Living the life in Saint-Aignan

13 October 2020

Le Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire

Cadogan again, in the words of author Philippe Barbour: “The Château de Chaumont boasts one of the best locations of all the châteaux along the Loire, looking dramatically down onto the river. You can best appreciate the place, standing proudly on its hillside, from the north bank... [there's] a medieval chivalric feel to [Chaumont], even if in fact it's another of those transitional Loire châteaux, built in the period when Italian Renaissance features were merging with French late Gothic forms. Construction began at the start of the 1470s...”

This was the château that the queen Catherine de Médicis gave to Diane de Poitiers, her husband's long time favorite, in exchange for the Château de Chnonceau. Her husband the king had died in a jousting tournament in Paris in 1559, at the age of 40. Catherine was the same age — she outlived her husband by 30 years — and Diane was 20 years older than they were. Catherine wanted Chenonceau, and she had the power as ex-queen and the queen mother to take it. According to one legend, the astrologer Nostradamus (or maybe it was another astrologer, Ruggieri) accompanied Catherine to Chaumont one day and shared his vision that her sons would die early and their Valois dynasty would end. Henri de Navarre, of the Bourbon line, would be crowned king as Henri IV. It all came true. Neither Catherine nor Diane ever actually spent much time at Chaumont.

In my slideshow, there are photos from my first visit (I believe) to Chaumont in October 2000, including a picture of a Renaissance-era tile floor and views out over the river and valley. Other photos of the château from the grounds or from the opposite bank of the Loire date back to 2007, 2009, and 2018. You used to be able to enter the grounds at Chaumont without paying an admission fee, but that era ended a decade ago. Now you can only enter the grounds after you buy a ticket, so you can't just stop by for a few minutes and snap a few pictures. Once when I was there, hot-air balloons were lifting off just down the hill and flying over at low altitude. That was pretty exciting. If I can find photos, I'll include a link to them.

12 October 2020

Le Château du Moulin, en Sologne

Again, I quote from the Cadogan guidebook for the Loire Valley: "The Château du Moulin, lost in the Sologne woods 12 kilometres [7 miles] west of Romorantin-Lanthenay,is the romantic star of the brick châteaux of the Sologne. It's a dreamy place, hidden in the countryside, reached by an alley of oaks you have to walk down, and surrounded by trees dipping their branches into the moat. Swans swim elegantly in its waters. The buildings that remain are fragmnts of a more solid ensemble..."

The Château du Moulin, built in the 1480s (as was the Château de Fougères-sur-Bievre) is about 15 miles east of Saint-Aignan in the Sologne, a "natural region" of sandy soil, ponds, lakes, and pine and birch forests. It's flat and the soil is clay and sand, so bricks were the main building material for houses and châteaux. The Michelin guidebook says that Le Moulin was originally protected by high walls and turrets. Those were torn down in later centuries to make the place airier and more pleasant to live in.

The woman who owned the Château du Moulin lived there until recently (maybe she still does). I remember getting a glimpse of her when we toured the inside of the château in October 2000. We were the on last guided tour of the day, and I think we caught her off guard when we entered a room that was part of her apartments. The pictures in my slideshow here are some that I took in 2004 when, if memory serves, CHM and I visited Le Moulin, which is just 15 miles northeast of Saint-Aignan.

And guess what I just learned — the Château du Moulin is now closed to the public and has been on the market since last January. You can buy it for a couple or three million euros. It's described as having 30 rooms, including 20 bedrooms, and 100 acres (39 hectares) of land. Here's a link.

