Saturday, June 7, 2014 - Day 16

Today is our last full day in France. Tomorrow is just the flight out.

We turned the house back to the owners this morning, and headed out to Paris. It was a total of almost 8 hours, with a couple of stops along the way. We learned a few more things about French fast food along the way.

1. McDonalds doesn't serve breakfast. They don't open until 10am.
2. The only Cheetos they have here are peanut flavored. Really, peanuts? Isn't this the country that makes the best cheeses in the world, and you can't get cheese flavored Cheetos?
3. Pringles makes smoked chicken and smoked ham flavored chips. I can't tell you what they taste like, as we have our standards.

After checking in to the airport Hilton and returning the rental car, we jumped on a train and went in to Paris for dinner and walking around. We stumbled on this little place called Le Bistro d'Henri, and it was tremendous. The place looked cool from the outside, so we had to try it. They only seat about 35 people, and it's a cramped 35. The kitchen is miniature and right there with you. It's a great place for food and a great ambiance.

We walked over to Notre Dame after dinner. The city is packed on a Saturday night, and there are a ton of people in square in front of Notre Dame. For the first time since we've been coming to Paris in 1996, Notre Dame doesn't have an scaffolding on it. They've completed the cleaning job, and the building looks fabulous. It's probably close to what it looks like when it first went up centuries ago.

You can find some Paris photos here.

Friday, June 6 2014 - Day 15

Today was our last day in Provence. It's been a great time and I'm sorry to see it end. But it will be great to get home.

This morning we went to a shop looking for some placemats. We talked to a guy yesterday at the farmers market and he had some placemats we wanted, but not enough for us. He gave us the address of his shop in a nearby town. We went there today thinking we were going to a small store with placemats. It turned out to be much different.

We turned the corner and ran into a huge store with thousands of fabrics for sale. Jan was in nirvana! We found the placemats they were selling, and located three different patterns that would be great in our dining room and kitchen, for a total of 28 placemats. Jan didn't find any fabric that she wanted, and the prices are quite a bit more than in the U.S. But the placemat score was great.

With the placemats we just bought, and the fabrics for table cloths we bought earlier in the week, we've now exceed the about of space we have in our luggage. So this is the first vacation we've taken where we had to buy a suit case just to bring home stuff that we bought during the trip. Another new experience on this vacation!

We spent the afternoon in the town of St-Remy-de-Provence. We started with a little bistro named La Gousse d'Ail, which means The Garlic Clove. So now you know what dominates their dishes. The food was fabulous. They gave us a small bowl of mushroom soup to start. My starter was an onion tart with anchovies and a salad on top. Jan had a home made pasta course with a light pesto sauce, which tasted great and was a huge portion. Jan's main was a ratatouille of sorts with a goat cheese crust. Mine was a steak with potatoes and garlic (what a surprise) that included a couple of whole roasted garlic cloves. Everything was well executed. Another 2 hour lunch! I could get used to this, but my boss probably wouldn't.

We then went down the road to the Monastery of Saint Paul, which is a psychiatric asylum and has been for a very long time. This is where Van Gogh committed himself for a year. It's still an asylum, but only for women patients. We were able to see the room that Van Gogh stayed and saw the lilies and wheat fields he painted in the last year of his life.

We also saw a couple of "treatment bath tubs" from the 19th century, where they would barricade the patient in with a wooden door with their head exposed, and they would periodically surprise them with dowsing their head with cold water. This was believed to cure the patient's wayward thoughts because of the shock of water. Really, you can't make this stuff up. Take a look at the photos if you don't believe me.

We spent the evening getting the house prepped for turning it back to the owners. Bummer.

Here's a few photos.

Thursday, June 5, 2014 - Day 14

Today was a fairly simple day as our trip starts to wind down. But it was a fun day.

The day started with a walk into the town farmers market. We wanted to get a roasted chicken from one of the vendors that sells these in every market, as they smell and look great. Along with the chicken we got a variety of veggies and greens for making a salad. This was lunch, eaten outside on our porch while looking out at the ducks swimming along in the river. It was a great lunch and a time that felt very "Provence".

We spent the afternoon back in Aix-En-Provence. We want to attend the chamber music concert at the church this evening. We just decided to hang out around town and wait for the concert.

We went off to the place we had lunch the other day as Jan wanted another helping of the great dessert she had there, a chocolate sundae. We then walked around town a little bit, looking in on the city hall which is a 16th or 17th century building. We had access to the little center within the building complex along with the hallway on the first floor to see the architecture.

We then spent some time sitting at one of the little Tabac places that are all over every town of France. These places are little bars that sell a variety of cigarette products, drinks and coffee. It's a place to spend a few euros on a coffee and just sit at one of the outside tables and watch the world go by. The one we chose was right next to the church, so we had plenty of people watching available while we drank our coffee, I smoked a cigar and Jan made out some post cards.

