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!
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