And here's a video I found on YouTube:

11 October 2020

The Château de Fougères-sur-Bièvre, a Loire Valley anachronism

Twenty years ago, after our arrival in the Loire Valley and our visit to Chenonceau on our first day in the car, we stopped in Montrichard and had lunch. Less than two years later, we would be back in Montrichard working with a real estate agent to find a house in the area that we might want to buy and live in. Anyway, in October 2000, our next stop would be in the village of Fougères-sur-Bièvre. We wanted to see a château there that CHM had told us about. Here's what the Cadogan guidebook for the Loire Valley says about it:

"The Château de Fougères-sur-Bièvre [12 miles north of Saint-Aignan, 10 miles south of Blois] is a bit of an odd man out in this area [the Loire Valley]. Most of the other châteaux open to the public around these parts are characterized by openness, generally constructed of sparkling clean-cut blocks of white stone, the towers roomy and decorative. Fougères looks defensively medieval, with its massed turrets, its small irregular stones, and its inner courtyard paranoically enclosed on all four sides. Despite the stern exterior, the château you see was built in the last quarter of the 15th century."

In other words, this château was an anachronism when it was built. Châteaux built toward the end of the 15th century and into the 16th were no longer fortresses. They were built as comfortable residences — but not Fougères. By the way, Fougères-sur-Bièvre is just 12 miles north of Saint-Aignan, the same distance east of Amboise, and about 10 miles south of Blois.

In later centuries, the original moat at Fougères was filled in. The château was used as a poor house in the early years of the 20th century. In 1932 it was acquired by the French government. During World War II, some of France’s greatest art collections were stored at Fougères for safe-keeping. Over the years, the interior has been stripped of its furnishings and decoration, making it a place where you can see how such medieval châteaux-forts were put together. Thanks to CHM for telling us of its existence more than 20 years ago.

10 October 2020

Chenonceau en octobre 2000, etc.

Those reading this blog are probably tired of Chenonceau castle by now. I still have a lot of photos.
Here's one, for example, that my sister, Joanna, took in September 2007 when she visited.
The two people on the right are our friend Janice, who came to France with J., and me.

Below is a photo of a painting that I took inside the château in March 2006.

And here's a slideshow of photos that I took at Chenonceau in October 2000. That's where this series of posts began.

I was going to post the slideshow days ago, but then I kept finding more and better photos from subsequent years.

Finally, I scanned through all my photos of the Château de Chenonceau to find one that sort of shows

the unfinished end of the gallery that spans the Cher river. I took this one in September 2012.

09 October 2020

Gardens at Chenonceau

There are two formal jardins à la française at Chenonceau. The story of those two gardens is long and complicated. The first garden — the larger of the two — was designed and created for Diane de Poitiers when she lived at Chenonceau, through a grant from king Henri II, from 1547 until 1559. When Henri died, his wife (it was an arranged marriage), queen Catherine de Médicis (de' Medici in Italian), evicted Diane from Chenonceau. Here's a photo of Diane's garden.

Catherine wanted the Château de Chenonceau for herself. As the mother of Henri's young son and his regent, Catherine lived there until her death in 1589. She made significant changes in Diane's garden, and she had the second Chenonceau garden designed and planted. Here's a photo of Catherine's garden.

Apparently, Catherine's garden has not been significantly modified since the late 16th century.

Do you think the younger gardener put on his color-coordinated T-shirt by design?

This is a photo of Catherine's garden that I took in late March 2006. Spring had not yet sprung.

Gardens à la française are laid out in geometrical patterns and are very closely trimmed and tended.

I've taken about 800 pictures at Chenonceau since the year 2000, including many photos of these gardens.
Every year, it seems, they are planted in these same pink flowers.

08 October 2020

Rowing around the castle

When I went to Chenonceau in 2005, a lot of people were rowing around in boats on the Cher,
enjoying great views of the château.

07 October 2020

Reflections on the Cher

These are all photos of the château de Chenonceau that I took in July 2004. It was on a sunny, windless morning. I don't have much to say about them, but here they are. You can see why so many people want to see Chenonceau, which by car is not quite 20 miles (30 kilometers) downriver from Saint-Aignan.

Speaking of sunny, windless days, that's not the kind of weather we've been having recently. It's been pretty rainy and windy since the end of last week. I put the rain gauge back out and we've gotten about three inches, 75 millimeters of rain in less than a week. We need the rain, but the contrast with the dry, hot summer we just lived through could make your head spin.

