The Beach

8 hours before the formerly porcelain-colored backside of my thighs turned tomato-red

and were so fiery-hot that we cooked eggs on them.

And I again remembered the joys of my childhood 

before sun block.

(you know back in the day your teenage sister would cover herself in Johnson & Johnson's baby oil)

Mind you we were only out for 2 hours.

Acquired taste

acquired taste (as defined by Wikipedia): a food or beverage that is unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it.
i.e.  Eat this thing you don't like 50 times and in multiple forms until you hate one less than than the others.  And then stick to that. 

So far, in the last 5 years I could apply this to wine, cheese, miscellaneous meat products, and fish.

Cheese I was always willing to try.  Meat too.  Though now there are few things I just outright refuse. (I am talking to you, andouillette.)
But now fish

I ate it in the beginning because it was such a big deal when I was a kid and my sister brought salmon home from Alaska.
And then people ooohd and aaaaahd over lobster and crab.

And then B's mom made white fish in a heavy tomato sauce for my first lunch with them.
So I took seconds, of course.

And then we come to the island and its ALL FISH AND SEAFOOD ALL OF THE TIME.
And I have given up entirely even thinking I could stick to the one I hate less than the others.  
I used to think I was a good eater.  My mother encouraged us to try everything once.  But now it is just:

 Yes, mini fish with scales and bones in oil are great.

No, cold sea snails with mayonnaise are fine.

Yes, please tell me about the length of the pouce-pieds' penis (poose pee-ay) before I eat it.

 Pouce-pied for dinner anyone?

and we cooked Mexican.

It might be a crying shame that I can make NO French dishes. 
Never was I so American as when I moved to France. 
I had never made hamburgers or wore a baseball cap before I came to France.
I never ate at McDonalds before I moved to France (sidenote: France is second to the U.S. in McDonald's consumption). 
But really, why would I make French food for French people coming to my house.  Why would I prepare them a dish they have eaten over and over again?  Why wouldn't I show them the delights of Thanksgiving and 4th of July BBQ and Halloween.   Who loves food as much as we do?  The French do.

Speaking of American food, we made dinner last night to say thank you to B's parents.  We made tex mex. 

This recipe is my go-to for Fish Tacos with some slight changes (cooking in advance and putting the lime/orange/onion/parsley mix in with the fish aftewards, flour tacos, and you can add rice).  
We have to put the marinade after because BBQd fish looks like this:

 

WHOLE fish are not easy to marinate.  

These fish tacos are TASTY.

Mine don't look exactly like this. 

But they do taste like this.

Matching buildings

I caved and became a member of the white pants club

so now I live in constant fear of colored food. 

What do you think?  Well dressed?  Or assimilated by the Borg?

Magazines

As a side note, my guilty pleasure when I travel, is magazines.  I buy at least 4 while in transit.

Vanity Fair just launched in France and I couldn't resist. 

PS Did you notice the prices?  Glamour 1,50€ and Vanity Fair 2€  This is standard.  The excessively long-winded-in-written-word nature of the French has devalued print.  Everybody writes. A lot.
Evidence no. 2:  Average book price? 5€  

Did you also know there is a magazines about Royals?  It is called Point de Vue.  B's grandma reads it. 

Metro, Train, Bus, Boat and a lot of magazine

So we've gone on vacation.  REAL vacation.  Like when you are 10 years old and your only worry is what fun thing you are going to do next. We are on the island of god.  Ok, not really, we are on the Island of Yeu at B's parents summer home.
Where they make every meal and we just ride bikes and go to the beach.
I feel a bit spoiled.  And a bit guilty.
My parents never did this.  They raised us to be independant. But this is a BIG difference in the parenting over here. 

And now I have learned to be a guest.  To sit at the table and wait to be served.  To do no dishes and eat for 4 hours at a time.  And now I do it for others at my own home. So I shut my guilt up with food. 
And the fact that B's mom can't wait to take care of him and iron his shirts and buy his favorite yogurt helps too.   

So we are on the laziest vacation of the year. We had to take a meto, train, a bus, boat and a really old car to get to our destination.  But it's totally worth it. 

boat clothes

 

Juice anyone?

That heat...

I have to admit that I am kind of loving the insufferable heat.
I don't love the sluggishness.  But I love that ice cream tastes so good. 
I love not having to wear long sleeve shirts or jeans in the summer,
      and wearing dresses and white clothes.
I love sleeping with the windows open
    And waking up before the sun comes up to feel the last of the cooled night air.

Staying up late. 
And the feeling that everyone is having a good time.

Evening standing in the metro at midnight,  sweating out of every pore, is ok with me. 

The view from drinks at Paris Plage

Instasummer is not that bad. 

it is good to be wrong sometimes

... because this is much better than what I expected in the North Atlantic

Île d'Yeu

At first when they told me "eel d'yeuh", 

I thought, île dieu - a paradise Island from God!?  

Yes, please!

