Millau, Laguiole, Ste. Eulalie d'Olt

Today was a touring day and we had a lot (pun intended) planned. The first priority was to eat breakfast in the castle, which had too many nice things to mention, so here is a photo


The second priority was to buy some cheap pants that would allow me to actually climb, which we found near Millau. I had read about the new Millau viaduct and heard from our friend Franck that it was stunning, so when I saw where we were staying, I knew we had to have a look. Along the way there was some beautiful light. We pulled over and I frantically got my cameras out. I haven't had my film developed yet, but a few of the digital shots turned out okay

We continued on


to the autoroute entry, and drove across the bridge




paid the 4 euros, and drove across. It's a beautiful and impressive bridge, and one of those things that you really need to see in person to appreciate: the scale of it is just amazing. The piers are more than 300 meters tall, which make it about as tall as most of the climbs I did this summer. It's funny that the same obsession with public works projects that tear up every street in france every summer can also produce something so fantastic.

We continued on past countless pretty villages, where we got stuck in front of sheep again




and we eventually arrived in Laguiole


We weren't in Laguiole by accident; I had read about a laguiole corkscrew in Peter Mayle's condescending but occasionally entertaining Encore Provence. His description made me wonder just how good a bottle opener could be. So I started reading about them, googled them and eventually wandered down to the scary knife store near the Jardin de Ville. The tire bouchon that the lady handed me when I asked for a Laguiole (Lah yole) was shoddily made and actually pretty ugly. Then I started reading more and found out that there are a lot of cheap imitation Laguioles, and many of them (perhaps even most) aren't even made in Laguiole and are machine made. There are a few exceptions, notably the Chateau Laguiole brand and the forge de laguiole brand. When I found a store in Grenoble which sold the Forge corkscrew, I was a little put off by the price, but it was beautifully made, so I decided that it would be a good thing to covet. However, since we were planning on going to the Tarn anyway, and the Tarn isn't so far from Laguiole I held off. In any case, Chloe used her magical route finding skills to take us right to the Forge-de-Laguiole forge and shop in the outskirts of town


and we wandered around the shop for a long time looking at all the different corkscrews and knives that were available. The handles are made from plastic, precieux woods like olive and rosewood and horn.




I hadn't really planned on buying a knife but was won over by the amazing craftsmanship and the fact that many of their knives are hand forged, assembled and finished. So in the end we got an olive wood handled sommelier corkscrew, a rosewood handles knife for me and a pistachio handled knife for chloe. And we applied to get the TVA back. Since it was monday and in between the weekend and another holiday, there weren't very many places open for lunch, so we ended up at a cafeteria like place for crepes and cocas.
From Laguiole, we continued to Ste. Eulalie d'Olt, another of the plus beaux villages de france and we wandered around the streets for a little while to admire the architecture






And the beautiful rock ducks


From here, we had a bit of a long drive back towards the Tarn on winding and headache inducing roads. Finally we made it to Ste. Enimie and had a look around since we didn't have a chance to do so on Saturday.




We continued on past La Malene and the castle to try to scope out climbing sectors for tomorrow, but darkness caught up to us and we weren't able to find very much of anything.

After another luxurious castle bath, we went to dinner. I didn't take any photos of this one, but I had the ravioli with scallops this time, and the perfectly done steak, followed by more cheese and the same dessert as yesterday. It was yet another perfect meal.

Tarn

We got out of the hotel as fast as possible today and headed out to find a topo for the climbing in the gorge. Unfortunately, I discovered that I had forgotten my climbing pants, so despite Chloes generous offer to let me use her pajama bottoms, i had to climb in jeans today. For those of you who haven't climbed before, the problem is that you need a pretty wide range of motion in order to climb, and my jeans are fairly tight. This led to a day of ball crushing, but still enjoyable climbing. The guidebook is now quite a few years old, so we ended up getting a little lost and on routes that weren't in the book. We warmed up on a route called La puerta del sol then on to nulle par ailleurs and then to a few short easy climbs. We found a beautiful climb called rose paille, jaune bonbon which goes up the full height (200 feet in 2 pitches, with P2 alone being ~130 feet!) of the cliff. It goes up the middle of the photo below


After a full day of climbing, we checked into the Chateau de la Caze, which I had found in the Karen Brown guide. There was a problem in the sink of our room, so we ended up getting a suite for the entry level (130 euro) price. This included a huge bathtub, a living room and a super comfortable bed






Here's our porsche in front of the castle and some more pictures of the castle itself







