Monday 10.18.2010


Wine-ding West

We're up a bit earlier today, but not much. Our Winnipeg couple is in the breakfast room as is a couple from Annapolis, and everyone chats from opposite corners. We “will” our Arles city map and a couple restaurant recommendations to our new Canadian friends, help the Annapolis guy with his laptop and finish packing up. We chat with Chris a bit before we leave and ask about the North Americans he has hanging around. Since he has been featured in the Rick Steves’ book, his clientele has gone from 20% North American to 70%. Rick called in July to book a room here for September and couldn't get in – obviously his own fault.

Since we got so far astray yesterday we will spend most of the day today around here before moving along. We do the in-depth walking tour of Sarlat taking special notice of stone roofs, 700 pound market doors and a 900-year-old monument erected to the saint who ended the plague in 1147. He did a lot of praying but also implemented hygiene standards while he was at it. One or both of those seemed to work. Mary continues her crusade to visit every post office in France and completes a nice transaction with a woman who is obviously practicing her American (Bye Bye!).

Next up is the mountaintop village of Domme. The main claim to fame here is the view, which stretches for miles along the Dordogne River Valley. The Dordogne is a popular tourist destination especially in summer when visitors can rent canoes for a one-way down-stream paddle past several walled castle-dominated towns. The idea is to coast-drift for a while, visit a touristy town, repeat until you get to Beynac where you turn in your canoe, have a glass of wine and hop the bus back to your starting point. Even with the chilly weather today we see a couple brave canoeists and our Canadian friends are out there somewhere on a bike. We think we will need just a bite of something to get us from breakfast this morning to dinner tonight so we pick up a couple walnut Gateaus (cakes) in Domme to prevent starvation.

We corkscrew back down to Dordogne level moving downstream to La Roque-Gageac, yet another ancient city stretching the better part of a mile on the riverfront. The cliffs, dotted with caves of inhabitants from 1200 years ago, drop vertically down allowing only a one-building depth before hitting the road and the river. The river floods every year with winter rain covering the road and the first floor of these buildings. There is a little path that leads a bit up the cliffs where the locals have created a tropical garden with bananas, pomegranates, lemons, roses and other exotic plant life. They apparently need a bit of something to brighten up their lives after the floods.

The other main sites here involve 10,000 – 18,000 year-old Cro-Magnon cave paintings that are among the best preserved in the world and the tours of goose-stuffing foix gras farms. While both might be interesting, we opt to keep moving. The first of the Gateaus, some chips and a Coke Light keep us nourished for the drive.


We continue to follow the river for the next couple hours moving past feudal villages like Beynac and big cities like Bergerac (sans Cyrano). The goal is the little wine village of St. Emilion about 25 miles northeast of Bordeaux and in the heart of that famous wine region. As we are driving through a grapevine filled plain near our destination we look up to see a storybook gleaming city (think Disney) up on a hill in the distance and we both say, “could it be?” Yep, this is St. Emilion and we make several passes through winding cobblestone streets that are 7-inches wider than our car before we find our hotel. They direct us back through some of those same streets to their parking area.

We hustle out for a walk and this place is all about the wine. Every block has multiple wine shops and several wineries have set up pretty elaborate display facilities in town. Being perched on top of a hill like Gilligan’s Island in an ocean of vineyards, the city has a lot of ups and downs and things we are looking for on our two-dimensional map that should be right here are really down there. We check out a couple potential spots for dinner and make a reservation halfway down a slippery cobblestone slope at La Cote Braisee.


We take a break for a while to catch up on the news. We didn’t have a TV in Sarlat so we have had a blackout for a couple days, and while we have heard about the continuing strikes in France, we didn’t understand the pace of escalation. Now we know that transportation is being shut down including the elimination of public fuel supplies (gas stations). This is a concern since we don’t have enough gas to get to Spain for the next phase of our trip.


We picked our restaurant tonight because for the first time we see a “menu” at a reasonable price that includes all the things we think we want to eat. There are four courses for each of us: Mary, fish soup, John, a creamy duck terrine; Mary, smoked salmon, John Coquille St. Jacques (scallops); Mary a steak with Roquefort sauce, John a magret of duck with pepper sauce; Mary, the cheese plate, John, chocolate mousse. At 23 euros each, this is the best deal we have seen and all of it is pretty good.

