More California desert photos

Here are more photos I took in the southern California desert, south of Palm Springs and east of San Diego, in February 2002. The winter weather down there is pretty nice, but the average high temperature in the area in summertime is 40º to 41º Celsius (105ºF). The slideshow runs for two minutes.

Around the Salton Sea in SoCal

One place where Walt and I spent a lot of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s was in the Southern California desert south of Palm Springs and Indio, around the Salton Sea. That's because CHM was spending winters down there. It was only about a 10 hour drive (!) each way from San Francisco, so whenever we could we would go down there and spend a few days decompressing. It was pretty different from life in The City, as you'll see. Here are eight photos that I took in February 2002. Twenty years ago...

        

I'm posting these at a smaller size than usual, but they all can be enlarged.

        

Our California years

Walt and I lived in California for 15+ years, from 1987 until 2003, after spending five years (1982-87) living and working in Washington DC. We had met in Paris in 1981. We ended up moving to California because Walt wanted to go to Berkeley and complete his university degrees. And that's what he did. I tagged along — I never enjoyed living in DC, though my work was really interesting. W. and I lived in San Francisco for most of the time we spent in California, with a three-year interlude in Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley) in the mid-1990s. I worked for Apple during those years. Walt worked for Santa Clara County as a transit planner, in San Jose.

    

During our more than 11+ years in San Francisco, we never lived more than a few kilometers from the coast. We'd walk the dog we had rescued in 1992, Collette, on Ocean Beach or on China Beach as often as we could. I enjoyed the beach because I grew up on the beaches of North Carolina — 4,000 kilimeters away on the East Coast. Lighthouses like the one at Pigeon Point on the San Mateo coast (photo below) reminded me of lighthouses in NC. I loved the smell of salt air and the sound of waves crashing on the shore. I was nearly 40 years old when W and I escaped from DC and fled to SF. I had already spent five years in France, mostly in Paris, in the 1970s and early 1980s. I had also spent five years as a grad student at the U. of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

    
Berkeley was on the other side of San Francisco Bay, at the other end of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. During Walt's early Berkeley years, I was working in downtown SF as managing editor of a computer magazine (UNIX Review). Walt ended up with three degrees from Berkeley — in architecture, city planning, and transportation engineering. I ended up working for several different software companies in Silicon Valley, with a lot of very talented people, between 1989 and 2002. I liked the people more than I liked the work. Walt ended up with a management job with the public transit agency of the city of San Francisco.

    

There were things I loved about SF and California, but the chilly, foggy SF summers, the earthquakes, the long commutes, and the Bay Area traffic jams were not among them. We lived on Potrero Hill for a while — that's it in the photo on the left above. Then in 1992, we both found ourselves with well-paid, interesting jobs in Silicon Valley, so we left SF to go live in Sunnyvale. That was a different world. After three years The Valley, we realized that we hadn't moved to California to live in the suburbs. We wanted to go back to the place San Franciscans call The City. So we bought a house in a neighborhood called Glen Park, which was similar to Potrero Hill in feel and flavor, and wound up living there for eight years before coming to live in Saint-Aignan. We've been here in France for nearly 19 years already.

Paris and elsewhere

I'm just taking my time looking through all the old photos I happened upon when working on my desktop computer a couple of days ago. Photos taken with film cameras, and even photos taken with many 1990s digital cameras, didn't save "metadata" like the date taken or with what camera the way today's digital camera do. As a result, I can't really determine when a lot of these photos were taken, or by whom. I don't remember. The photos are just warm, fuzzy memories.

    
Left above, a Citroën 2CV parked at the mouth of the Gironde river near Soulac-sur-Mer, 1989 (Walt's photo)
Right above, the view from our hotel room at on the Quai Voltaire, facing the Louvre, November 1989

    
Left above, a blue door in Lauris in Provence, June 1993 (Walt's photo)
Right above, an Eiffel Tower poster than our late friend Cheryl had in her living room

     Left above, the Panthéon and the Sorbonne in a view over the Latin Quarter in Paris
La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, 30 or so years before the big fire in 2019

1990s photos and memories

Yesterday, as I was organizing and filing away some photos on my main desktop PC up in the loft, I came across a treasure trove of old photos that I didn't know I had on a hard disk. I know I have them all on CDs and DVDs, but it's a lot of trouble, and very time-consuming, to pull out old disks and go through them one at a time. I guess that at some point I decided to do just that, though, because there were all those photos in one big folder containing almost 60,000 files (31 GB).

I'm very late posting today because I've been sitting here for three hours or more this morning trying to figure out what to do with all these pictures. I've been looking at them and remembering places where we lived and traveled in the 1990s. We lived in California and we traveled to France once or twice a year between 1988 and our big move to France in 2003. We also traveled to a lot of other places. Here are some photos we took in France back then.