And then I remembered,  that's in the North Atlantic.

Which was not unlike when they told me we were going to St Michel

Yay!

but it was actually St Michel Chef Chef

less yay.

Or when they told me we were going to Province and I thought I was going here:

but no.

 Surprise! You are going.....

...anywhere outside of Paris!

Sunrise without the window

I figured this was better without the window.  

Glacier National Park 5:46a.m.
This post could alternately be titled "The benefits of jet lag"

August

We are baking

And by baking I mean sitting in a 48 square meter dish with tin foil covering while we wait for the 90° heat and 79% humidity to bake us.

Our apartment, which is ¼ floor to ceiling windows, has direct sun until 2p.m.

Baking.

So we are sitting inside with the shutters down. In the dark. With a lamp on.

At 10h in the morning.

This is what happens when there aren't enough hot days in the year to merit air conditioning. (<---more franglais)

La Drôme : Saou and Saint Médard

I’m keeping on with the summer vaca series because the photos/road trip experience was so great.

I could just tell it in pictures, but then you wouldn’t know about all the stuff!

Because as we all know, stuff is really important. So bear with me. I promise you pretty pictures…and stuff.

So just like before…ruins, empty churches, and now lots of Dutch people in motorhomes.

We hit a couple of villages on the way out of the gorge and tried to hit Saoû for lunch.

Meal times are even more important while road tripping. If you don’t hit the time (12 to 2) correctly, you may not eat.

There are no McDonalds or supermarkets on the side of these small roads. You may hit a town with only 1 restaurant and if you miss lunch and haven't eaten breakfast, you are screwed until 19h (7pm). Which has been known to make some people inexplicably cranky and punchy.

So, Saoû (pronounced Sue) is a small city (and by that I mean a village with 2 restaurants and 1 corner store) on the edge of a large plateau/mountain of limestone.

It makes for steep white lines topped with a deep and lush green. In summer it is crawling with French and Dutch people. (The Dutch, it seems, are particularly keen on motor homes and the South of France. Goedemiddag to you!)

At 13h30 (1:30pm) we arrive and I get out and find a table in the restaurant in the center of town. I wait for 10 minutes before anyone comes within spitting distance of the table. And apparently lunch is over.

At 13h40 (1:40).

Holding onto my self restraint, I ask where one can eat. We are in luck, there is another restaurant.

Maybe if we run, they will serve us. Please, please, please, let them serve us. So I don't have to come back and murder the rude restaurateur.

So we rush over to the restaurant #2.

Preface: It is something that strikes me as odd that in the middle of nowhere forestland that you can have really good food. Middle-of-big-city kind of good food.

These places are much closer to farm fresh ingredients but you expect that they just wouldn’t care about it as much. It is just food.

But they do. God bless them, they do. Because they are French.

As you can see, we got served at the other restaurant. By nice people, in a converted farm, with excellent and pretty food.

Andalusian gazpacho with balsalmic vinegar and Roquefort cheese appetizer.

So at this point, I have eaten well, I am ready for a hike and I really want to camp. We go to buy some local products in a brewery (this mini town is shaping up to be quite swanky) and there is a young kid running the front. We got warned about camping but I think this kid might know if we are really going to get in trouble for camping or not.

Which, apparently, is yes. He and his friends got caught twice. 400 euro fine and ranger escort back down. And he is a local!

Ugh! I know this will probably be one of our last chances to camp. The further south you get, the less wooded it is and the MORE people there are. Paris is 75% empty and all those parisians are in the South (Plus the Dutch caravan parade). You are lucky if you can find a spot to pee in.

So, the nice kid gives us a recommendation for camping. But what about our 5 hour hike? We decide just to drive into the forest and randomly stop.

~~

We hike vertically up 50 minutes. I am expecting a shack covering an old church, like our first hike. But I am wrong and we are lucky for the 2^nd time that day.

St Médard is an old 1 room chapel. Recently cleaned up and refortified by a local catholic group.

We have a beautiful view on all sides and watch the colors change with the fading sun as we hike back down.

Well fed, exhausted. I am happy.

And we get to camp.

La Drôme: churches, waterfalls and medieval mania

green is mountain,

red is highway,

blue is our road :)

We left Allex in the morning and headed to the market: tomatoes, peaches, bread, green beans. Market tomatoes.....SO good.

market tomato being sliced with our big camping knife for sandwiches

Our first event was in a small village called Gigors et Lozeron. Which is more letters than there are people in the village. We took a hike that started at a church and ended at a church. One church is big, imposing, medieval stone and the other only like a cave but then locked behind a modern sheetrocked bit of construction.

So logical that you would put the ruins that you invite people to hike in 2 HOURS to see, behind a construction box so that THOSE people then can't see the church.

medieval stone eglise

After our hike we headed over to this trail where we are supposed to stay the night. We drive through this beautiful valley and into a gorge. White and orange painted cliffs on either side. At the lowest point, we cross a small bridge with a moulin ("mill") attached to a restaurant. Which I then become obsessed with eating at. Enter bad restaurant experience #852. (And it is not even because I had snails for dinner.)