06 October 2020

Le château de Chenonceau en juillet

The first time we stayed in Vouvray, in October 2000, we spent time wandering around the little town and taking photos, but we also spent a lot (too much?) time on the road, driving from château to château and village to village. Our first stop was at the château that is probably most emblematic of the Loire Valley castles — Chenonceau. It's the château that has a long gallery that spans the Cher river. It's just 15 or so miles from Vouvray (and also about 15 miles from Saint-Aignan).

2004

Actually, these are not photos I took in the year 2000 or 2001. I did take some then, but I think these are better. I took some of them in 2004 and some in 2005. I'm trying to remember the last time I went to Chenonceau. It was probably years ago. That's what happens when you live near famous sites and attractions. Above is Chenonceau reflected in the waters of the Cher.

2005

My most memorable visit to Chenonceau was in 2004. A good friend in California told me about a friend of hers who was in France and finishing up a stay down in the Pyrenees mountains. Walt and I didn't know her at all. She was headed back to Paris for her flight home and had a few days extra. Could she come and stay with Walt and me for two or three nights? Could we show her some Loire Valley sights?

2005

We said yes. We had only been here a year and we were trying to figure out what to expect next. The friend of a friend wanted to see Chenonceau. It was mid-July. Tourists were everywhere. The weather was beautiful. The visitor and I drove over to Chenonceau one afternoon. It was so crowded and the lines to get in were so long that I told the visitor I just couldn't face it. The parking lot was full of tour buses. I didn't want to go inside and shuffle along with the hundreds or thousands of other visitors.

2004

Our visitor was understandably very disappointed. I told her, by way of apology, that we would drive back over to Chenonceau the next morning and try to be there by 9:00, before all the tour buses pulled into the parking lot. So that's what we did. And it was fantastic. We were almost the only people there. Again, the weather was beautiful, and it wasn't nearly as hot early in the morning as it had been the afternoon before. Not only were there no crowds, but there also was no wind. The river was glassy and the reflections were spectacular. I took a lot of photos.

2004

A year later, in mid-July, other friends from California came to visit. We also went to Chenonceau — you just have to when you have visitors from the U.S. — but we didn't actually pay to go onto the château grounds and into the building. There's a path along the south bank of the Cher river that most people don't know about. You can park your car and walk a few hundred yards right up to the château and get good views of it. There's no admission charge and there's no crowd. At least there wasn't any charge or crowd back then. I wonder if things have changed...

P.S. A search of my blog leads me to believe that my latest visit to Chenonceau dates back to 2013. I was also there in 2012, 2011, and 2010 (twice). I guess it's time for another visit.

05 October 2020

Vouvray street views and houses

In October 2000 and again in June 2001, we spent time walking around the town of Vouvray as well as driving around in the Loire Valley, from Mennetou-sur-Cher all the way west to Angers. If we hadn't spent those two vacations — three weeks in all — we might not have come to live here in 2003. The countryside, while not really spectacular, is beautiful in a calm, bucolic way. The villages and towns are picturesque. The food and wine are excellent. When we decided in 2002 to leave California for France, it was only natural that I started our search for a house in the Loire Valley, though I knew Normandy and Paris much better. We came to France in December that year, and in just four days' time we found and put a downpayment on the house in Saint-Aignan where we've now been livng for 17 years.

A lot of houses in Vouvray are "troglodytic," meaning that they are cave dwellings. The town is built on a fairly steep hillside on the north edge of the Loire river valley. Tunnels and caves were dug into cliffs along the valley and the limestone was quarried for use in building projects. People set up housekeeping in the tunnels and caves in the rock, and nowadays such dwellings are quite comfortably finished and furnished. For example, look at these two "cave dwellings" (troglos) that are rented out to tourists who want to spend time exploring the area. The château you see up on the heights toward the end of the slideshow is called Moncontour and is a wine property nowadays. It has a tasting room and and offers tours of the property.

