dark, the sun came up as we flew north and east to meet the morning. We landed at Keflavik in Iceland in a chilly breeze, rode buses to the terminal in order to enter the European passport zone, then rode back out to a plane parked right next to the one we had arrived on. It's a pity they couldn't have sent a passport officer out to stand by the stairs and let us walk from one to the other.

Another flight, with more videos about Iceland, and then we landed at Charles DeGaulle Airport outside Paris.

We had a nice lunch, or breakfast, or whatever it was, at the Sheraton hotel cafe in the airport, then went down into the airport's very own railroad station to catch our train for Bordeaux. By this point it was the middle of the day on the 29th, and I had only slept a couple of hours on the plane, so my memories may be a little fogged by exhaustion.

We boarded the train, and shot off through the French countryside for Bordeaux at about 200 kilometers per hour. The roomier train seats meant both of us got more sleep, so we were feeling much more alert and cheerful when it finally pulled into the three-dimensional maze of scaffolding that is the main station in Bordeaux. The Gare St. Jean is apparently a lovely old iron-and-glass structure, but it's in the middle of a thorough restoration project so the entire station is scaffolded inside and out. If they just removed the station to work on it elsewhere and left the scaffolding behind, nobody would be able to tell the difference.

After a quick cab ride we arrived at our hotel, a little boutique hotel called La Boutique Hotel. We had a celebratory glass of champagne, took our first showers in more than 30 hours, had a bit of charcuterie and wine for supper, and collapsed into bed. In France!