Just The Caffeine Talking

France Excursion 2023 Part Nine: Reunion in Paris and Departure

On June 28 I had my last breakfast in Tours, said au revoir to Diane, and went off to the train station while she remained behind for another couple of days at the conference. I made the train in plenty of time, rode to the transfer at St. Pierre-des-Corps, and boarded the TGV to Paris. At no point did I have to show a ticket (cheapskate travelers take note).

I zoomed across the French countryside to the end of the line at the Gare Montparnasse, on the southwest side of Paris, then rode the Metro across town to the Gare du Nord at the north side of the city, and boarded a train to Charles De Gaulle airport. I passed completely through Paris without once setting foot above ground.

The train to De Gaulle was hot and seemed to take forever, but I did arrive in time for my scheduled appointment at the Objets Trouvées office. Just in front of me was a man a few years older than myself, who had apparently lost a bag containing his phone, tablet, and even his hearing aids. He was understandably upset — especially when he got the same spiel I did a week earlier about going to the Web site. Without any electronics, how could he do that? And how could he get an email if his bag did turn up? In the digital, all-electronic world I think there should still be physical analog backups for everything.

Perhaps he had softened up the office lady's resistance, because when I came to claim my bag — which happened to have Diane's nametag on it rather than mine — I got only a little perfunctory official puffing and blowing about proper documentation before she made me sign an illegibly blurry scan of my passport to certify I had picked it up, and then gave it to me.

Everyting was as I had packed it, which was a huge relief. My hand did not stop clutching the handle of that bag until I reached my room at the Hotel BASSS (not a typo) in the Montmartre section of Paris.

After wasting two hours riding back and forth to the airport I still had a few hours and the weather was adequate. So after a quick rinse off in the phone-booth-sized shower in my tiny room, I went out to explore the neighborhood.

I climbed up the Butte de Montmartre (the big hill where St. Denis was martyred) but didn't go into the Basilica on top as line for entry was too long. The view across Paris from there was very impressive. After descending again I looked into the Church of Saint-Jean de Montmartre, an Art Deco era gem on the Place des Abbesses.

After a big fancy dinner at the restaurant across the street from my hotel, I wandered down to Boulevard de Clichy and passed by the famous old Moulin Rouge nightclub. Once the center of Paris's naughty nightlife section, the whole area is kind of bland looking, with a Starbuck's and the inevitable Irish-themed pub. The only trace I could find of Montmartre's "bohemian" past was a high proportion of Italian restaurants on the side streets. I strolled back to the Hotel BASSS (not a typo), crawled into my tiny bed, and went to sleep.

My flight out in the morning was scheduled for 9 a.m., which meant I had to get to De Gaulle by 7. Not wanting to trust my fate to the train again, I arranged for a taxi to pick me up at 6 a.m. Both I and my driver were early, which meant I had just enough time to grab a coffee and a croissant before riding off through the early-morning streets.

When you get through the security checkpoints at the international terminal at De Gaulle airport, the duty-free shops are incredibly lavish. All the famous luxury French brands have big stores. I looked for things to spend my remaining Euros on, but everything was priced way beyond what I had left.

After that there's not much left to tell. I flew to Dublin, stood in a lot of lines, sat around, boarded my flight back to New England, and read ebooks most of the way home.

France Excursion 2023 Part Eight: Heroes of the AEF

On Tuesday, June 27th, Diane had to head off to the neuroendocrinology conference, so I was on my own for the morning. I got some espresso and walked about more or less at random.

I went across the Loire via the Pont Napoleon, which crosses a large island in mid-river. The island is set up as a park, though at the entrance I did see a prominent sign warning that no camping was allowed because of sudden changes in water level.

I walked along the north bank of the Loire, looking across at the city. (The photo I posted for the first day was taken from there.) The riverside road led me to the square at the north end of the Pont Wilson.

One intriguing sight there was the six customhouses commanding the three roads that led out of the square. In the days before the French Revolution, those were for the collection of the internal tariffs on goods. I don't know the specifics, but I get the impression that one of the reasons France became so incredibly powerful after the Revolution was simply due to the removal of so much feudal deadweight on the economy.