04 October 2020

The Vouvray gîte owner's house and property

I mentioned earlier that the owner of the gîte we rented in Vouvray in 2000 and 2001 lived right across the street. Her house looked magnificent from the outside — we didn't go inside. The house was originally built during the French Renaissance of the 16th century. It was expanded and enlarged in the 18th. There are two large buildings on the property.

Apparently, the property was a winery in the past. It was called the Domaine des Barguins. When we were there, there was no evidence of a wine cellar or shop. The owner rented out the smaller house we stayed in, and she had been operating a table d'hôtes business in the big house. That is, she was preparing meals for customers, probably including her gîte tenants and other tourists.

She sold the house a decade or more ago, we've been told by people we like to buy wine from in Vouvray. I'm not sure if the house is occupied, but the other building on the property has been converted into a bed and breakfast (chambres d'hôtes). It's the building you see in the photo just after the wooden Les Barguins sign. The photos in which you see a white wooden gate were taken from the gîte property, looking toward Les Barguins. And the woman in black in the last photo of the slide show is our friend Cheryl, who was staying there with us in 2001. She passed away several years ago.

03 October 2020

Vouvray, a rustic wine village

“A tingling taste on the tongue, even with a dry, still Vouvray served as an apéritif, gives away this wine's natural leanings towards bubbles. The other great characteristic of Vouvray, apart from its very slight natural effervescence, is the Chenin Blanc grape variety... Vouvray produces some of the finest Chenin Blanc wines. In fact, Vouvray is the largest producer of Chenin Blanc in France, made from 1,750 hectares [4,300 acres] planted with the variety...”

“Some people can find the tingle and the tastes of Vouvray Chenin Blanc startling... It's interesting to distinguish the characteristics of the different types of wine produced here. The dry white makes for a powerful-tasting apéritif in Touraine. It could easily be served with fish and seafood. The demi-sec is the kind of sweet wine [whose] flowery honey flavour is less popupular these days — some suggest trying it with Touraine goat's cheese!”

“The Chenin Blanc character often comes out to good effect when transformed into sparkling wines... its flavours [are] strong enough to cope with the distraction of the bubbles... The very liquorous sweet moelleux will only be made in good years... where noble rot sets in; these sweet wines... can age for decades, even up to a century in rare vintages. They can have a mouth-filling richness and develop a variety of complex flavors.”

“Reaching the town of Vouvray itself, the lower part looks a bit of a mess down in the valley. Signs signal potential wine tastings, dégustations, at every turn. There is also a renowned charcuterie down here, Hardouin... These specialist charcutiers add a dash of Vouvray wine to their array of specialities. Their products are not sold just in the village, but also in some of the most prestigious grocery shops in Paris...”

The quoted excerpts above come from the Cadogan guide to the Loire Valley (1997,2001). Like villages in the Champagne wine country, Vouvray is surprisingly rustic and rural — agricultural, and not prettied up for tourists. The photos in the slideshow here are some I took in the years 2000 and 2001 on walks around the village and vineyards.

02 October 2020

The Vouvray gîte — the bedroom, the bathroom

We stayed in this gîte (a furnished vacation rental) twice. The first time was a week in early October 2000. The second time was two weeks in May and June of 2001. In 2001 I took some photos of the bedroom Walt and I slept in. The skylight was the only window in the room. The other bedroom (I have no photos of it) had a double bed in it, if I remember correctly. I wonder if CHM has any photos of it. He stayed with us in the Vouvray gîte for a week in 2001.

And here's a photo of the bathroom. I'm just trying to give you an idea what a nice, affordable gîte can be like. This one in Vouvray was fairly small, but it was perfectly comfortable for three good friends.

In late May and early June, the weather was gorgeous. We were lucky. As you can see, when we were there in the daytime, we had all the windows and doors wide open.

By the way, the house in the photos is no longer rented out as a gîte. The woman who owned it, as well as the huge house across the street where she lived, apparently sold both the properties a decade or more ago.

