For some reason the city of Limoges made me uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the change from the fields of Aniane to the grittier urban environs. Perhaps it was staying in the microhotel. Perhaps I was just sad that things were drawing to a close. But when I got up on Sunday morning, I just had to get out of there.

Careful readers of this blog will note that things in our family tend to go horribly awry only when we forget to eat. Limoges was no exception. We had decided not to take the 3,40 euro Formule 1 breakfast, and instead to fend for ourselves. What we forgot was (a) the Formule 1 was located in an industrial park, far away from any corner boulangerie, (b) it was Sunday, (c) it was a holiday (VE Day). As such, places to grab a quick coffee and croissant were few and far between.

What we should have done is to hop on the A20 north and stop at the first rest stop. They’re always open. What we did instead, or rather what I did, being the catatonic underfed grumpy driver, was to randomly drive through the countryside in a primitive forage for food. I think I hoped that, as if by magic, I would round a corner and see a neon sign, above the world’s best boulangerie, flashing “Stop Here Pete!” It didn’t happen.

We did manage to see a lot of the rural areas around Limoges. It’s a lot like Prince Edward Island, in fact, except that there is a much greater proportion of Limousin cattle about, that being their “home place.”

Eventually we ended up getting on the A20 north, stopping at the first rest stop, and managed to get enough food in us to keep us going. Crisis averted.

Having no idea of our destination, we decided we needed to get off the A20. The autoroutes in Frances are an excellent way to quickly get from point A to point B. In a sense they are like traveling at “warp speed,” as things move by too quickly to really focus on at 130 km/h and there’s not really any scenery to speak of in any case, as the land given over to autoroutes is generally the land not needed for anything else.

So at exit 18 we slowed from warp speed and switched to impulse power and headed east towards the village of La Châtre. Not that we knew anything about the village, but it had a pleasant dot on the map.

It turns out that La Châtre is the birthplace of George Sand. I must admit that, short of a vague recollection that George Sand was someone important, I’d no idea who she was. This was remedied somewhat by a visit to the George Sand Museum in La Châtre which is housed in an ancient tower in the middle of town. The Museum is home to a huge collection of stuffed birds, a giant wooden village, various paintings and sculptures, and a decent collection of George Sands memorabilia.

An email to my English-major brother Johnny filled in the gaps for us in the George Sands story:

George Sand was the pen name of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant, a French writer and feminist. She was perhaps as famous for her numerous love affairs (with Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin, among others) and her flamboyant bohemian libertine lifestyle (she preferred dressing in men’s clothes when it was seen as quite scandalous to do so and as such is often speculated to have been a lesbian) as for her writing.

La Châtre turned out to be a rather pleasant place. It being Sunday, and VE Day, everything was closed up tight, however, and we thought it might be nice to stay overnight and get a taste of the working town in the morning. However all attempts — and there were many — to find a place to stay resulted in failure. We found closed hotels. Locked hotels. Full hotels. Hotels with crabby managers who claimed not to be able to accommodate three people in a room. We found a charming riverside hotel located down a flower-lined country lane that could have come from the pages of a novel. It was closed up tight.

Although Catherine did eventually find us a room, in a hotel on the edge of town, the room was rather abysmal, which we took as a sign that our romance with La Châtre had to end. We got in the truck and headed to the City of Bourges.

To find a hotel in Bourges, I simply pulled out my Orange mobile phone, fired up the web browser, and selected “find a hotel near me.” Through some magical “we know what cell you are using and thus where you are” method, it gave me a list of three. We choose one, Les Tilleuls, and followed the directions provided right to the door. The delightful manager arranged a room with two beds (one big, one little) on the top floor. The hotel was a welcome change from the prison-like conditions of the Formule 1 the night before (prison-like but, of course, 1/2 the price, which is the point).

Bourges turned out to be the perfect city to end our trip. Small enough to walk around, large enough to have enough to entertain our senses, we ended up staying for two nights. Complete report to follow later.

As I type, I’m in the Hotel Étap near the CDG airport in Paris (getting here is a tale of its own). We leave tomorrow morning for Charlottetown.