We sit down on the patio next to the beautiful stream, it starts raining.

We move to be under an umbrella.

My boyfriend starts (as is his addiction) watching/listening to people around us and decides the guy next to us and his wife rate 10 on the most disagreable restaurant customers ever.

The wait staff refuse to be outdone by this guy: He changes the wine 3 times. They bring the wrong plates to the table. He barely touches his food because the wine is wrong, they start packing it in for the night (uh, what restaurant closes at 9p.m.)

I can't add anything to eat to my small meal of onions and snails because there are 4 people wandering around this small patio, but none of them can come over so I can order.

We leave 25 minutes later after letting go of our hope that anyone working here will come back to our table, and finally go to pay at the cash register.

Awesome.

We continue to our destination: La Chute de la Druise (waterfall), hiking past the no camping sign down to the stream, and round the bend. We allow our brand spanking new 2 seconds tent to explode itself into tent, and crawl inside just in time for the first drops of rain to fall.

I am genius. Taking my boyfriend camping sauvage (no campground) for the first time in the middle of a rocky gorge where it is raining. What better way to find out if you really love eachother than buy putting the other one in mortal danger of a flash flood. Genius, I say.

Sadly nothing was revealed during the night, lots of lightening but the storm had no real water power. We woke up at 7h30 to this

...and my overwhelming urge to get in the freezing cold, virgin waters of the enormous waterfall. I thought outdoorsy french people got up early and I HAD to be the first of the day, but no, they are like Parisians and would not be climbing out of their BOWLS of coffee until 11h. So technically I could have waited at least until the sun hit the trees and the water was more than 10 degrees above freezing. Did you know that rainwater is COLD?!

On a positive: I got to watch the sun come over the gorge. Which I could not -or perhaps would not- have done, had I stayed in bed and waited for the sun to hit. And so hiking out looked like this...

Marsannay la Côte to Allex

Allex at the red flag, Geneva Switzerland on the lake on the right.

Allex is a mini village (and yes, the term "village" is commonly used, and no it does not mean the inhabitants are living in huts). But it isn't even on our France map.

We start out in the early afternoon taking the autoroute (translation big, fluid-traffic road with tollways). I am living my american dream in our Ford mini car, driving on the freeway listening to the Foo Fighters. Stopping for sugary gummy things and coke (because really, what are road trips for, if not to allow yourself and all access pass to Candyland).

We arrive at our "chambres d'hôtes" in Allex in the early evening. It has a pool, and it is warm, lots of garden and plants - lavender, of course- and NOW I feel like we are on vacation.

The term Chambres d'Hôtes is translated as Bed and Breakfast. So it is basically people taking you in to a room or rooms in their home. By the French Government's tourism statistics for 2009 there are 35 times more Chambres d'Hôtes than there are Hotels in France. If the option of a chambres d'hôtes is available we undoubtedly take it. We have had really good experiences in all the chambres d'hôtes we have stayed in. They are generally owned by people who have traveled and who want to provide a good traveling experience for you.

One of the best parts of staying at these places is that you can get the low down on the area. The one we stayed at in Allex was called Chambres d'hôtes les Gaillards. The owners were avid hikers so they gave us maps and reccomendations on hikes and local fresh markets.

(Yes, for all my family members pick yourselves up off the floor, I actually asked for someone's advice.)

No, I do not carry scars from my childhood of having 3 older siblings who couldn't keep their mouths shut. I have no problem taking people's advice. I just only want it when there are words coming out of my mouth that resemble "Can you give me some advice?"

Paris-Dijon

The first leg of our trip was to Dijon where got some good old fashioned family time.

I have to say that I am not sure if my family seducing skills are as strong in France as they are in the US. I can usually charm the pants off of anyone's parents within the first 10 minutes of meeting them. It's my combination of "utterly polite" and "super sweet". Add in the fact that I am pint sized and you have a professional.

Though my good manners have gotten me into trouble more than once when meeting french families.

"Yes of course I'll have some red wine. The champagne and white wine we already had from your private collection were lovely".

Do you see what I mean? I am not a heavy drinker and I am not very big. Coupled with politeness, this is a recipe for me falling asleep at the table.

So 1 three hour lunch and 1 hour walk in 95 degree heat later, we are on our way to yet another family home where we will have another copious meal and stay for the night. Hooray for multiple multi course meals!

No really. Hooray for the fact that we are only staying with peoples families for the the first night.

Paris-Dijon

It strikes me as funny that we would end up making our French road trip in a FORD.

Summer Vaca

I tried to hang on to my guilt trip for not having a job but it didn't work out.

So instead of staying home I went on vacation. It's a moral obligation for all people living in France to go on vacation. Legally after working one year they have 35 working days of paid vacation. Yes, 7 weeks.

So I settled on a road trip through France.