I crossed back to Tours proper via the Pont Wilson, which was renamed after World War I. Before that it was the Pont Neuf — the "New Bridge" and of course it is the oldest extant bridge over the Loire at Tours. That almost seems like a law of nature. The Pont Neuf in Paris is the oldest bridge there, and Novgorod is the oldest city in Russia.

The bridge at Tours was built because Louis XIV was able to put a member of the House of Bourbon onto the throne of Spain. All of a sudden there was more trade between the two countries, after centuries of a quasi-Cold War along the Pyrenees. A big new road was cut through Tours, leading south toward Spain. That road became the Rue Nationale, which is now the main axis of the city — shifting the orientation of Tours from parallel to the Loire to perpendicular.

Just on the Tours side there is a monument I didn't see in any of the guidebooks: a fountain commemorating the feats of the American Expeditionary Force's logistics effort during World War I. It's a lovely sculpture and obviously very carefully maintained. The French were apparently deeply affected by the American aid in that war. I think every town in France has a "Rue Wilson." His reputation in the U.S. has declined considerably over the past century, but in France, Woodrow Wilson is still a hero. Frankly, they're welcome to him.

We met for lunch at a nice little restaurant called Bistrot d'Odile on the Rue Colbert, which had been recommended highly. There are a lot of restaurants in Tours and we only got to try a handful. I wouldn't object to just spending a few weeks in town dining out.

After lunch I packed and had a nap, then went out again in the late afternoon to get another Aperol Spritz and watch the people go by. Dinner that day was my only mediocre meal of the entire trip: a "kebab" sandwich (which we Americans call a gyro), which was surprisingly bland and starchy.

France Excursion 2023 Part Seven: Secrets of the Templars!

Monday the 26th was the last full day before the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology conference got underway, so we decided to go see what lies west of Tours, having gone east on all our previous jaunts. More or less at random we chose Chinon as our destination.

Chinon is a little town sheltered between a big river and a big castle. The Loire flows past on the north and just behind the town is an impressive ridge crowned by the massive fortress of Chinon. It has been a military strong point since the days when the Romans built a fortified camp on the site, and over the centuries it was expanded by Franks, Merovingians, Capets, and Plantagenets.

One of the most famous events to happen at Chinon was the meeting between Joan of Arc and Charles VII of France. According to legend he was in disguise but she picked him out of a crowd of courtiers. I don't know if that's true, but I can understand why Charles was so freaked out by her arrival. A medieval monarch must have had a very hard time getting his mind around the concept that Joan was leading what amounted to a peasant revolt supporting him. That never happened before, as far as I can tell. Peasants tended to rebel against their lords, but picking one side in a dynastic dogfight was a new development. In this case I think Joan and the rest of the French commoners were just so damned sick of the Hundred Years' War that they decided to end it.

The fortress is mostly a ruin — not due to any assault by enemies, but mostly due to several centuries of being used as a free building material depot by the inhabitants of the town below.

We saw the whole thing, from the top floor of the Clock Tower (one of the few towers that didn't get dismantled) all the way down to the dungeons. Apparently some leaders of the Knights Templars were imprisoned at Chinon for a while, and what is said to be the room they were kept in features some grafitti cut into the walls, said to be by the Templar prisoners. Or maybe by someone else. Still, if Dan Brown wants to use this as material for a thriller, here's a photo.

Walking around a giant castle and climbing stairs all morning gave us a good appetite, which we satisfied at a restaurant called Au Local, just outside the castle gates. Highly recommended.

After a leisurely drive back to Tours, I dropped off the rental car while Diane signed in at the conference. She went off to some opening ceremonies while I dined in the old section of town, eating Andouillette and putting away a demi-bottle of local rosé wine. At the next table an intellectual-looking Frenchman about my age was sporting a "LOS ANGELES THUG LIFE COMPTON" t-shirt.

And so to bed.

France Excursion 2023 Part Six: Pandas!