We take another walk around town where we see a few folks still in restaurants, but nobody out and about. Off to bed to dream about gas stations.


Today’s weather: Cloudy and cool with peeks of sun. Low, 38, high 60

Sunday 10.17.2010

Oradour-sur-Glane

It is sunny and cold this morning, but the sunny won't last long. We are lazy and it is almost 10:00 when we get to breakfast. They are willing to serve until 11:00 so when we don't have to get moving, we tend not to. There is the usual supply of cereals, pastry, fruit, meats and cheeses and Chris cooks eggs to order. He also has an Israeli juicing machine that he dumps whole oranges into and it whirls and grinds like it should have a monkey attached to it. Eventually fresh juice comes out. We have seen sleek versions of the same thing but this seems to be the first one ever made.

There is a chatty couple from Winnipeg across the room who we bond to in our frozen tundra way. They are carting around their Rick Steves book and doing the real thing by train. The French strikers are getting surlier by the day and these folks have already had several itinerary changes in dealing with the rail strikes. They are off to Arles and Nice from here and checking schedules hourly to see what may be in store.

Mary wants to spend an hour or two in the shops in town and John doesn't so they agree to meet at noon to get on with the rest of the day. John supervises Chris's wife Amanda and Irish helper Sandy as they tidy the room in six minutes flat. Very impressive.


We're in the car by 12:10 (also very impressive) heading north to Limoges and then west a bit to Oradur-sur-Glane. On the way we pass through at least a dozen small villages with every house made of stone, sprinkled with a mixture of castles and chateaus all dating back many hundreds of years. We occasionally see something new, but it would be designed exactly as everything else. There are no split-levels, ramblers, or cubist-modern architectural statements. Each little village has its patisserie, couturie, brasserie, pharmacie, and perhaps a dentist, doctor or veterinarian. Between the villages are the farms and orchards we have become accustomed to seeing. Walnuts seem to be the most prevalent crop and we see a few folks with various devices picking them up off the ground. We think we should bring the golf driving-range picking machine over and get the entire orchard picked up in about a half hour.

It's a bit after two when we arrive at Oradour. This is a village just like the ones we have been passing through for the last two hours except there is no one here. On June 10th, 1944, four days after the D-Day landing, 200 German SS troops marched into the village in the morning, rounded up all the inhabitants, separated the men from the women and children, and then executed all of them. Six-hundred and forty-two folks got up that morning, got on with their day, kids in school, adults working, Moms home with babies, all laughing, arguing, playing and in the evening they were all gone.

The village has been preserved just as it was left on that day more than 66 years ago. Every building (after being looted by the German soldiers) was burned with the dead still inside and now there are only stone walls, burned wrecks of cars and the bullet pocked walls and altar of the church. Over there is the patisserie, there are two couturies, a boulangerie, a woman dentist worked here, there is the gargage with the metal oil signs still in place, a sewing machine in that building, and there's the market next to the church. Maybe 8 blocks this way and 5 blocks that way it could have been any of the villages that we drove through this afternoon. Six-hundred and forty-two people is a tiny drop of blood in the bucket of the atrocities of the war, but it is an “in-your-face” very personal reminder of our lowest instincts. The loss of life was appalling, but the mental degradation that had to take place allowing those soldiers to machine-gun small children and babies seems somehow worse.


There is an informative museum that follows both the inhabitants of the village as well as the route of the soldiers leading up to this day and the results of the war crime trials and aftermath. The whole thing is moving, but walking around the burned, deserted village on a gloomy Sunday afternoon in dead silence is haunting.


It’s approaching 4:30 when we get back on the road and GPS chick Monique gets us back to Sarlat just after 6:00. Amanda and Chris separately come up with the same recommendation for dinner tonight so after some looking around and hemming and hawing we follow their advice and go to Petit Manoir, a few blocks away. Mary was not seated next to the toilette, but her shrimp and risotto did not stack up against last night’s. John had a nice chunk of salmon with all the trimmings. We both were brought a creamy potato-like soup that wasn’t part of the deal but was a nice starter.