01 October 2020

A gîte in Vouvray — interiors

We liked this gîte so much that we rented it twice. We stayed just a week in October 2000, partly because we had specific plans for the other two weeks of our trip — Champagne, Normandy, and Paris for me and Walt; the Pyrenees mountains, Basque country, and Paris for our friend Sue. In June of 2001, we came back and spent two weeks in the same gîte (a gîte [zheet] or gîîe rural is a furnished short-term vacation rental, usually a house, in the French countryside).

Gîtes come in all sizes and levels of confort, from the spartan to the luxurious. This one was a mid-range rental, and not expensive. I wish I could remember how much we paid for it. It might have been about $400.00 U.S. for seven nights... for three people. The house had two bedrooms, one with two single beds for me and Walt, and one with a double bed for Sue. It also had a nice bathroom (more photos to come). The French Wikipédia article says that nowadays there are as many as 43,000 gîtes available to be rented in France.

Here's an anecdote demonstrating the affordability of such rentals in France. When we signed the contract, it specified that we would have to pay extra for any electricity we used over a specified daily quota. The meter would be read by the owner at the end of our stay and we'd pay her a surcharge on the spot. In 2000, we were there in October, and while afternoons were warm, nights and mornings were chilly. We used the heat (electric radiators) as needed and we did quite a bit of cooking.

On the morning of our departure, the owner came over — she lived across the road (photos to come) — and I told her we were ready to pay the final bill. We used as much electricity as we needed or wanted, I told her, so I'm sure we've gone over the quota. Then she read the meter and said, yes, you did use quite a bit of electricity over the amount that was included in your rent. I braced for bad news. The surcharge comes to 90 francs, she said, apologetically. That was about $12.00 U.S. at the time. It was a struggle not to laugh.

30 September 2020

A gîte in Vouvray in the Loire Valley

In the spring of the year 2000, Walt and I decided we wanted to go to France and stay not in Paris, but in some other region. We had already seen a lot of Provence, Normandy, and Brittany. We seriously considered renting a house or apartment in Alsace, in a village not far from Strasbourg. Neither of us had ever been there before. At the last minute, before reserving a vacation rental (un gîte rural), we changed out minds and decided to go spend some time in the Loire Valley. We found an attractive house near Tours that we could rent for a week at a very affordable price.

We asked an old friend of ours, Sue, if she wanted to go to France with us in October. She said yes, and we decided to spend a week in this house in the wine village of Vouvray. Then Sue went off on her own for a week in the Pyrenees and Basque country. Walt and I drove to Champagne and on to Rouen in Normandy for the week. Finally, we met up with Sue in Paris and spent the last week of our vacation in an apartment in the Marais neighborhood. It was a great trip.

Walt and I had spent a week driving through the Loire Valley back in January 1992. I caught a very bad cold and I was pretty miserable. The weather was gray, chilly, and damp — typical weather for the season. This time, in early October, we had plenty of sunny days, and we stayed very busy driving from village to village and château to château — Chenonceau, Chambord, Cheverny, Azay-le-Rideau, Amboise... Sue had never been to the Loire Valley before. We all wanted to see as much as possible.

An anecdote: when we decided to rent the house in Vouvray, Sue bought a couple of guidebooks for the Loire Valley. In one of them, she read that Vouvray was a famous wine village but there wasn't really an awful lot to see there. She wasn't convinced we had made a good decision. She asked me why I hadn't decided to rent a place in a more picturesque town or village. I was a little nervous that she might be disappointed.

On a Friday in early October, the three of us flew to Paris, picked up a rental car at the airport, and drove down to Vouvray, arriving on Saturday afternoon. We settled into the gîte and over dinner decided it would be a good idea to spend our first day just walking around the town and through the vineyards that were just steps from the gîte. The weather was beautiful. That Sunday, Sue, using a film camera, was taking a lot of photos. We had a good time out in the sunshine and fresh air. We walked for what I'm sure was several miles. It was a good way to stretch our legs and shake off jet lag after a 10-hour flight and a three-hour drive.