On Sunday we set out early once again, heading up the valley of the Cher a second time. Our destination was the town of Saint-Aignan, home of the ZooParc de Beauval — one of France's best zoos. It's big, modern, and — on summer weekends, anyway — packed with visitors. We got there at opening time and stayed for a good five hours, in broiling sun on a very hot day. But the zoo was definitely worth the visit.

         As I mentioned, it's a fairly new zoo, dating back to 1980 when Francoise Delord ran out of room in her Paris apartment for her collection of birds and set up an aviary park at Beauval. Over the decades is has grown to include 35,000 animals from every continent. Building a zoo in the 1980s and 1990s meant that the Delord family could learn from a couple of centuries of other people's mistakes in zoo construction and operation. The enclosures are roomy, with plenty for the animals to do. I didn't notice any paths worn down by obsessive pacing by big cats.

         The big draw at Beauval is their collection of giant pandas, courtesy of the People's Republic of China. (Apparently China considers all pandas — like many other things — belong to China no matter where they are or were born.) The exhibit is very posh, and features big flatscreens showing videos of various French big shots at the zoo to welcome the pandas' arrival. There's also a lot of frankly fawning text panels about how swell China is and how grateful Beauval is for the right to show the pandas.

         I was actually more amused by a less showy exhibit, showing the famous North American Trash Panda (Procyon lotor).

         Personally, I'm always as interested in the two-legged animals wandering around the zoo as I am at the creatures inside the enclosures. My estimate is that a good 95 percent of the people at Beauval were French. I think I spotted maybe one group that included at least some Americans, and I heard a British accent at one point. Saint-Aignan is about three hours from Paris by car — a little long but do-able for a day trip if you don't mind getting up early and getting back late, but perfect for a weekend. Pack up the kids and leave the Place d'Italie at about 5 p.m. on Friday, drive down with a stop for a nice dinner around Orleans, and book a hotel for two nights somewhere along the Loire. Spend one day looking at chateaus and maybe visiting a winery or two, another day at the zoo, drive back Sunday evening and you're done.

         Hot and tired, we drove back to Tours along a scenic back-roads route recommended by the Green Guide, which passed through Montresor, one of the official Most Picturesque Villages in France. Dinner was at an adequate Thai place in Tours. There's an interesting guidebook waiting to be written, about the best "foreign" food in other countries — does Paris have better Vietnamese food, or Prague? Which European countries have the best Mexican food? And so forth.

France Excursion 2023 Part Five: Naps!

On Saturday the 24th we decided to take it easy. We slept about 11 hours, then I stashed the car in a garage for the day while Diane went out to find pastries for breakfast. We took our dirty laundry two blocks to the nearest laundromat: "Charlie et le Choco-Laverie," a hybrid cafe-laundry with wifi. There we caught up on various Web sites and social media while getting our clothes clean.

For lunch we picked a nice-looking place on the Rue Colbert, the old pre-18th Century main street of Tours which runs parallel to the river. I'm afraid I don't recall the name, but the food was good.

From there we wandered over to the Cathedral of St. Gatien (the first bishop of Tours), and stumbled across a concert in progress. It was a performance by a choir, small orchestra, organ, and half a dozen Scottish bagpipers. The first several rows of the audience were occupied by people in Renaissance costume, but the music was mostly recent, including a spirited rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."* I have no idea what was going on, but the music was nice and the cathedral is lovely.

We stopped at the science fiction bookstore Imaginaute and had a nice chat with the owner, shading as always into bitching about how kids these days don't buy enough books.

We napped away the hottest part of the afternoon, then I went out on my own in the evening to sit at a sidewalk table drinking an Aperol spritz and update my journal while watching the people, feeling exceedingly cosmopolitan.

If I had my way, trips would last longer and include more days like this one.

 

*How the heck did this song get turned into a quasi-hymn? Does nobody listen to lyrics?

France Excursion 2023 Part Four: Up and Away!