The concert this evening was in the old Saint Savieur church I described a couple of days ago. It was a chamber music concert by the Berlin Chamber Music Orchestra, as they bill themselves. It's a group of 6-7 musicians, all string instruments. Anyway, the pieces were by Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi. The musicians were up on the front part of the alter, and we took seats that were right up front practically on top of them. It was cool to see their facial expressions as they looked at each other for timing. The music was excellent and it was a fabulous setting, in an ancient church. What a great experience.

Only a few photos today, which are here. The photos of lunch are pretty inviting I think. More church photos as well, along with the poster of the concert.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - Day 13

Lunch dominated our day today. We went to a little restaurant named Le Bistrot du Paradou on the recommendation of our friend Mary Thomas, who was here last year. Housed in the town of Le Paradou, this little restaurant is a local legend and has been since it opened in 1984. The current chef/owner has been in place for the last couple of years.

The special thing about this restaurant is that it only has a single menu each day, which is what everyone gets with no options or alternatives. There's a single price for the menu and it includes a bottle of wine. There actually is a choice on the menu, and that's dessert, There are about 8 different house-prepared desserts and then a variety of ice creams and sorbets. More on that later.

Today's menu was a first course of sliced and roasted eggplant with a diced prepared tomato, the main course of roasted rabbit with house-made pappardelle and a roasted tomato, a cheese course and dessert. I was concerned when I heard about the rabbit, as it's not Jan's favorite normally but she has had it and enjoyed it in the past.

Every one of the courses was fabulous. Jan really liked the rabbit, as did I. The olive oils on the table were locally made and tremendous. The cheese course was a tray of about 10-12 cheeses that the waiters move from one table to another as you're ready for the course, and you take what you want with the tray staying on your table for 10-15 minutes. You'll never see this in the U.S.

Dessert was a real rock star. Jan had the chocolate tart and was literally speechless with how good it was. I had the rum baba, which was already pretty well soaked with rum until the waiter dropped off a bottle of rum to the table, which allows you to add your own rum.

Oh, Jan wants me to note that she had lunch with her two favorite Johns. You'll know what this means after you check the photos.

After our 2+ hour lunch, we headed to the city of Nimes too view the museum of Beaux-Arts. It's a small museum with some cool stuff. There's a Roman mosaic in the floor that was discovered in the 1800s and dates from approximately 100 AD. There is also a small collection of renaissance-era paintings from Italian, French, and Nordic artists. It was generally a good museum, especially the Italian section.

Nimes has a couple of very cool Roman monuments, a huge arena and a "chateau" that's a monument to a goddess. Try as hard as I could, we couldn't get near either of them because the town is prepping for a wide-ranging carnival that has them closing and rerouting a lot of streets. We finally bailed out and headed home.

Today's photos are located here.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - Day 12

Today was spend in Aix-En-Provence. Aix is sort of the "happening" town in Provence, sort of like the county seat. I do know that I was able to get the cigars I was looking for (yeah!).

We walked past the little Fontaine des Quatre Dauphins (Four Dolphins fountain), a little 17th century fountain with water coming from the mouths of the four dolphins. It's surrounded by old mansions and is a small, high-end square in town. We then had lunch at a little place right outside the Palace de Justice (the courthouse) while the local market was dismantled and cleared out.

We walked across town on our way to the Cathedral Saint Sauveur (Cathedral of the Holy Savior), but first hit a little square called the Place Hotel De Ville because it's in front of the 17th century city hall. We had to stop and have a café and just take in the sights, as it's a very busy square. It's amazing how many people will just stop in the middle of their work day, sit in an outdoor café and have a coffee and a cigarette (lots of smoking here). No one minded my cigar, which was a good thing for a change.

One thing in the square, outside of the city hall, is a cool plaque dedicated in 2004 on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Aix by the American 3rd Army (which I think was under Patton's command) on August 21, 1944 with the assistance of the French Resistance fighters from Aix. I had forgotten that the 70th anniversary of D-Day is Friday. These people haven't.

The Cathedral Saint-Sauveur has parts that date back to the 4th century and the very earliest Christianity when the Romans started to adopt it. The Baptistery is indoors now, enclosed during one of the church expansions in the 14th century, but it was originally outside. The baptism font is a small 8-sided hole that allowed for total immersion, which was the Roman practice.

Other parts of the church date to various times. Some of it was built in the 12th century, then there was the enclosure of the baptistery in the 14th century, some more in the 15th century, and then other parts in the 18th century. It's really quite large and impressive, with some pretty old frescos and a massive organ, which was being played while we were there. There's supposed to be a classical music concert there on Thursday night, so we'll try to go if we can figure out tickets.