We had dinner in the Chateau's restaurant, which was fantastic, and not too expensive (40 euro for the menu which included entree, plat, cheese plate and dessert). After a few amuse bouches


Chloe had the mushroom ravioli with seared scallops


and I had a gateaux de foix gras


which were both excellent. We both had the grilled bar (not sure what it is in english)
on a bed of cabbage. Normally cabbage is a pretty tasteless vegetable, but it's actually very nice when not cooked to paste. Also, I think that it might have been from the castle garden. The fish had been skinned and the crunchy, oily blackened skin was served on top of the filet


These dishes were all accompanied by a 2001 Bourgogne of some kind -- I don't remember which one. Next came the cheese plate, which was very impressive


All of the cheeses were local (from less than 50 km from the chateau), and in quite a few cases the waitress knew the fromagier personally. There were rustic tommes, some tangy goats milk pelardon, and most importantly: the Roquefort. I knew that we were in Roquefort country, so I asked for it and a few other good looking unpasteurized cheeses. The waitress actually smiled when I chose the Roquefort (pronounced Roque-fort) and said that it was exceptionally good. She went on to say that now (actually october to january) is the best time to taste Roquefort, because in the summer months and September the cheese makers overproduce the cheese, and as a result of this the sheeps milk is less fatty and not as salty. So what you get is a cheese with less character, less creaminess and which requires that salt be added to it. Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of blue cheeses, but this Roquefort was remarkable: it was incredibly creamy and rich, but not overwhelmingly salty. The marbled and slightly translucent slabs were also beautiful to look at. It was a cheese revelation for me.
Dessert was also very good. Chloe had a crumble and I had a chocolate filled chestnut cake with chocolate sorbet (yes, sorbet)






At the end of the meal we filled in a card for what we wanted for breakfast, and at what time, and slowly lurched back to our room.

Driving to Ste. Enimie

We had planned a big weekend in the Gorges du Tarn, but the route which we would take wasn't at all obvious. France is crisscrossed by a network of roads of varying size and twistiness (important when both Chloe and I get car sick) which go from the autoroute, to the route nationale down to the frequently nauseating but charming departmentale. Having had several trips where we realized afterwards that we had missed out on something very interesting because we were zooming along at 140 kph on the autoroute, I planned our last major trip in france very carefully. I first consulted the plus beaux villages de France web site and discovered that with only a few small deviations we could drive through two of the 149 plus beaux villages de France: Arlempdes and Pradelles, both in the Haute Loire. After a few hours on the autoroute and the excellent N88 south from Ste. Etienne, Chloe spotted an interesting church on a hilltop in Le-puy-en-Velay, so we decided to check it out.

We paid the admission fee and walked up the stairs to the chapel, which was not easy after a week of intestinal hell. It's amazing how badly a stomach flu can hobble you.






the other dominant feature of the le Puy skyline is the kind of ugly Notre Dame statue. A quick look with the binoculars was definitely close enough for us. That's it behind me on the left


and a close up from the web site:

some fun tidbits from the official website (above): baby Jesus' head weighs 1100 kilograms and his arms weigh 600 kilos. That's a big fricken baby jesus.

From le Puy, we continued on the N88 and a small departmental to get to the hamlet of Arlempdes. The village was underwhelming; it has a nice castle on a cliff




which is being poorly restored and some nice houses, but it is otherwise unremarkable by french standards. The only interesting things were the cowardly dog that made a few half hearted attempts to attack us (I discovered that a fully extended tripod works well to discourage such attacks), and the crazy guy. The Crazy Guy was a middle aged local who had set up a network of ferret cages near the base of the castle, with terracing that led to another much bigger netted enclave for tropical birds. He was industriously running back and forth to the village to find more garbage to burn on his bonfire when we left the village.

on to Pradelles.

Well, it's possible that we missed the beautiful part, but Pradelles seems pretty ugly to us. So ugly in fact, that after a cursory look around from the parking lot, we sped off towards Mende. Mende is like several other towns that I've been to in France where there is a one way ring road around the city, but much smaller than the peripherique roads in Paris and Lyon. I happened to be looking at a detailed map of the area later on in this trip and realized that these roads are probably where the ancient walls of the city were. Turning them into a one way ring road is actually a pretty good idea. We took a break in Mende to look around and found that it had some really cool little alleyways, and beautiful government buildings as well as a large chapel. All were built from a yellowish tan kind of stone that I hadn't seen before