On Friday the 23rd we got up very very early, about 4:30 a.m., and bundled into the car for a drive up the Cher river to the little town of Francueil where we sat outside a deserted winery in the pre-dawn darkness. A few other cars pulled up nearby, and then the caravan of white trucks bearing the "France-Montgolfière" logo came tearing up, towing a trailer filled with a big basket, tanks of propane, and a big bundle of colorful nylon.

We were going ballooning!

The professionals inflated and released a little helium balloon, and watched its path in the light breeze as it floated off, and then we all piled into the trucks and drove off to the launch site. My guess is that they have a number of alternate takeoff points, based on which way the winds are blowing. With a balloon you don't have a lot of control over where you go, but you can pick where you're coming from. We drove some five or ten kilometers to the east and into a soccer field where two other balloons were already unpacked and inflating. They use gas-engine powered fans to fill the balloons with air, then heat it with propane burners until the balloon is upright.
Once the balloon was ready and we had our safety briefing ("Don't touch the fans, and when we land squat down and face away from the direction we're moving") eleven passengers clambered into the big basket, our pilot Fabien fired up the burners, and we took to the air!

Fabien used a light touch on the propane burner, keeping us quite low for the first part of the flight. Once we actually brushed the upper foliage of a tree. We were low enough to see a fox in one cow pasture below us. The sun rose just after we took off, and the golden dawn light made the landscape gorgeous.

Staying low meant our balloon was carried along by the breeze blowing down the valley of the river Cher. We could see some of the other balloons in the air that morning — I counted eight, others said ten — had gone higher and were veering off to the southwest.

The strategy paid off as we passed directly over the Chateau of Chenonceau, with a glorious view of the house and gardens lit by the rising sun. We began descending as we crossed the river, and touched down in a newly-cut hayfield. The farmer cutting hay paused in his work to come over and join us for a toast to the successful flight. The winery where our cars were parked was just a kilometer away.

It was still quite early, just past 8 a.m., when we got back to the car. Diane and I drove across the river to the town of Chenonceaux (the town has an x, the chateau doesn't). We found one cafe opening early and got ourselves some breakfast, then hung around in the parking lot until the chateau opened for the day.

Chenonceau is gorgeous, both from the ground and the air. It was a pleasure palace, built by Henri II for his mistress Diane de Poitiers, then claimed by his widow Catherine de Medici, who basically ran the country from there until her son Henri III was old enough to take over. The house was built on the foundations of a fortified mill, and has a long gallery section stretching right across the river Cher.

The gardens are typical French landscaping: lots of gravel and show those plants who's boss. There is a small modern English-style garden which to my taste is much more appealing. Also a hedge maze, and — for some unknown reason — a pair of classic old cars. Maybe they belonged to Catherine de Medici.

We spent the morning at Chenonceau and then drove north to the banks of the Loire, for a sumptous meal at the Chateau de Pray, another Michelin-starred restaurant and hotel in a 13th-century castle. I didn't keep a copy of the menu, but I know we started with a kind of vichysoisse with tiny clams (almost like a cold chowder), roasted artichoke, beef with a wonderful broth poured over it, goat cheese, and a kind of deconstructed strawberry shortcake for dessert. All quite delicious.

I have noticed some patterns in high-end cooking lately. I don't know if this is a long-term trend or just this year's fad. The chefs are definitely scaling back on the butter, cream, and lardons. Instead they're pushing a lot of umami with concentrated broths and reductions. Portions are quite modest, really. The focus is on flavor, not fullness. Diane actually lost weight on the trip — remember we were alternating fancy meals with long walks through castles and museums, often logging five miles a day.

After two hours at the table we finally finished, and drove just a kilometer or so down the river to Amboise, to visit the Chateau du Clos Luce, the final residence of Leonardo da Vinci. Unsurprisingly, the house is now a Da Vinci museum. Because all his artworks and original manuscripts are in the hands of much bigger and better-endowed museums, the Chateau du Clos Luce focuses on Leonardo's technology ideas, with constructed versions of some of the things he only doodled on paper. The house itself is pleasant, and the gardens are quite nice, but I can't say I learned anything I didn't already know about Leonardo da Vinci.