Dinner tonight was simple. We picked up a couple of great ham and cheese sandwiches from a local store in Aix along with a couple of cheeses and a baguette, and ate them with a couple of bottles of wine from the trip. We watched the move A Good Year again, since we've now been to pretty much all the spots featured in the movie.

The photos of the day are here. Once again, a lot of old church photos.

Monday, June 2, 2014 - Day 11

Today is our 30th anniversary. Wow, it doesn't seem that long at all. It went by in a heartbeat.

Today's first stop was the Musee de La Lavande (Lavender Museum). We're a little too early to see the huge fields of pretty purple lavender that dominate certain areas of Provence because they don't bloom until June. The museum was interesting though. There was a 10-15 minute film about the growing and production, along with some history of the industry. The museum was dominated by the types of stills that have been used over time to distill the oil from the flowers, which was something I didn't know about. I did start to glaze over after about the sixth type of still, and from that point buzzed past them.

There was a small part of the exhibit dedicated to the production of lavender honey. There are bee keepers in the area of lavender fields that specifically make honey from the lavender flowers, which has a distinctive taste. It was funny to listen to the audio guide, as the lady described the interaction between the bee keeper and the lavender farmer in the summer:

• Bee keeper: "You must wait another fortnight (two weeks for anyone reading this under the age of 40) while the bees make more honey".
• Lavender farmer: "No, the flowers are at their peak and are ready to be harvested".

I suspect the farmer's real response was much shorter, something like just two words. But that could just be me.

Moving on from the lavender museum, we made our way to the town of Chateauneuf-du-Pape (CdP) for a wine and chocolate attraction Jan had read about. CdP is one of the top wine areas of the world, but unfortunately we would do no tasting today as we had acquired more than enough wine to get us through the week, and these wines need time to cellar. The chocolate attraction turned out to be a store where they made their own chocolate. So while it wasn't much of an "attraction", we did manage to do a little damage in the store with their tasty products.

While in the area, we went to the ruins of the pope's chateau, which is the reason the town exists. There is little left to the building that was the pope's weekend/summer retreat when the papacy was in Avignon. It's interesting that the papal palace in Avignon is in excellent condition while this building is practically gone, and both were built at the same time. The building at CdP is at the top of the hill so therefore subjected to all the wind and elements of the area, which is not the case in Avignon. Also, when the papacy returned to Rome in the 1400s, the church continued to own and use the building in Avignon, while I believe they abandoned the building in CdP. More research is needed.

The ruins themselves are still pretty interesting from the architecture that is evident. I took a lot of photos, which you'll see later. It's interesting that when we were last here in 2003, the ruin was pretty much on its own on top of the hill with nothing around it. Now there are grape vines planted by it, someone has put up a restaurant, and there's a tasting room for one of the wineries in the area.

We then headed over to the Pont Du Gard near the city of Nimes. The Pont Du Gard is the tallest aqueduct ever built by the Romans almost 2000 years ago, and it was done in 5 years. It spans over the Gardon river and is as high as it is in order to get up to the tops of the hills surrounding the river to continue to carry the water from a nearby spring to the town of Nimes. It's 360 meters long and 50 meters high. When up close, it appears that this too, like the Pont Julien from last week, was built without mortar, having the precisely shaped stones fitted together in order to keep everything in place. During the summer you can get up to the very top level which is where the water was carried, but that was closed. Still, a very cool monument.

Our anniversary dinner at home tonight consisted of some monster prawns we bought from the fish man at the farmers market. This, a fresh salad from the market along with some local white wine was all we needed. Oh, and some of the chocolate from earlier today.

Some frustrations about France came out today for both of us. I'm sure it's cultural differences, but it makes you wonder why a people would make certain things difficult for themselves (at least for the first two things). So bear with me while I rant for a few minutes. Three topics:

1. Convenience stores - They are practically non-existent. The only small stores that exist are little specialty shops (bread, pastry, meat, etc.), so if you want a couple of different things, you have to go to multiple places. The only places that sell everything in one place are mega mart food stores that take forever to get out of because there are only three checkout lines open during rush hour. So when you're driving along and decide you want a coke and some chips, forget it. The handful of town convenience stores that exist along the small roadways that dominate the countryside can't be parked at because the roads were designed 1000 years ago for horse-drawn carts. In this quest yesterday we encountered one of the few McDonalds in the area and were going to stop for some coke and fries, and they're out of regular coke. WTF? You're McDonalds and you ran out of regular coke??? Who runs this place, and gives a crap?
2. Random store closures - There is some kind of habit in this country that stores are open only for very specific hours on very specific days, and they're likely not posted anywhere. This is different from the fact that every business in the country except restaurants closes between 12 and 2 for lunch. We went through whole towns where every business was closed. The most fun are the myriad of stores we ran into that had signs out front stating "Ouvert 24h" (open 24 hours) that were closed. I guess the sign really means "we're open 24 hours except for the times we decide to close for any reason that suits us".
3. U.S. Credit Cards - Ok, this may sound like an ugly American thing. Not a one of the automatic payment machines in this country take U.S. credit cards because we don't use the security chip in our cards. I realize a bunch of other countries have gone to this technology, but can't the machines be designed to take both? We are the biggest economy in the world (sorry, that's ugly American). Then it takes forever to find the one guy in the business who knows how to use the machine they have that take swipe cards to read the magnetic strip on the back of the card. Nothing can be done fast.