We had a nasty surprise when, driving out of Mende, we saw signs that the road that we needed to take to the Gorges du Tarn were closed! Some quick re-routing by chloe led us onto a nice straight departmentale across the plains that lead to the gorge. Along the way we got stuck behind some sheep


before we descended into Ste. Enimie. Thinking that we had actually made hotel reservations in La Malene, we continued on, discovered that was no "Hotel Deux Sources" in La Malene and drove back to Ste. Enimie. The hotel turned out to be grim indeed:


and after wiping the dead flies off of the sheets and the shelf above the sink in the bathroom we decided it was in our best interest to eat elsewhere. The Auberge du Moulin looked a lot nicer, and we had an ok but very greasy meal of trout and some other forgettable things. The chestnut cake with homemade ice cream was good though. No we are not spoiled.


We watched a little TV, and discovered to our surprise that there was a full Occitan version of the news with French subtitles. This was on a regular TV channel, not cable access or OcTV. Googling reveals that more than 2 million people speak it, that the languages called "Provencale" is actually a dialect of Occitan, that it shares linguistic origins with Catalan, and that there is actually an Occitane wikipedia.

We were woken up several times by someone with their TV blaring and I had to go bang on their door until my hands hurt.

Tartiflette at Lolo and Vero's place

Tonight we had dinner at our friends Laurent and Vero's place. Barbara, Francois' wife was also there and we all ate a giant plate of Tartiflette together. Tartiflette is a relatively new addition to the world of extreme high calorie cheesey dishes that you should only eat after a day of ski de randonnee or some other suitably exhausting exercise. A couple of tartiflette recipes can be found here and here, buf suffice it to say that butter, potato and cheese play a prominent role. Even though it is not as old as its brethern the fondue and raclette, putting cream in the recipe is apparently frowned upon by tartiflette purists. I can't wait to make this back in the states, but I wonder how easy it will be to find large quantities of reblochon.

edit: reblochon can be bought on amazon!! or here at www.perfectcoffeeshop.com or at igourmet. if you are insane, you can apparently pay $330 for just over a pound of reblochon here

ombleze

we made one last trip to Ombleze, with a friend from rockclimbing.com who recently moved to Annecy from sacto. One last chance to climb the beautiful orange blocky limestone before we go back to the states! Here is darin on Les feux de la ramp

Moving!!!

We spent the weekend making washing clothes, sorting through drawers and throwing away a lot of things.




Late last week, the moving comany told us that they had an available pickup slot today, which we accepted since we wanted to get things out of our apartment and onto a boat ASAP. Anyway, I think we were both a little doubtful that they would actually be here today, since the consultant who inventoried our things said that they typically need a few weeks notice. However, at 8:30 today, they showed up, after illegally parking in the "Vigipirate" buffer zone around the Jewish community center across the street


Allow me to take a little detour into french culture to explain the plan vigipirate. It is a set of counter terrorism protocols originally formulated in the late 70's. These include a set of colored alert level croissants in purple, red, orange and yellow. I'm pretty sure it predates our own beloved colored alert levels stateside, but with a couple of differences. First, the progression of colors actually makes sense compared to green, blue, yellow, orange, red sequence. Second, threat levels aren't always high, like they are in the states (where the threat alert has never actually been in green or blue mode). However, it should also be pointed out that like in the states, they are backed by extremely questionably intelligence and are essentially useless.

Anyway, even in France, where you can park anywhere as long as your hazard lights are on, parking in the vigipirate zone is frowned upon and can get you a whopping ticket.

back to the movers

They showed up, asked what needed to get packed up, and got doen to work immediately. There was: one big boss with a strong southern accent, an earring and two arms full of tattoos (below, middle). There were two silent and extremely efficient moving guys. Then there was sebastien (below, right).


Sebastien was doing an apprentissage, looked to be about 15 years old, and didn't know how to make a box. After the movers got threatened with a gigantic parking ticket, Sebastien was demoted to sitting in the car and scaring off meter maids. I think he learned how to make boxes by the end though.
The other guys chugged along, and Chloe and I hid in the bedroom as they packed and carted


Chloe got so nervous that I made her leave to go to a cafe and destress while the packing continued


After packing up most of the loose stuff, the movers brought in a giant roll of bubble wrap


and started wrapping up tables etc


Earlier, there was some confusion about whether our beloved armoire would have to be disassembled, and we were both adament about it not being taken apart... so they had to carry it down the stairs as originally planned




If the move weren't costing $8000 I might have felt bad for them :).
Here they are wheeling down to the truck


And here is me signing the paperwork


and our almost empty apartment!!!!