By that point we were both pretty tired — it was something like 14 hours since we woke up — so we drove back to Tours, had showers, and went to bed early. A great day in all.

France Excursion 2023 Part Three: Chambord, Ezia, and Magic

We got moving early on the 22nd. I got the car out of the underground garage, and we set out eastward on the Autoroute heading for Blois. From there we followed smaller roads to the great palace of Chambord. This was Francis I's personal dream house, and he poured treasure into the project — and then only got to live there about three months.

Chambord's position reflects some of Francis's geopolitical ambitions. He was pushing his claim to various Italian kingdoms, especially Milan, but other major powers in the area were trying to stop him. As is customary with Renaissance politics, they all switched sides and made temporary coalitions so that at any given time Francis might be allied with the Papal States or the Holy Roman Empire, or he might be fighting them. But all this activity in Italy made it useful for the King's center of government to be located south of the Loire, saving days of time for couriers from Italy. Also, in an era when wealth still equated more or less directly to food, putting the court right in the middle of France's breadbasket was good policy.

Anyway, the chateau itself is immense and fantastic. Here's a picture.

Inside, there's no attempt at consistency. Some of the rooms are fitted out as they might have been in Francis's day, others replicate Louis XIV's era, or the days of the exiled Polish King Stanislaus I, or the tenure of Marshal Saxe, or the last private owner, the Comte de Chambord.

That last figure is a bit obscure, but he's worth learning about. He was the last serious candidate for King of France. In the 1880s, after the fiasco of the Franco-Prussian War, the Royalists had a solid majority in the Assembly and finally managed to agree on a single candidate, the Bourbon Henri V, who used the title Comte de Chambord when he didn't want any snickering.  

Henri's moment had arrived. And then he blew it all by issuing a proclamation from the palace of Chambord stating that he would never accept the throne if France didn't go back to the old royal banner of white with lilies. The French — including most of the Royalists in the government — decided that the Comte de Chambord was a fool and they'd be better off sticking to the Third Republic. Henri went back home to Austria and France has remained a Republic ever since.

The guidebooks strongly insinuate that the cool double-spiral staircase in the center of the house was designed by Leonardo da Vinci, but they can't actually state it as fact because there's no record. Having climbed up and down it I can attest that it almost certainly was designed by Leonardo because he made the stair riser height inconveniently low to get the right curve of the spiral staircase. That seems very like him.

Having worked up a considerable appetite, we drove to the nearby village of Montlivault for a big fancy lunch at the Michelin-starred restaurant Ezia. It's a nice unpretentious place in a quiet little town. Here's our menu:

Wrasse (it's a fish) with artichoke and a basil cream sauce

Braised carrots with shellfish

Fish (I don't recall what kind) with eggplant

Smoked duck breast or Pigeon (Diane had the duck, I had the pigeon) with beets, rhubarb and juniper

Goat cheese mousse

Elderflower, cucumber, and gin sorbets

All excellent, and we paired them with local wines but I didn't note what we ordered.

Full and happy, we drove over to Blois, which has another famous chateau, but we ignored that completely. Instead we went across the square from the chateau to the Maison de Magie — a museum devoted to local boy Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the famous stage magician and inventor.

Every thirty minutes, giant dragon heads emerge from the museum, but unfortunately my video is too large for me to embed here. So instead here's a link to someone else's video on YouTube.

Inside there's exhibits of stage illusions, three different theaters where magic acts perform, a collection of vintage posters, and lots of stuff about the life and career of M. Robert-Houdin.

Here is one illusion, featuring the disembodied head of Dr. Diane A. Kelly.

We drove back to Tours the slow way, following the Loire, and had a light dinner across the street from our hotel before tumbling into bed early. We were going to be getting up before dawn and wanted our sleep.

 

France Excursion 2023 Part Deux: Stones and Wine

On Wednesday the 21st we had a fabulous lunch at a restaurant chosen at random because we were hungry, then picked up our rental car at the Tours train station and drove out of the city to do some tourism on the north side of the Loire River.