In 1996, I spent a week in Ireland on a work trip, with a side trip to Paris just for fun. Some California friends were in Paris at the same time. It was in April and the weather was fine. A North Carolina friend that I first met in California was there and we spent a day together walking around the city, including a stop in this café for a refreshing beverage.

Walt probably took this pre-digital photo on one of our trips to the southwestern part of France. I don't know if it was in 1989 or in 1995. It's the town of Cahors, on the Lot river. We were on high ground on the opposite side of the river, taking in the views. Cahors is famous for it's dark red wines, made from Malbec grapes.

In October 1995, we flew into CDG airport, rented a car, and headed south toward Cahors and the Lot valley, where we had reserved a gîte. We were pretty tired after the flight from San Francisco, so when we got to Bourges, not far from Saint-Aignan, we stopped and found a hotel room for the night. We had discovered Bourges and its cathedral in 1993. Again, it was probably Walt who took this photo out of our hotel window.

I think this photo dates back to 1989, when we went on a driving trip from Grenoble, where I had attended a conference, to Nîmes, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Poitiers, Chartres, and Paris. Walt flew in to CDG and took the train down to Grenoble as the conference ended. The next day we started driving and sightseeing. We didn't have reservations anywhere. Each day we would find a hotel toward the end of the afternoon, book a room, and then go out to dinner in a restaurant. We would shop in markets most mornings, buy salads, sandwiches, or pâtés, and then have a picnic lunch wherever we were at noontime. That was a great trip.

I believe this photo dates back to 1989, too, but I'm not sure. It''s the town of Albi, not very far from Carcassonne, Castelnaudary, and Toulouse. We spent the night in a hotel in Castelnaudary, in a hotel that turned out to have a very nice restaurant. We ate a memorable cassoulet — it was probably the best meal of that 10-day trip. We had great weather except some rain toward the end, as we got to Chartres and then Paris.

In 1995, we stayed for 10 days in a gîte that was in the town of Puy-l'Évêque, just west of Cahors. CHM had told us about a medieval château called Bonaguil that was nearby. That's it above. When we went there, a school group was being shown around by a guide or a teacher who really knew the history of the place. I followed them around, listening to the commentary, and enjoyed it greatly. I think we had a picnic lunch at Bonaguil that day. Again, I'm sure Walt took the picture. I wasn't so into photography at the time.

Jambalaya, a Louisiana treat

Walt and I hade been talking about it for weeks. Jambalaya, I mean. We wanted a good way to enjoy some more of the shrimp (crevettes, prawns) that we bought at the Asia Market in Tours back in January. And maybe finish them. Jambalaya is a staple of Louisiana Creole and Cajun cooking. I decided to base my version on the late New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme's jambalaya — I have his book titled Chef PP's Louisiana kitchen.

Jambalaya is a rice dish that's usually made with a spicy Louisiana smoked pork called tasso; chunks of boneless chicken (breast or thigh meat); smoked Louisiana andouille; and shrimp, peeled and de-veined. It also includes a trio of aromatic diced vegetables called The Holy Trinity in Louisiana — onion, celery (céleri-branches), and sweet bell peppers (poivrons). Tomatoes and okra are frequent additions. And spices and herbs, including cayenne pepper, black pepper, bay leaves, thyme, sage, and oregano, are essential. Cajun and Creole recipes are Louisiana born but have French roots, Prudhomme writes in the book I mentioned above. Jambalaya might also remind you of Spanish paella.

The French Wikipédia article about jambalaya says the recipe might have its origins in Provence. The Cajuns are people who emigrated from France to eastern Canada and then were forced by the British to move on to Louisiana. They adapted old French recipes and traditional cooking methods to use North American ingredients. Now I'm adapting Cajun recipes to use French ingredients: smoked pork belly instead of tasso, for example, or other smoked sausages for andouille. Luckily, I can get everything else I need to make jambalaya, or the other Louisiana classic called gumbo, here in France — even okra nowadays. To make jambalaya, sauté the meats and vegetables with herbs and spices, add rice and broth, and bake the dish in the oven until the rice is cooked and the broth is absorbed. It's pretty simple, actually. And delicious.

I've been to Louisiana two or three times in my life. Once was back in the 1970s, when I drove down to New Orleans and Cajun country with a French woman I worked with at the University of Illinois. That was fun, because we spoke French together and when Louisianans heard us talking, they would often speak to us in French. If you go there speaking English, you might never hear Louisiana French. I went back to Louisiana in the 1990s and I made it a point to speak French with people, just to see if they would understand. Many did, but some just said they understood what I was saying but were apologetic for not being comfortable speaking French. For decades, schoolchildren in Louisiana were not allowed to speak French at school. Many never really learned the language, even though they heard their parents and grandparents speaking it at home.