On Monday, we decided to go see the Château de Chenonceau. Sue continued taking a lot of photos in villages and towns all along the way. At some point, she apologized and said that she was going to need to find somewhere to buy more film, because she had already gone through most the rolls she'd brought with her. I expressed surprise. You said you had brought plenty of film for the whole trip, I said. "Yes, I thought so," she said, "but you didn't tell me that everything would be so beautiful."

29 September 2020

Those shipping crates

It's a funny coincidence that I took the photos of the storage crates in this post exactly 10 years ago today (Sept. 29, 2010) and posted them on September 30, 2010. Our attic conversion was completed by then. The question of the old shipping crates we've been using as bedside tables came up in comments yesterday (thanks, BettyAnn). Here's their history.

Yesterday [in 2010] I finally got my "new" furniture finished. The two pieces are shipping crates that were in our attic when we moved into this house in 2003. They were full of old papers — mostly French tax forms and form letters left here by the woman who owned the house previously. She was retired from the French tax administration.

The papers had no value. We'll burn them in the wood stove this winter. But when we cleaned up last spring, in anticipation of the [2010] attic conversion, I thought the crates were things I wanted to save. There are three of them. The man who had this house built [in the 1960s] was employed by the French aeronautics and space agency. He spent a few years on assignment in Kourou, French Guyana, where French satellites are launched. That's in South America.

You can see the new hinges on the side of the crate.

When [Jean] Kientzy moved back to France, he and his wife apparently packed up some of their belongings and had them shipped back to Mareuil-sur-Cher, a village adjacent to Saint-Aignan, along the banks of the Cher River. Jean Kientzy's first wife was a native of Mareuil, and they had had this house built here.

This all happened in the 1970s, I believe. You can see the addresses on the lid of one of the crates. Les Bagneux is a hamlet in Mareuil.

Here's the door open so you can see inside. I plan to put in a shelf later.

I took two of the crates outdoors and scrubbed them with soap and a stiff brush. That was when the weather was hot, and I let the wooden crates dry in the hot sun. Then I varnished them, inside and out, applying several coats. I decided to use them as little tables, or plant stands, and to store things in them. I put feet on the bottom (the side, actually), and I put hinges on the lids to make them into doors. I attached one of those little magnet clips to each box to hold the doors shut.

This is the second crate. The third one isn't done yet [in 2010].

And now I've finished that part of the job and I'm using the two crates in the loft, as you can see in the pictures here. For the moment, I have put printer paper in one, and in the other I'm storing a ton of CDs and DVDs that are in binders in plastic sleeves. Those items are heavy and give the boxes some heft and stability. They are ballast, I guess.

I've become handy and resourceful in my old age. Well, I've always been resourceful, I think, on some level. When I worked in Paris, people — employers, colleagues — told me I was très débrouillard. La débrouillardise is resourcefulness. It means the ability to make things happen, to figure out creative solutions to everyday problems.

Back to 2020: Here's some of the backstory about the shipping crates. Jean Kientzy was a native of the Vosges area in Alsace-Lorraine. He was born in 1914. I'm not sure where or when he met his wife, who was from Mareuil in the Saint-Aignan area. They had a house built in Mareuil in the late 1960s and spent summers here until he retired. I think they came to live here year-round in the mid-'70s, when he would have been in his 60s. I'm not sure when he was on assignment to Kourou, but it must have been in the 1960s or early '70s. He and his wife had some of their things shipping back to France in these wooden crates. Then the crates were stored for decades in the attic space that we had converted into living space in 2010.

In the late '70s, Jean K. and his wife went on a long driving trip in North Africa (Morocco and Algeria). Somewhere along the way, they were involved in a terrible car accident. Mme Kientzy was killed, and Jean was seriously injured. He came back to live here in the house we've lived in for the past 17 years. He recovered from his injuries. Sometime in the early 1980s he got involved in a book club that had weekly or monthly meetings. At one of the meetings, he met a divorced woman named Josette who was originally from the big town of Châteauroux, 45 minutes south of Saint-Aignan. Jean and Josette ended up getting married in about 1985.