Our first stop was the Dolmen de la Grotte aux Fées: a Neolithic tomb in the middle of a wheat field near the town of Mettray. It has walls and a roof made of slabs of natural stone, presumably moved to the site with rollers and erected by large groups of people working very hard. The tomb originally had dirt walls outside the stone ones, but millennia of erosion have stripped them away.

Here's a photo, with Dr. Diane A. Kelly for scale (170 centimeters).
Like many ancient sites in western Europe, this one has been attributed to the fairies, with the vernacular name "La Grotte aux Fées" (The Fairies' Grotto). Thirty years ago in Brittany, Diane and I stopped to visit a similar structure known locally as "Le Roche des Fees" (The Fairies' Rock).

We moderns may snicker about this, attributing human-built structures to supernatural beings, but it's worth remembering that these things pre-date the arrival of Indo-Europeans to modern France. They were very old a very long time ago. As far as the people of Roman Gaul or Christian France knew, they might as well have been built by fairies.

From the dolmen we took a leisurely drive on country roads to the town of Vouvray. Wine snobs may have already figured out why we were there: a winery tour and tasting. In this case, we visited the Domaine de Thierry-Cosme, and it vastly exceeded expectation. I had figured there would be a brief stroll around the winery building, maybe a look at the "caves" cut into the limestone bluffs, and a taste or two.

But the winery owner (I never caught his name but I assume he is M. Thierry, or M. Thierry-Cosme) had more ambitious plans. He bundled us (and his charming dog) into his truck and drove us up onto the top of the limestone plateau to have a look at the actual vineyard. His tract is right at the edge of the Vouvray region. There's a hedge at one side of his field, and on the other side of it the Touraine region begins.

After looking at the vines, we got to see the harvesting and pressing machinery. Wine making is now thoroughly mechanized. There's a big kind of tractor that straddles the rows of vines and gently shakes the grapes loose, catching them in rubber conveyor belts that dump them into bins.

Back at the winery building the grapes go right into the press, which uses hydraulic pistons to squeeze out every drop. A hectare of vineyard can produce five to six thousand liters of wine, or roughly one bottle per grape plant.

The next stage is fermenting. The winery has something like a dozen enormous stainless-steel fermenting tanks, all temperature-controlled to manage the transition from grape juice to wine as perfectly as possible.

After the ferment, the wine gets bottled (we didn't see how that's done but I assume it involves pouring wine into bottles and then capping them). Then it goes into the cave. The cave is a tunnel cut into the limestone — according to our host, his grandfather and his father did a lot of expansion by hand with picks and hammers. The temperature in the cave is always about 15 centigrade (60 Fahrenheit) year-round, and that is perfect for aging wine.

Our host also casually mentioned that his grandmother was born in the cave, as her family had owned it and lived in the front part. They certainly weren't the only ones: even today you can see lots of house fronts right in the limestone cliffs along the Loire.

One thing I learned is that Vouvray is better known in France as a sparkling wine than a still one, which sounded weird because most of the Vouvray I've seen in the U.S. is still wine. So we wound up buying a bottle of Vouvray Demi-Sec, and with careful packing Diane managed to get it back to our own cellar intact.

Winery, with Dr. Diane A. Kelly for scale.

Vouvray in hand, we went back to Tours and had a light supper at the little restaurant across the street from our hotel. That evening (and since this was the day of the summer solstice, at latitude 47 North, evening lasted a very long time) the old quarter of Tours was hosting a music festival. There were musical acts playing every few blocks: a brass band, a hip-hop group, a band doing covers of the Cure, a punk band, an open-mike stage . . . and presumably dozens more I didn't see. The streets were packed. My favorite metric for crowds, "Like Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras" was no hyperbole this time. We wandered about, listened to some music, tried to avoid getting separated by the mob, and at about 10 p.m. decided to pack it in for the night, even though it was still just twilight.

One bit of good news: when I checked my email I found a notice from Objets Trouvés at De Gaulle airport. They had my bag! I made an appointment to recover it on the day I was to return to Paris.

Next time: Castles and Magic!