Actually, Wednesday is the day we do some serious tastings here in the Loire, so expect a longer post then. In the meantime just a quick little video we shot tonight mixing some Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne and Chambord Liqueur Royale.
We visited the Chambord Chateau today, and on the way back to Le Moulin Du Port (our B&B), we passsed the Chambord property - pretty cool.
Once again, our pairings are TOTALLY off, but what are you going to do when you’re in France with a 10mo old and curfew is each night at 7p, and the restos don’t open til 8? Well, you do a quick video with some champagne and Chambord for y’all and then settle in for a few episodes of Dexter on the MacBook.
BTW, tomorrow, we walk the 4k along the banks of the Cher to Chenonceau, a chateau with no moat, because it was built on the river.
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There is a Starbucks inside the walls of the Forbidden City. Nothing is sacred. So I shouldnt be surprised, in the least, to the make the gauntlet hike to the top of Mont St Michel and be bombarded with ticky tacky tourist trap shops all the way.
Mont St Michel is a medieval masterpiece, and if you didnt know that, you’d just have to visit one of the dozen shops offering to sell you armor, swords and chess pieces of the day. Heck, they’ll even sell you a Knights of the Round Table rotating centrepiece, or action figures from Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings.
According to Rick Steves, we shouldnt be too disappointed by the tackiness of the Grande Rue. He warns in his book, France 2008, the Mont is “home to a single, grotesquely touristy street.”
In other words, it’s just like Gastown. A beautiful, classic, heritage site taken over by the fine purveyors of tee shirts, tea towels and anything with an “I was there” marking.
Okay, that’s fine and dandy but E3,70 for a can of Coke? That’s about C$6. That’s about ridiculous.
Jen and I survived the run, and made it to the abby at the top. 10 minutes late. Sure, it’s open til 6, but the last group is let in at 5. We saw a back door from the gift shop with people trailing in from the tour, so we thought we’d do it in reverse. We made it about halfway through, when a woman made some comment to Jen.
She doesnt speak french, I heard her make english comments to someone else along the lines of “go ahead, I’m coming back.” I thought it was a tour, Jen thought it was something else. So we continued along for another few minutes until we reached a locked door. Uh-oh.
The church is closing, that woman was sweeping out the dregs, and we just passed her. We hustled a couple of dark, stone chambers ahead and found .. another locked door.
We were trapped. In a stone abby, that just 2 centuries ago was used as a prison. Sure, Michael, it may not be Sona or Fox River, but let’s see you get out of this one. With a baby. And no food. And no phone.
Thankfully we didnt need to scream, the woman was just a few steps ahead and heard us fiddling with the locked door. She opened it, scolded us, and we hustled our way back to the beret shops, where we belonged.
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Yes, we’re in France, but we’re in the North, not the south where the wine is (yet). Here, the trees are filled with apples, and the Belgians are just a barrels throw north. So Normandie is not about wine, it’s about cider. Lots of it. Cider and apple brandy, called Calvados, which also happens to be the name of the department (county).
But back to Beer Thursday. With the abundance of apples, and the friendliness of the Belgian beermakers nearby, you knew someone, somewhere would get chocolate apple juice in someone else’s peanut butter beer.
Oh, and I dont know why my head got cut off .. it was fine in the original footage.
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Quebec City is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year. The commercials all over tv should be enough to remind you by now.
Jen and I got the message, and went to the place where Quebec City really got it’s roots - Honfleur, France.
It was from this harbour that Samuel de Champlain made his many voyages across the Atlantic to found the posts that became Quebec City.
Now I have never been to Quebec City. It’s a place I want to visit terribly, but I got a pretty decent second place. Almost 400 years to.the.day that Champlain returned to this habour, Jen and I stood at the gatehouse of the Le Vieux Bassin and wished a bonne fetes a Quebec.
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Not the movie. Not the awards. The beach. (France, not Florida) Maybe you’ve seen the movie, maybe you’ll watch the awards next week, but the Juno you should really care about is the beach.
A beach in Normandy which Canadian boys stormed on June 6, 1944 as a part of D-Day.
I’m not a war guy, I don’t stay up late watching cgi recreations of WW2 naval battles on History Channel. I couldnt tell you the difference between guns and planes and battalions and such. I just know I hate war. I think it’s stupid, it’s ignorant and pointless.
But go to Juno Beach, and you get an idea of why the boys came here. The depression was knocking the stink out of the Canadian economy. Incomes had dropped by more than 50%, unemployment had doubled.
When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Canada declared war on Germany within months and thousands of Canadians saw a way out of the hell at home, by going to a hell overseas with the chance to be a hero.
The beach is tiny. Maybe 20 yards before the first row of German bunkers. Those were backed by tunnels, trenches and barbed wire. The troop transports would land, the doors would drop open and the boys had orders to “run like a bat out of hell and shoot anything that moved.”
The most impressive part of the centre, is the sculpture outside. It has waves of motion to remind you of the sea, all of the soldiers are linked together, supporting each other, each leaning into the action in eager defense and aggression.
It wasn’t as sad as I thought it would be. But the Juno Beach Centre is there to explain what and why, and a ilttle bit of the who. One small section features a wall with the scrolling names of the more than 15 000 who lost their lives. It takes more than 12 hours to scroll through each and every one of them.
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To celebrate our engagement on Monday night, Jen and I opted for a romantic dinner in.
A couple of boxes of takeout from Mezzo di Pasta and a bottle of Tavelfrom the marche.
Again, we’re not pairing this properly, but Jen was so excited to see this half bottle on the shelf, she dropped it (must have been the extra weight from that engagement ring;). It didnt break, we bought it.
This wine is only available in the spring and is ripe for the hot Mediterranean days to sip on a patio with a bucket of mussels. It’s about +2 and raining in Paris and we’re having bolognese pasta. So the pairing is off - way off. But this is Paris, and Jen and I got engaged today, and Zacharie is sleeping. All that makes a perfect pairing.
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Despite what our Facebook statii say, Jen and I are not married.
Yes, she wears a diamond band on her left hand, and I a gold on mine - but those are just personal commitments we’ve made to each other. Nothing formal. Truth is, I bought Jen her original diamond band with the thought of using it for a wedding band, one day. In the meantime, it was something for her to wear on her left hand and feel comfortable being pregnant with people immediately staring down at the left finger. You dont think it happens, but it does.
Jen and I joke that ours is an arranged marriage. We got pregnant soon after meeting, and even though there has never been a doubt about our commitment or relationship, it was always something that seemed chosen for us, instead of chosen by us.
I had so many things I want to say to Jen when I proposed. None of them came out but, “Do you choo choo choose me?”
It’s a joke between us, Jen loves the Ralph Wiggum clip, and it sums up what this decision is for us. It’s our choice to be together.
There is no wedding date set, although wouldnt a Hawaiian wedding and Tahitian honeymoon wrap nicely around the Team Diabetes Easter Island marathon in June 09?
We’ll see. The important thing is we choo choo choose each other.
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The most impressive part of the centre, is the sculpture outside. It has waves of motion to remind you of the sea, all of the soldiers are linked together, supporting each other, each leaning into the action in eager defense and aggression.
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