Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 2
Note: this email was originally composed on Oct. 1, 2004
Preface: I`ve been having lot`s of computer problems since I got here. I am now sitting in front of (gasp!) a Macintosh at the local post office writing this. The last post office I was at had me waste about 45 minutes as the Mac kept crashing. I lost 15 minutes alone just trying to figure out how to reboot it. 🙂
Welcome to the Land of Grapes
Day 1:
Our flight to London went well and having business class tickets sure adds a new level of comfort. British Airways advertises seats in business class that “fold flat”. This is technically true but it`s not flat in a bed and it only is about 5ft long front to back. As such I got more sleep than I would hqve in economy but not like in a hotel.
We connected from Heathrow to Lyon and picked up our car there. We then had a 90 minute drive to our first destination: the small town of Meursault in the heart of wine country in the Bourgogne (Burgundy) region. We qrrived around 10PM at our gité (B&B) and fell asleep almost as soon as we got into our room. Our host Pascal spoke no English but this wasn`t a hurdle we couldn`t get over.
Day 2:
We had a typical French breakfast of fresh bread, jam, yogurt and coffee before heading off to explore Meursault on foot. Virtually every square foot of land around Meursault and the surrounding area has grapes grozwng on it. This time of year is harvest time and the whole town was bustling with people moving grapes from the fields to the local wineries. Mersault itself has only about 3000 people and it seems that most of the population works in the wine business.
About 5 miniutes from our gité is the Chateau de Meursault winery – perhaps the largest in Meursault and we toook the time to take a tour and taste some wine. OK, so it was 10:00 in the morning but this is France so you must relax your inhibitions about driking just after breakfast.
Inside the wine caves under the winery are held about 800,000 bottles of wine. The caves are almost pitch dark and have low ceilings so you must be carefull to avoid cracking your head open. We tasted about 7 types of wine – most of which were white. Despite the name Burgundy, this area of France is primarily known for it`s good white wines.
Do you have any Grey Poupon?
Later that day we drove to the town of Dijon. OK, admit it, you`re thinking that there is a store selling mustard on every street corner of Dijon? I guess I did too but the funny thing is that ti took a long time to even find a store that sold mustard. In the end we found this store that not only sold mustard but *only* sold mustard. Sorry no Grey Poupon sold here but we did buy a bottle. What type you ask? Classic Dijon of course.
That night we had our fist dinner in France and both ordered a Bourgogne
speciality: beef bourgignone. The dinner was simply delicious and the use of a knife was pretty much optional as the meat just fell off the bone.
Definitely a promising start to our trip.
It was interesting to note that our dinner started around 8:00 which we would consider fairly normal. This differed dramatically with our trip last year to Spain as we were eating no earlier than 10:00PM on most nights.
Day 3:
Today we rented some bikes and rode along the bike pathe called the Voie Vert (Green Path). It is an old railway line that was paved over to make a bike trail and mostly goes along the farming area just south of the wine country that we are staying. The ride goes past these charming tiny villages of maybe a 1000 people. Each of these villages always seemed to have the
necessities: a street market, a boulangerie (bakery), pattiserie (pastry shop), cafés and without exception a huge church. It`s interesting that the street market would run for a few hours in the morning then everything would close up and disappear in the stretch of about 20 minutes. After the market had closed, this army of street cleaners would descend on the place and within minutes would have all remainding rubish cleaned up from the street.
I admire the French for having this strong civic pride that makes them care about the appearance of their tows so much.
Day 4:
Today is our lat day in Bourgogne and tomorrow we head south to the Provénce region. This week that we will stay in Provénce will likely be the highlight of our trip as we have a culinary tour arranged. More details of that on our next chapter.
Take care,
B+B
Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 3