We strolled around the old city for a while after dinner with no one else on the streets. A half moon was peaking through some scattered clouds over the ancient church steeple and there is a fountain splashing somewhere within earshot. We still like Sarlat.

We read for about 4 minutes before falling asleep.

Today’s weather: Early sun turning to clouds and cool all day. Low 40, high 46

Saturday 10.16.2010


Moving Day

There is one big concern with our rental house in Arles and that revolves around Friday night/Saturday morning and the ensuing Saturday market. There are very specific areas in front of the house where if one is parked there overnight, one will be towed away. There are signs in the house reminding us not to park where we shouldn't and all of our documentation for the house screams at us to be careful where we park. Apparently it is a big deal. We think concern number one was resolved in that we found a legal parking place on the other side of the road and since others were still parked there last night we "assume" we're ok.

Concern number two is that with the market people setting up on Saturday morning, will we be able to get out to get Pat to the airport? Yes. Pat and John take off at 7:20 to the airport in Marseilles for her 10:40 flight to Paris and on home. It is an hour drive into a Great Pumpkin sunrise over the hills above Marseilles and a flashy memory for Pat to take with her on the trip home. Au revoir Pat! The transition goes as smooth as possible and John gets back to the house at 9:15 where Mary has finished packing and is ready to go.


That brings up concern number three which is, will John get a place to park within a mile of our house with the market in full swing out the front door? The answer is "yes'" sort of. He parks like the French in that he pulls into an area that really blocks a little side road just up from our house, but he pretends that he has left enough room for someone to get by. He hasn't. M and J both hustle getting trash out to the dumpster and suitcases into the car before there is a roadblock uproar and they are sucessfully on the road within minutes. No reason for concern.

The Great Pumpkin sunrise has turned into another hazy but sunny cool morning as we head northwest through pretty flat farm country. Our destination is Sarlat just southwest of the center of France and we have an all day drive to get there. We stop for some supplies near Montpelier and take turns driving the next five hours. The sun gradually gives way to clouds and occassional drizzle and our farmland turns into low slung mountains and heavily rolling countryside that feels like our eastern mountains in Pennsylvania. On a clear day this would be a beautiful drive and even today it is pretty good. We stop at a rest stop on the motorway for a couple of pretty bad tuna sandwiches and turn up the heat in the car as the temp has dropped into the low forties.

Sarlat is in the center of goose and nut country, as in over-stuffed geese for foix gras and walnuts for everything else. There are walnut orchards (?) along every roadway and signs for farms where we can view the feeding of the geese and purchase a few tins of their product. Much more than anywhere else on our trip, this really feels like France. We have an easy check-in at our B&B with Amanda and Chris, a couple of fiftyish Bristish ex-pats who moved here for the climate. Our room is huge with a street view and a bathroom as big as many hotel rooms in Europe.


There is a square across the street that leads into the historic center of town. There are lots of people still milling around late on a Saturday afternoon and most of the shops are still open. If you would like to buy a supply of foix gras from the goose, from the duck, in combinations together, whipped into pates, or blended into spicy spreads, this is your spot. Or maybe walnut cake, candy, pastries, bread or any other conceivable thing "walnut", you won't go wrong here. There is still a spitting drizzle but for a change we don't mind and really think we will like this place.


Le Bistro de l'Octroi is a block from our new home and comes highly recommended. Most tables are reserved for the night which means we are hustled off to a small table somewhere between the door to the kitchen and the door to the toilette. Once again, Mary is not pleased since others after us are led upstaires to tables that she assumes are much better than ours. She seems to be done with French service. Anyway, she has a good shrimp risotto and John has the "Grand Plat" which is about 12 different things on one plate from salad to dessert including various goose and duck products. Very tasty. In spite of the lying, thieving, cheating waiter at our restaurant, we still think we will like Sarlat.


No TV in our room so it is reading and bed tonight.

Todays weather:  Sunny early turning to clouds and rain.  low 40, high 52