Josette in her Saint-Aignan apartment in 2003, when she was 76 years old

When Jean and Josette were married, Jean told his new spouse that he didn't want to live in his retirement house any more. He said the winters were too damp and gray here, Josette (who sold us the house) told me when we got to know her between 2003 and 2005. Jean wanted to live in town, so he bought an apartment in Saint-Aignan and they lived there. They kept the house, and they would come and spend a couple of months here in the summer to take advantage of the good weather. Jean had a dog, and he would come out here (the house is just 2 miles from the apartment they lived in), park his car in the driveway, and go for long walks with the dog in the vineyard.

Jean fell ill sometime in the 1990s. He would have been about 80 years old. He had to be hospitalized in Tours at some point, and Josette rented an apartment there (35 miles from Saint-Aignan) so she could help take care of him. He passed away in 2000, I believe. Josette inherited his Mareuil house (Jean had no children) and soon put it on the market. She found a buyer, but the buyer couldn't get the mortgage he needed to seal the deal. So Josette (who is now 93 years old) put the house back on the market in 2001 or 2002 and listed it with a real estate agent over in Montrichard. That agent showed the house to Walt and me in late 2002, even though it didn't match our description of the kind of house we were looking for. He said he thought we'd like the location, l'environnement. We did, and we were able to buy it when we sold our house in San Francisco.

Josette, Walt, and I having lunch in a sidewalk café in Romorantin in 2003

What I think is that Josette felt no particular attachment to this house. It wasn't hers, but belonged to Jean and his first wife. Besides, Josette was alone again, and she had a daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter who wanted her to come live in Tours, in the neighborhood where they lived. Josette ended up moving to Tours in 2004 or 2005. We helped her move by packing up our car and driving over there. We once invited Josette and her family over for a Sunday dinner so that they could see what we had done with the place. The granddaughter had good childhood memories of summer vacations she spent here. We enjoyed having them over, and we tried to stay in touch, but as the years went by we eventually drifted apart. Here's a post I wrote about Josette's 80th birthday party in 2007.

28 September 2020

Le nouveau matelas Actiflex

As I've mentioned a couple of times over the last few days, our new mattress arrived last Thursday. It came in the box you see on the right. It was in sous-vide packaging (vacuum-packed). We had to take it out of the box, pierce and cut away the plastic the mattress was wrapped in, and watch and listen while it "self-inflated," re-expanding to its actual size — 2 meters by two meters by 24 centimeters (that's about 79" wide, 79" long, and 9½" thick).

We left the new mattress on the floor, on a clean rug and covered in a sheet, until yesterday (Sunday) morning because the manufacturer recommended letting it keep exanding for 24 to 36 hours, and for another reason I'll come to later...*

Meanwhile, we continued sleeping on our 25-year-old Simmons Beautyrest mattress (not a Sealy as I mistakenly said earlier) over the weekend. We slept on the new mattress last night, and I found it pretty comforatble. I'll see what Walt thinks of it when he gets up in about an hour.

This is the new mattress re-expanding on the floor, covered with a sheet. Now the old mattress is there on the floor and the new one is on the bed. We don't want to try to take the old mattress downstairs before we are sure we like and want to keep the new one.

We held our breath as we lifted the new mattress onto the platform bed frame yesterday morning, fearing it might be too big. It fit perfectly, though, as you can see. The new extra-large fitted sheet we had ordered for it fit perfectly too. Unfortunately, when the XL mattress pad that we ordered for the new mattress arrived, we discovered that the vendor had sent the wrong size. I had to send it back because it was too small.

Above is a photo of our espace chambre (bedroom area) up in the loft that I took just before we stripped the bed and moved the old mattress. The doorway you see opens into the half-bath we had put in upstairs in 2019.