As I type it is still pre-dawn (okay, it’s actually 9:00 a.m., but the blind is closed) on Sunday morning. Catherine and Oliver are still asleep. We’re hunkered down here at the Formule 1 hotel in Limoges, about a third of a way up from Montpellier to Paris on our slow ride home.

We spent Friday in a whirlwind of linen laundering, floor scrubbing, and shutter shutting as we worked to clean and close the house for departure.

Oliver and I made our last trip to the boulangerie; I told the woman there that it was the last day of our trip, and said something resembling “thank you for your excellent products” to which she responded “thank you for your excellent patronage.” The chocolate croissants were still in the oven when we arrived, so we had to be satisified with regular ones on our last day, appropriate because that’s how we started off.

We went through a similar scene at the Point Coop, our favourite grocery store. We bought oranges and hand soap, and thanked the winking grocer for his store. He asked me if I was from Belgium, which I took as a compliment.

By noon we were ready to go. House was clean from top to bottom, shutters shut. All of Oliver’s toys gathered up and the truck packed. We found our woman on the ground, handed over keys and payment for electricity, and headed out of Aniane. I’m almost certain we’ll be back.

We had planned to spent the previous night planning our route north to Paris — we have almost 5 days to drive the route. Unfortunately a wonderful meal got in our way, and so heading down the road to Gignac we had no idea of our destination.

Earlier in the day, having coffee at the Glacier, Catherine got some advice that the western route, through Limoges, was much nicer than the eastern route, through Lyon. From two parties. That sealed it. We headed north to Millau. I was secretly glad of the opportunity to see the super bridge — the Millau Viaduct — one more time. I was not disappointed.

We decided, as we had driven over the bridge on our way down, we would drive down into Millau proper and see it from below on our way back up. This was an immediate lesson in why they built they bridge in the first place as a drive over the bridge takes about 10 minutes compared with a trip of perhaps an hour down into the valley, through Millau, and back up the other side. Apparently in the middle of summer this is a two hour trip; a couple from England I talked to in Millau said that the bridge now made it possible to drive from the north coast to the south coast in one day, something they’d not been able to do before.

The only defect with our Peugeot Partner truck has been that its headlights were aimed much too high; every time we’ve driven at night we’ve been “flashed” at by half the drivers we pass. Catherine insisted we do something about this, so we pulled into the Peugeot dealer, and I conducted a complicated mime exercise in which I explained the problem at the end of which came an exclamation something like “oh, you want your headlights regulated, but of course!”

The truck was ushered into a bay, a complicated looking headlight aiming machine brought out, and 15 minutes later we were on our way. No charge. Very nice shop. If you need your Peugeot serviced in the south of France, go to Millau.

Of course we had to stop to take pictures, the best of which was perhaps this one, taken from the edge of a subdivision up a hill in suburban Millau:

We headed back up the other side, Catherine marvelling all the while at how the local farmers could plow fields on a 45 degree slope (she took as many sloped fields pictures as I took of the bridge; you’ll have to look to her blog to find those).

Our tentative plan was to head west to Rodez at exit 41.

At exit 43 we realized we’d gone to far. Rather than doubling back, we decided to head out overland on a third-class road and see what we could see. As it turns out, this took as right up the valley of the River Lot (confusingly also called the River Olt, it seems), then up into the mountains on roads that, if you know PEI’s “scenic heritage roads” you will be familiar with, and finally, about an hour later, out to Rodez.

From there we headed north on the N140, and when it started to get dark we started to look for a place to spend the night.

We ended up at a hotel-restaurant under the shadow of the hilltop town of Capendac. For 50 euros we booked into a double room that gave Oliver three beds to choose from (and thus many “Goldilocks” games) and his own shower. We had a view of a chicken farm tucked into the bottom of a mountainy hill. It was very serene.

We took dinner at the hotel restaurant and in doing so experienced, after 23 days, what was our first meal in a “French” restaurant.

The menu was somewhat difficult to decrypt, as the emphasis was not on the food itself but on how it was prepared, so there were lots of confits and other verbs that we were unused to.

We settled on two of the stock menu, each offering a soup, appetizers, main course and dessert.

