Eating in France

Picture 1: The fruit section, or half of it, at Carrefoure.
Picture 2: The veggie section, or one half of it, at Carrefoure.
Picture 3: The seafood counter at Carrefoure, a WalMart like place. The counter extends to the end of the building. Prepared packaged seafood is to the right in a cold counter out of sight in the photo.

Take a dictionary to dinner with you. It will eliminate some of the mystery of what you are ordering for dinner. But if you can't find your food in the dictionary, order it anyway. Part of the fun of traveling is enjoying new experiences, right. The French have six different names for chicken, depending on age, size, sex, or lack of sex. That doesn't count the term "poultry." Duck is almost as complicated.

We left Chatel Censoir, and the boat, on the 16th and took the train to Auxerre. We rented a car, did laundry for the first time, and drove to the upscale village of Chablis, same name as the wine growing area. Laundries are hard to find in the country. We ate dinner there at a "nice" restaurant the inn keeper recommended. It was the only disappointing meal we had. We drove from there the next day to our hotel in Avignon.

We ate lunch at a truck stop in Lyon. There were only two "plats" on the menu. At a French food establishment the entree is the first course: the salad, pate, small serving of something. The "plat" is the main dish, the meat, chicken or fish, accompanied by a veggie or starch. The truck stop offered what I later translated to be ring-neck dove. We arrived late in the normal 2 hour lunch period they were out of that. The second plat was filet of loup with berre blanc sauce. Now I know the French word for loup. It's wolf. I thought we ordered that. I didn't really believe it would be wolf. It wasn't. Maybe they were out of the wolf as well but we got a nice little steak. It was a tough cut that had been prepared very well. The truck stop ranked just behind the country inns and the best food so far.

We have eaten at country inns, nice restaurants, snack bars, cafes, truck stops and taverns. By far the 3 best meals we had were at the 3 country inns in Burgundy, and I do mean country. These were all in the Burgundy region, specifically in the department of the Yonne, and in the general area of Chablis. We are in Provence now but haven't eaten out as much. The town of Gurgy in Burgundy is the snail raising capitol of the country. Personally, I think that good butter, garlic, & parsley sauce is best without those tasteless chewy nuggets in it but Mike and George liked them. Burgundians also like eggs. You are likely to find a very soft poached or fried egg on top of your salad, your galette, or anything else.

Eating hours at restaurants are pretty rigid. Most restaurants only seat between 7 and 8:30 or 9 and often require reservations. Lunch is between 12 and 2. Yesterday we went Roman ruin sight seeing and stopped in the town of Uzes for lunch. It was 3 pm. It was almost impossible to find a place serving food, although most places were open for drinks. We finally got lunch at a snack bar. They only thing they were serving was bruschetta. It isn't like our, or Italian bruschetta. The owner was describing it and I said it sounded like pizza. Non, non, pizza is with a dough. This is with a bread. Oops, my mistake. It was a 8x10" oval of a light, crisp, buttery bread with your choice of pizza stuff on top. Good.

We don't always eat out. We cooked many meals on the boat and our room in Provence has a small kitchen so we generally make dinner here. But that requires food shopping, which is a treat. There are many grocery stores, most smaller. But you can also get your food at an open air market held once or twice a week in many towns, a roadside fruit stands, at the butcher shop, the bakery, or the bread maker.

There are a few equivalents to WalMart. Carrefoure is near our hotel and we have been doing our grocery, and wine shopping there. But you can tell from the photos above, Walmart has a long way to go to challenge the food section of Carrefoure. The pictures are just of the fresh sections. The frozen and refrigerated "frommage" and "saucisson" sections are just as large. The wine section... well, it is France.

Baguette, cheese and pate have become staples of our lunch or breakfast. This blog won't let me type an accent mark over the e in pate. With the accent part it is the constructed meat dish cooked in a terrine. Without the accent it is pasta. We were reminded of this at lunch two days ago when we stopped at a winery with restaurant in the Rhone hill country north of Avignon.

But so far the greatest food discovery I have made is something called mirabelles. A grocery told me he didn't know the name of them in English. He didn't think they were plums but I believe they are in that family. They are only 1 1/2" in diameter with a free stone and they taste like honey. Wonderful.

Bon Appetit.

Flowers Everywhere

The Burgundians make the most of their summer. Everyone with any size plot of land has a vegetable and/or flower garden, no matter how small. Also, I think the lockmasters with cottages have a contest to see whi can decorate their lock the most. One guy was solid flowers but the 30 plus garden statues was over the top. Snow White & the 7 dwarfs had trolls, geese, Rin-Tin-Tin, wheelbarrows and whatever to keep them company. Most small villages had a flower shop even when they didn't have a grocery.