While we were lifting the new mattress up onto the bed platform, we stood the old one up against a wall. It wasn't in such bad shape, really. But 25 years old... I looked up Simmons Beautyrest mattresses on an American website yesterday and saw that the king-size models cost something like $2,200.00. Yikes!

So here it is, cleans sheets and all. The flat sheets and comforter covers we already had fit it just fine. We ordered a couple of fitted sheets in the new, larger size, and now that we see we are happy with them, we'll order at least one more. That should hold us for a while.

Here's a link to an Amazon U.K. page in English about the Actiflex mattress.

And here's a link to the same information in French on Amazon France.

P.S. The other reason we kept the mattress on the floor and continued sleeping on the old one for a couple of nights is that one of the animals — we don't know if it was the cat or the dog — jumped up on the new mattress Thursday night... and peed on it! Bad cat! Or bad dog! They are both tight-lipped about which one did it. We carefully cleaned the mattress with an Oxyclean-type product, and then with a mild bleach solution, and let it dry for an extra 24 hours. Why do these things always happen? Both animals are otherwise perfectly house-broken. It's not as bad as it could be, however. When the old mattress was brand-new back in the mid-1990s, the bottom of it got soaked in skunk juice. That's a long story. It took us weeks to get the awful smell out of it.

27 September 2020

Appartement, rue de l'Université, janvier 2000

In late January of the year 2000, we spent three or four nights in an apartment in the 7ème arrondissement of Paris, on the rue de l'Université. We had flown to Paris for a long weekend. It was very extravagant, but maybe not as extravagant as it might seem. The other alternative to a quick trip to Paris from San Francisco was a quick trip to Las Vegas, and that, as it turned out, would have cost even more. It was a lot more fun to go to Paris. I've written about this trip several times over the years, including in a post in March 2019 and again in a post in January 2020.

The apartment we rented for that weekend adventure was in the building above. There were long, narrow balconies across the front. Since we were there in January, being able to sit outdoors to enjoy a meal or a drink wasn't exactly a priority. Even so, it was good that the building across the street was the one pictured below. These are the offices of the Institut National de Recherche Agronomique. In the evening there was nobody there to see us in our apartment, so we didn't have to worry about shutters or shades. We were on the top floor.

In fact, January 2000 was not really cold, but it was pretty damp. We enjoyed walking all around the city, but we took our meals indoors. What we did like about the apartment, which consisted of a living room/bedroom with a separate kitchen and a separate bathroom, was the view we had out the front windows over the rooftops — photo below.

We also enjoyed the neighborhood. We were only there for three or four nights, and we were happy to eat in restaurants. We didn't do any cooking. I also didn't really take any pictures inside the apartment because, to tell all, we had stayed there one time before, in 1997, for a much longer time. That was before I began to take photos. That year, I was on sabbatical from my job at Apple and I spent a month in Paris. Walt spent two weeks but then had to go back to San Francisco and return to work. My mother and my 15-year-old niece flew over and stayed with me for the rest of the time. My mother hadn't been to Paris since 1982, and my niece had never made the trip before. We saw Paris and then went to spend a few days in Normandy.

Even though we didn't do any real cooking, it was nice to be able to run downstairs (there was an elevator, actually) and get a fresh baguette and some croissants for breakfast. There was no lack of boulangeries in the neighborhood.

We also enjoyed dinners in neighborhood restaurants. One of them, the Thoumieux, was also a place where we had enjoyed meals on earlier trips. I saved the receipt when we went there again in January 2000.

Remember when prices were still listed in French francs? The dollar was really strong against the French franc at that time, so the full meal for two — with starter salads, a bowl of cassoulet, a steak, (too much) wine, a cheese, a dessert, and coffees — cost us less than a hundred dollars U.S. (the U.S. dollar was worth 6.7 FF).

By the way, Walt just pointed out to me that he has photos of our 2003 gîte in Provence, which I posted about yesterday, on his blog in three posts here.