I settled on the faux filet de boeuf after extracting from the waiter that it was a the filet that was faux and not the boeuf. Catherine ordered something involving canard which we cleverly recognized as duck (it turned out to be three duck legs, which was confusing).

We both started with a salmon tartare (which I’ve only just learned now from Catherine was raw salmon; it was very good nonetheless), and I plunged in and ordered escargots de la maison, reasoning that if I was ever going to eat snails now was the time.

Eating snails is not conceptually different, in the end, from eating mussels or lobster. Indeed the taste is somewhat similar. Snails are, however, more cuddly than either mussels or lobsters, and thus it feels more like eating a trusted friend. I survived. It was actually kind of pleasant. Oliver, not aware I think of what he was doing but eager nonetheless, had one himself. He liked it.

The main course was rich and tasty and involved pounds of butter. For dessert I had the best chocolate mousse of my life, Catherine had a pear and chocolate pie and Oliver had, as you might expect, pistache ice cream.

All of the staff at the restaurant were very accommodating of our naivete, and we emerged feeling rather victorious.

Saturday morning we woke up to a misty, chilly day. After a quick breakfast at the hotel we checked out and headed up to the mountaintop walled village of Capendac-haut, reknowned for having held out against Julias Caesar at some point in the past. It was easy to see how, as the village is very high up a hill, surrounded by rivers on two sides, and circled by a thick high wall. We toured the village, had a coffee and hot chocolate, and headed off on our drive north.

In no particular order, the day saw us: not buying a door knocker at an antique shop that was priced a 700 euros, stopping at a large flea market in the town of Martel (no doubt run by Pat Martel in his spare time) where Catherine ended up buy two door knockers, eating too much vegetarian pizza, experiencing two great playgrounds, and covered about 300 km. We ended up here in Limoges where Catherine rested while Oliver and I bought running shoes, ate at Mcdonalds, and came back to the hotel to fall fast asleep.

Today it’s on to… well, we’re not sure.

May 5, it seems, is a holiday in France. We’re not sure exactly which holiday it is, mind you. The first we noticed was on our way through Gignac to Montpellier where we’d planned a fun last afternoon in the south of France.

We’ve encountered two types of gas stations in France: those that are completely automatic and operate only with credit card, and those more familiar, with an attendant. The automatic ones don’t accept any of our credit cards — perhaps because they require a “smart” credit card and ours are “dumb.” We’d planned to get gas at the Gignac hypermarket’s gas bar, as it is has an attendant. Except that today is a holiday, so it was on “automatic” mode, and we were out of luck.

I foolishly thought to myself “it must just be a holiday in Gignac — we’ll just keep going and get gas in Montpellier!”

As I said, I was foolish.

Every station we found in Montpellier was either closed, or running on auto-pilot. And then the “you’re out of gas” warning buzzer came on in the truck. The manual says this means there is 50km more driving in the truck, and also warns that, the truck being diesel, if you actually run out of gas you need to “prime” the fuel system. Catherine, remembering the complex process of doing this to diesel tractors, painted pictures of fuel spilling all over the place. We started to panic.

One of us — we’re not in agreement who it was — suggested a trip to the airport. Surely, [this person] reasoned, there would have to be gasoline available there. We stumbled our way to the airport (which, confusingly, is known by two different names, thus making one think there are two airports). And there was a gas station. And it was open. And there was a real person there to take our money.

With a sated truck, we were now free to enjoy the rest of the afternoon.

We headed into the centre of town, and found that, despite the holiday, most everything was open. This explained the “special opening on Thursday: 10h - 19h” signs I’d seen at the Polygone shopping centre earlier in the week (and ignored).

Catherine and Oliver went off to ride the merry-go-round and I went hunting for Internet. I’d been led to believe that the Place de Comedie was saturated with free WiFi; while there was a lot of this in evidence, I couldn’t find any WiFi at places where it would actually be useful. I’m willing to go to great lengths to feed my net addiction, but sitting on the pavement in front of a balloon cart in front of thousands of onlookers is too far.

So I returned to Avril’s alley, just off the square, and found the WiFi I’d used two weeks earlier. It was strong, and the stares from onlookers as I balanced on a concrete post weren’t enough to put me down.