Locks and Bridges

Picture 1: Unnamed bascule bridge
Picture 2: Mike cranking open one side of a lock
Picture 3. Lock opening for us
Picture 4: Carolyn Stamps and I at the Bourgagne (Burgundy) Canal in Migenes.

We picked up our canal boat in the small village of Migennes, about 100 miles SSE of Paris. It is on the Burgundy Canal at the junction of the Yonne River and the Nivernais Canal. Perhaps you can follow this itinerary on Google maps.

The Yonne River is 192 km long and empties into the left bank of the Siene. It starts in the Nievre department in the Morvan hills near the town of Chateau-Chinon and gives its name to the Yonne department of the region of Burgundy. It was the primary traffic route to move wine and timber to Paris using tow barges during the 19th Century, similar to the U.S. Eire Canal. it is shadowed by the Nivernais Canal. Boat traffic locks into the canal wherever the river is too shallow, rapid or curvy. The canal and river are no longer navigable to commercial traffic above the town of Auxerre because the locks are too short, narrow and shallow. But the French government maintains them very nicely for pleasure traffic.

We locked out of the Bourguigne Canal into the Yonne River on Monday, Sept 6. This was our deepest lock at 10 ft. It is a little nerve wracking to be standing on the bow of your boat and looking over the water in front of you to a 10 foot drop. Kind of like being on the Black Pearl as it goes over the edge of the world.

We headed down river to the town of Joigny the first day and spent the night in a marina. It cost 5 Euros, about $7.50. Water was free and electricity was included. Sure beats the cost of cruising in the U.S. Most of the towns we stayed at deserve their own post so I won't go into them now. The second day our we reversed course and headed upriver. Stops included Gurgy, Auxerre, Bailly, Vincelles, Cravant, a riverside tie up on a meadow near Mailly-la-Ville, the rock formations at Saussions, Coulanges-sur-Yonne, Clamecy, back down river to Coulanges-sur-Yonne, and finally Chatel-Censoir where we turned the boat in on Sept 16. See the picture above.

Auxerre is the biggest city in the region at 35,000 plus. This is not a heavily populated area. In fact, most of it was country. Auxerre was founded in 900 AD by Saint Nicholas, I think. I will check on the founding guy. It is a beautiful city and worth its own post. I have a number of great pictures and will share a few. In fact, I have pictures of most of those medieval towns and will post them soon. Most are built on hills and my knees have yet to recover.

We lost count of how many locks we went through. It was around 50 during the 8 days of travel. Courtesy suggests a boat member help the lock master/mistress if possible. When going upstream this requires one crew member to jump onto a slippery ladder and climb the to the top of the lock, retrieve lines from persons on the bow and stern, wrap them around a bollard, toss the lines back, and then go crank one side of the lock gates. Going downstream it require the assisting person to climb back down the ladder and step onto the moving boat. The boat driver needs to be pretty good. Needless to say we "girls" left that part to the more nibble "boys" while we controlled the lines.

At one point, in some nameless hamlet we came to a bascule bridge. It was clearly marked, in French, that only authorized persons were allowed to operate the bridge. Since no authorized person showed up we had to operate it ourselves, both going upstream and back down. The local traffic thanked us for being hasty in our transit.

Coming next: Eating in Burgundy, Flowers everywhere, and all those medieval cities.

Canal Boats

Picture 1 & 2: Canal boats on the Siene
Picture 3: Elegant canal boat on the Siene in Paris.

Canal boats come in an incredible variety of designs, shapes and sizes. They can be as elegant as a beautifully preserved Trumpy, look at home in a Florida marina, or be as plain as an old Clorox bottle. The one we rented was closer in appearance to the later. But all canal boats have the same things in common: they are narrow and low. The width of locks and bridge clearance determines the maximum of these. On the Nivernais Canal where we were there were several bridges with a clearance no greater than 3.3 meters. Some of the locks were no more than 10-12 feet wide. The length of the boat will also determine which locks it can pass through. The elegant boat in picture 3 would never fit in some of the locks we passed through.