Ok, I'm better now. Thanks.

You can find today's photos here.

Sunday, June 1, 2014 - Day 10

This morning we went to the giant town market. We found a vendor selling great table clothes and bought one that would work great in the dining room. Everything is metric here but I had converted all the standard table cloth sizes here to inches and we're able to get the right size.

Two vendors down from the first guy was a lady with dozens of large decorator fabrics on bolts. She had a couple of patterns and colors that were also going to be great for the dining room. We picked up enough fabric for Jan to make table cloths from them as well. So we've gotten four Provence table cloths on the trip, which will work great in the kitchen and dining room.

We went to Gordes this afternoon to check out the sites and to also see the café that was featured in the movie A Good Year. Gordes is a small town that was on the verge of extinction until artists discovered it. Now it's still a small community but very revitalized as a tourist destination and a place for Parisians to build luxury summer homes.

The café we found fairly quickly. It's actually a hotel, the Hotel Renaissance, however it's just depicted as a café in the movie. It's a cool plaza right by a fountain.

The castle in Gordes dates back to 1031, but was rebuilt to an extent in the 16th century. There's a cool fireplace that dates to that time that takes up one whole wall of a room. Unfortunately, this is about all that's open to the public.

We spent some time in the Church of St. Fermin. It's a Renaissance era church that still retains much of it's Rococo style fresco wall decorations. However, the walls are in a serious need for restoration, but this little town doesn't really have the funding to do so. But what is there is pretty fabulous looking and typical of the great fresco painting of the 15th and 16th century.

You'll find today's photos here. I hope you like photos of church frescos, because there are a lot of them.

Saturday, May 31, 2014 - Day 9

Slept in and got a late start today. I spent a bit of time feeding Madame Canard. I was sitting on the porch trying to update my journal when she flew up from the river to the back yard, walked up the stairs to the porch and came right up to me and started yapping. I interpreted her "duck speak" for "I'm hungry. Get me something". So I spent some time feeding her yesterday's croissant, which she devoured. I did manage to video a couple of minutes of it, so if I'm able to get that uploaded, you'll be able to view it here.

We headed to the town of Menerbes. This town was the stronghold for the Protestants during the 16th century "Religious wars" with the Catholics. There are some building used for defenses still in existence, which we didn't get to see because of time constraints, but we'll try to get back here next week. We did walk the town a bit and got a shot of the "main drag", as it is, of the town.

We did make a stop at the Musee Du Tire Bouchon, otherwise known as the corkscrew museum. "tire bouchon" translates to "cork pull". It's inside the winery Domaine de la Citadelle. We couldn't take photos unfortunately. The guy's collection is really extensive, being literally thousands of corkscrews. They date back hundreds of years. Many are very decorative and probably meant more "for show" than "for go".  The most cool for me were three that were a combination of pistol, small saber, and corkscrew. I don't quite understand the basis for putting those three things together into one unit, but they were clearly professionally made and very well done.

As the purpose of the trip is to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary, we of course would have a special dinner planned. Since our real anniversary is on Monday, we decided to do our big dinner tonight. We went to Le Vivier (The Pool), the only Michelin starred place close by. It's run by a British couple that migrated here a few years ago after running restaurants in London. I think the name comes from the location, which is right where one of the rivers segments into two and goes through a couple of very small water falls. You can look out at this from the terrace, which is where we had our aperitif.

Dinner was their seven course "Menu Gourmand" and overall was nice, with the selected wine pairings. They did some unique things, such as the lobster meat in a crispy cannelloni enclosed with pureed avocado. The fish course featured mullet and octopus with a salty butter sauce and an excellent corn puree. The meat course was veal sweetbreads, which Jan tried for the first time and didn't mind them, although I think they won't be either of our first choice in the future. Dessert should always be great as the last course and this was, being a pairing of a chocolate lava cake and a chocolate frozen "lollipop". It was a nice setting and a great evening.

You'll find a handful of photos here.