As I typed away, Catherine and Oliver did, indeed, ride the merry-go-round. Then the hopped on the last tourist train of the day and toured the city. And then got some ice cream.

We met up at 6:00 p.m. and I suggested, this being out last day in the city and all, we investigate the pony rides through the park that had so intrigued Oliver on our last visit.

I had passed this stand several times, and I’d just assumed that when it said Location de Poneys it meant something like “rent a pony with trained professional pony leader.”

I was wrong.

What it meant was something like “here, have a pony; bring it back.”

I, being the designated pony leader, was given 7 seconds of training in pony management: the wrangler handed me the lead, showed me where to put my hands, and told me to follow the arrows painted on the pavement. Oliver climbed on board. And we were off.

One would expect a four year old to be afraid of riding an awesome beast like a pony. He was not. I, on the other hand, was sure that the pony was going to see a squirrel and run off with Oliver on his back.

Catherine, being smarter than I am about all manners related to the animal kingdom, assured me that the pony had done all of this before and I had nothing to worry about.

And of course she was right. This was one smart pony: every time I even thought about deviating from the course the pony offered gentle corrective tugs on the lead as if to say “this way, Pete, this way.” There were very strong Dr. Doolittle vibes. With the exception of an unfortunate incident where the pony, through no fault of his own, stepped on my foot, we made it down the course and back.

If you ever in Montpellier and in need of a thrill, ask for Bambo at the edge of the park.

On the way into town we’d seen signs pointing to a guinguette newly opened on the shore of the Hérault between Aniane and Gignac. They claimed to serve tapas and saveurs orientales et exotiques. And they had pedal boat rentals. We were in.

It proved to be one of the highlights of our trip.

La Famourette is an open-air restaurant about 30 feet from the banks of the river. Tables are gathered under a simple roof on a wooden platform; there’s seating for perhaps 100, although there was only one other couple when we arrived. There are a variety of table settings, varying from the traditional to the easy-chair. At one end is the kitchen, at the other end a set of washrooms.

To get there requires driving down a wendy-windy set of one-lane dirt tracks for about a mile. When we arrived at the parking lot a small white dog emerged and Oliver suggested that we simply follow him. We did, and he led us right to where we needed to go (we followed him back out at the end of the night too).

The menu offered a variety of cooking styles, from Indian to Mexican to Turkish.

We started off with a plate of appetizers: humous, an eggplant and tomato tapanade, and a very tasty mixture of olives, garlic and anchovies, all served with fresh bread.

For mains, Catherine had ginger-encrusted salmon, I had the kefta with tabouli (with shimmers of Charlottetown), and Oliver had a petite assiette that let him share.

And for dessert Oliver had pistache ice cream, and Catherine and I both had ice cream sundaes, hers of coffee ice cream with coffee sauce and cold coffee, and I of chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce (thus remaining true to form).

This was all served by a dreamy waiter who knew exactly what we needed when we needed it, spoke just enough English to make things flow alone through my rough spots, and was about the nicest guy you’d ever meet on the banks of a river.

Throughout this all we were entertained by the antics of two newborn kittens and the aforementioned white dog. Mid-meal the owner came over to ensure that we were getting along well; we had a pleasant conversation with her in which she revealed her feeling that Canada is a wonderful country.

Around 10:30 p.m., three hours after we arrived, we rolled ourselves into the truck and finished the trip with the short drive up the hill and around the corner to Aniane.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

In Aniane, as elsewhere in France, there is a problem with dog owners letting their dogs shit where they like — streets, sidewalks, alleys — and then just leaving said shit there for others to avoid or, if unlucky, drive over or step in.

There is a campaign here in Aniane, however, to change dog owner behaviour. From the look of the streets it is not a terrifically successful campaign, but perhaps we’ve caught it early.

School children are on the front lines of this campaign; here’s a random selection of their poster are against crottes:

Here’s a photo I took yesterday from a plateau overlooking Aniane. The tower to the left is the “Tour” in “rue de la Tour,” which is our street. Our house is roughly in the middle of the picture.