Our boat was a 21 year old Traditional 1135. I can't find a picture of it. This is an old style European canal boat. It was only 35' long with a center "living area" or salon. It had a small stateroom, and smaller head (toilet and shower) both back and front. Just right for two couples. It also had a small gallery with a refrigerator that never got colder than 55 degrees, just perfect for wine. It had a sliding cabin top that allowed the front half of the living area to be opened to the air. With the windshield dropped it was a great warm weather boat. We picked it up in the village of Migennes on the Burgundy (Bourgogne) canal where it joins the Nivernais Canal and the Yonne River. This is about 160 kilometers (95 miles or so) SSW of Paris. I'll post our itinerary next.

Paris

The French countryside is not wired for internet. After 1 day in Paris and 10 on a canal boat without internet access I finally connected in Avignon, Provence. So here is a late recount of the fast day we spent in Paris.

We arrived in Paris on Sept 5 at 6:30 am, 12:30 am Tampa time. After an hour wait for out shuttle we departed Charles de Gaulle airport for downtown Paris. Our hotel, Hotel Montpensier, was only a block from the Louvre. But we were to be in town just for the day. And it's advertised Wifi didn't exist. It is a nice little, old hotel. Our room was the size of 2 postage stamps but it was just for the night. We left for the Bercy train station Sunday morning, the 6th, to catch a train to the little town we picked up our canal boat. This is the same train station from which the Orient Express leaves. Too bad it wasn't there.

So we opted for a 5 hour tour of Paris. It included an hour and a half drive around town, an extended stop at the Eiffel tower, and a 2 hour boat tour of the Siene. That was definately the best part. Not much time in Paris but maybe another trip. It was overcast most of the day, not great picture taking weather. But here are a few pictures I did take. The base of the Effiel Tower, the Tower from the Siene, Notre Dame from the Siene, and a view of the Arc du Triomphe from the Eiffel Tower. Lastly, the Siene is criss-crossed with bridges. From the boat the view was frenquently of 10-12 bridges in a row.

At the Airport

Here we are at Tampa airport waiting to board our flight to Dulles where we will meet up with the Stamps and continue on to Dulles. Mike is on the phone with a Verizon agent trying to activate an international phone that will have his phone number while we are in France. It's a great program for Verizon customers but the customer service is appalling. I ordered the phone on Aug 28. The agent said he couldn't process the order until the 31st but would do so then. The phone would arrive on the Sept 2nd. Didn't happen. I called Verizon and found the order was never placed. That CS rep said they would send it out priority overnight. I would receive it yesterday. Didn't happen. I called. They said sorry but it had to have a supervisor approval so it was sent out on the 3rd. It would arrive by FedEx on the 4th, today. Too bad we would have already left! We could go to a Verizon store and buy a global phone! Thirty minutes before the airport shuttle arrived a special FexEx truck shows up with the phone. It has to be charged before it is activated. Fortunately we found a workstation near our gate and it is now charged. But the instructions on how to activate it didn't work. Hence Mike is on the phone with Verizon. But thinks are definately looking up. How bad can things be if you are one your way to 3 weeks in Burgandy and Provence? The next post should contain pictures of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

Getting Ready for France

Friday, Sept 4, Mike (my husband) and I leave for 3 weeks in France. I've completed 8 weeks of "adult education" in the French language. I have been insured by my two teachers that any French speaker will be able to understand me when I say, "I don't speak French; do you speak English." But since one was Lebanese and the other French Canadian I have my reservations.

We are traveling 2 of the 3 weeks with old friends from Maryland, George and Carolyn Stamps. We fly to Paris on Sept 4th, arriving around 7 am on the 5th. We leave the next morning by local train to the town of Migenes, France on the Yonne River. It is in Burgundy, the region of Chablis. We will be chartering a canal boat until Sept 16, dropping it off in the village of Chatel Censoir down the Yonne river and Nivernais Canal. George and Carolyn will head back to Paris but we are renting a car and driving to Provence. We will spend the first night in the nearby village of Chablis checking out a few "caves" (wine tasting rooms). Then on the Provence, with a mid day stop in Lyon. We will be based in Avignon until Tuesday, Sept 22 when we take the high speed train, the TGV, back to Paris. Half a day more to see something in Paris before we fly home on Wed morning, Sept 23rd. Both days in Paris we will be staying at the Hotel Montpensier, just a block and half from the Louvre.

We have a million things to do. Mike is dealing with the yard and house prep. Fortunately he has finished working on a client's boat that has consumed much of his time. I have a show hanging at local art center that needs to come down the day before we leave and one of the paintings has to be sent to the Kentucky Watercolor Society for their annual exhibit that same day. I was just asked to do a demo at the Florida Watercolor Society Trade Show two days after we return. It's one of those where you need 3 versions in different stages, plus the finished painting. All that has to be done before we go.