1. Bicycle tires in France have different valves, complex yet ingenious little things that screw out (to inflate) and back in (to seal). Perhaps this style is more widespread than I know, but this is my first encounter.
2. Car radios are smart. There’s a switch you can flip that will keep the same radio station (or network) tuned, even if you’re traveling a long distance and the actual frequency changes several times.
3. Escalators are on the other side. Which is to say the “up” is on the left, not the right as it is in Canada. And vice versa.
4. Milk for tea is served hot. And it also appears to be something of a novelty to order milk with tea at all, as when I order, as instructed by my phrase book, thé au lait I’m often greeted with a quizical (in French) “you mean you’d like some tea, with a little pitcher of milk on the side?”
5. Aluminum is still in vogue. I couldn’t figure out with the space-age light material that various spoons were made of until Catherine told me it was aluminum. There are also three standard spoon sizes, with an intermediate size betwen our “tea” and “table” spoons.
6. Credit cards have PIN numbers. Whenever we pay by credit card there is confusion because we don’t have a smart chip in our cards, and need to actually sign the slip rather than typing in a PIN number. I assume this means the French system is an amalgam of our “Interac” and credit card systems, but I’m not sure. Oddly, when paying road tolls on the autoroutes I’ve been able to just slide my card in the slot, and it comes back to me immediately and the gate opens with no “we’re checking to make sure you have enough money” wait. I wonder if they’ve just decided to eat any charges that might arise in return for smoother flowing traffic at the toll plazas.
7. Milk is sold in “last forever” sterilized packages. Try as we might we’ve not been able to find milk in the “fresh” form that we’re used to at home. Grocery stores have entire aisles where milk is sold in Tetrapak or similar containers, sterilized and sealed and with no need of refrigeration until opened.
8. Everyone says “bonjour.” Really. Well, perhaps not in the big cities, but here in Aniane everyone we meet, from child to adult, plasterer to businessperson, strange and familiar, says “bonjour” or “bon soir” to us (and to each other) on the street. It’s very endearing.
9. The country has an excellent tagline. In the annals of three-word phrases, you gotta say that Liberte Egalite Fraternite is a pretty good one. And it appears on every public building, school and piece of official documentation we’ve seen. Canada needs branding like this.

Here’s a work in progress, a photo-collage of all of the street signs in Aniane:

Oliver and I were sitting on the steps of the Perpignan Public Library on Tuesday afternoon drinking our orange juice when a young man with a guitar wandered along and sat down about 10 feet away and started quietly strumming. Oliver noticed that he was drinking orange juice too.

A few minutes later another man, a little older and drinking a bottle of beer, came alone and, out of nowhere, starting singing the most beautiful music at the top of his lungs.

Words cannot do justice to how good a singer he was. Neither can this low-grade recording I made with my phone, although it will give you a little idea. A motorcycle sped down the street just after I started recording; towards the end Oliver starting singing himself, and asked me if he could dance.

This Sunday was May Day here, the day the French simultaneously celebrate workers (like our Labour Day) and spring (like our Victoria Day).

We knew something was afoot when we picked up our baguette at on Sunday morning and the boulanger handed us a small bouquet of flowers and wished us “Happy First of May.”

The big May Day event here in Aniane was the Au Bonheur des Jardins, held on the edge of town in a large walled compound that looked like it had been a armory in an earlier life.

We figured, from the publicity, that the Au Bonheur des Jardins was a festival of flowers and plants. What couldn’t be effectively be communicated on the posters, however, was that it was a died in the wool “Birkenstocks and apple cider” hippie festival of flowers and plants.

Some things, it seems, transcend cultural divides, and “back to the landism” appears to be one of them, for we might just as well have been at any Canadian gathering of organic farmers, folk musicians and hackey sack devotees.

All the telltale signs were in place: the healthy brownies for sale that tasted like chocolate pressed wood pulp, the man selling energy detecting handcrafted wooden pendulums, tables covered with pamphlets selling the international solidarity movement, recycled stuffed toys in the children’s “fishing pond” game, the drummers drumming their handmade drums, and the shiatsu stand in the corner.

Of course, this being France, there were also mimes on stilts, handmade goat cheese, and flagons of wine available to go with the brownies.

Although I’ve flirted with the edges of hippie culture in Canada — when Catherine met me I had a full beard and hair down to my shoulders in a pony tail, after all — I was always a tourist, eating the carob burgers by day and running out to Mcdonalds by cover of night. In the end I found conforming to the rules of the Birkenstock crowd as confining as conforming to the rules of the suit and tie crowd, and went my own way.

But I found Au Bonheur des Jardins oddly alluring.

Somehow being amidst something so disturbingly familiar but in French (and thus completely without chance of recruitment) made for a very pleasant afternoon. I sat back and drank my mint tea (leaves left in, of course) and ate my brownie, and just watched it all unfold. I even screwed up my courage and bought some artisanal cheese (very good, from the Champagne region) and some handmade books (cookbooks about basil, eggs and olive oil).

Catherine, frighteningly at home in any situation, simply dove in. She and Oliver made handmade paper, fished for recycled stuffed toys, and watched the mimes up close. She bought some myrtle juice (we’re still not sure what a myrtle is) and some more cheese and some weird substance from which she can purportedly make tea.

Monday morning, life returned to normal.

On Tuesday night we got caught, again, in the “we’re going to have to eat at a cafeteria” bind.

We’d driven down to Perpignan for the day, attracted by the allure of the promised “somewhat France, somewhat Catalonia” colour of the city. Catherine spent the day wandering around by herself, visiting art galleries and going behind the scenes at a weavers coop. Oliver and I found a playground, visited the library, went shopping for shoes, took in all of the toy stories within the walls of the old city, had a fresh squeezed orange, kiwi, strawberry juice, and found a FNAC outlet with glass bridges that Oliver found very compelling.

At the end of the day, though, I had to find a quiet place to settle down for a conference call with the folks back home at Yankee. The truck was underground, with no mobile phone reception, so that was out. We considered going to dinner and having me just duck outside, but we were still to early to eat.

In the end we decided to head towards home, and find a place along the way to stop when 8:00 p.m. (aka 2:00 p.m. Eastern) arrived. As it turns out, this place happened to be the parking lot of a giant Carefour grocery store. And when the conference call was over, and I’d reunited with Catherine and Oliver (who’d been exploring the cheese, televisions and running shoes of the store), we realized that it was too late to head back into the city (too late for us and too late for the city). We had no choice but to dine at the cafeteria we had so accidentally parked immediately in front of.

We decided that I would take Oliver and sit while Catherine made her rounds and picked up her dinner, then we’d switch.

Catherine made a good go of navigating the system, which was a little different than what we’d experienced earlier in the week in that the meat course had to be ordered in advance and picked up elsewhere. She made the mistake, however, of picking up a small can of apple juice for Oliver from a special fridge devoted to the servicing of the menu pour enfants.

It turns out that this can of apple juice was “not sold separately” and by the time we knew what hit us (I was involved as a French-English go between by this point) we’d been forced to order the entire menu pour enfants, which consisted of a heaping portion of french fries, a piece of chicken that was large enough to be an entire small bird, a salad plate and dessert.

The problem was that Oliver, catatonic from a day in the Perpignan sunshine, wasn’t hungry at all. Not even the prospect of french fries with mayonnaise (usually a sure winner) could tempt him. He didn’t even want the apple juice.

So I polished off my “assiette des legumes” (I had learned from our earlier experience, and there were no squid parts on my plate) and Catherine finished off her boiled pork (Catherine hadn’t learned from our earlier experience). Catherine, feeling guilty, polished off Oliver’s salad. We smuggled the apple juice out to the truck. And Oliver’s menu got left on the plate.

Of course if my grandmother had been in attendance the entire meal would have gone into a napkin and into her purse, but modern day fears of botulism combined with the realization that Oliver would be even less likely to eat a giant cold piece of chicken later on prevented us from doing likewise.

Out on the highway, we found ourselves alone with the trucks heading up into France from Spain. With 130 km/h of highway largely to ourselves, we made short work of the journey home, and were in bed by 11:00 p.m.

We have vowed that, come hell or high water, there are no more cafeterias in our future.