An evening drive... to see the dentist

There were two big events yesterday at our house in Saint-Aignan. Walt cut part of the grass in the back yard. And I did some cleanup work around the garden shed, cutting back a lot of ivy that was trying to take over out there. It felt good to get something accomplished besides cooking and walking the dog.

Late in the day, I had to go see the dentist again. The temporary crown he put on one of my teeth last week, after I lost a old 50 year old filling, came unglued and fell off. He glued it back on. The drive to the dentist's office in the village of Luçay-le-Mâle (pop. 1,350) takes about half an hour each way. The appointment was for 6:30 p.m. and I got there early. Before going to the doctor's office, I had time to drive around the village a little and look for a vantage point from which I might be able to see the privately owned château there. CHM and I tried to find the château one day nearly 15 years ago, but without success. Here's a photo I just found on the internet:

Le château de Luçay-le-Mâle. Photo credit: http://www.all-free-photos.com

It took the dentist all of 10 minutes to glue the temporary crown back on. I have a follow-up appointment two weeks from tomorrow, and then a final appointment to complete this work a week after that. This has been going on for a month or so now. It's a long drive over to Luçay, on narrow, winding country roads, but the dentist is a good one, so it's worth it. It's not really easy to find a dentist within an hour of Saint-Aignan — at least not one who is accepting new patients.

I wish I had taken my camera with me yesterday, because there was a beautiful sunset as I drove back to Saint-Aignan between 7:00 and 7:30. The countryside is gorgeous, with bright green fields and a lot of trees covered in white, pink, or yellow blossoms. The temperature was about 15ºC (close to 60ºF) yesterday afternoon. By the way, the French government lifted the mask mandate yesterday except in hospitals and on public transit. The fact is, however, that the number of new Covid19 cases is on the rise again. People at the doctors' office were wearing masks, at least in the waiting room. I was too.

Laon : cathedral walk-through

Here's a last post (for now) featuring photos I took in Laon. I do hope to go back one day. I was thinking about CHM in this context. He was in his mid-80s — 86½, to be precise — when we took the trip to Senlis, Soissons, and Laon in June 2011. I'm not quite in my mid-70s right now, so I have time... assuming I can find a driver willing to take me there. Maybe by Sept. 5, 2035, driverless cars will be a reality.

     

  

     

Salad for a Sunday

It had been a long time since we'd eaten salad greens like frisée (curly endive) or scarole (escarole) instead of batavia (leaf lettuce) or laitue (Boston lettuce). One good way to serve and eat "bitter greens" is as a salade lyonnaise, a specialty of the city of Lyon which includes lardons fumés, croûtons, and egg(s). In this case, I found a nice-looking escarole at the market.

We had about a third of a French baguette «tradition», often called une tradition or even une tradi, left over from the day before. That's perfect for croutons. To be called "traditional" a baguette has to be made with flour that contains no additives whatsoever. The dough cannot be frozen at any point in the process, and the baguette must be made and baked in the boulangerie (bakery) where it is sold. Besides flour, the only ingredients are yeast, water, and salt.

We also had some smoked pork lardons in the refrigerator. Lardons (above) are chunks of pork breast or "belly" (poitrine de porc) and they are essential to French cooking.

They're not traditional, but we also had some leftover sauteed potatoes in the fridge, and I put those in too. The first step in making the salad is to sauté the pork lardons. Then you can sauté the croûtons in the same pan. If there's too much pork fat, spoon some out. If you need more fat in the pan, add some vegetable oil.

As for eggs for the salad, you have several options. Poached eggs are really good, but soft- or hard-boiled eggs will work too. I made neither this time. Instead, I just fried a couple of eggs "sunny-side up" on low heat. (The induction stovetop is great for cooking eggs this way because you can regulate the heat so easily.) Don't fry the eggs until the last minute. The dressed salad greens can wait.

Also, don't put the croutons in the salad until you've already dressed the salad greens. Use a good vinaigrette (vinegar, oil, and Dijon mustard). Toss the salad greens with it, and then put in the other ingredients. You especially don't want the croutons to soak up too much dressing and get soggy.

There you have it. Dressed salad greens (purists will tell you the best greens for this salad are dandelion leaves), crunchy croutons, and smoky bacon. And in my version, some sauteed potatoes. Put the egg on top. When you break the yolk of the egg it mixes with the salad dressing and other ingredients. Some good French cheese (Camembert, Brie, Saint-Nectaire, Roquefort) as a second course wouldn't be bad.

Laon : standing on animals

Does anybody know what the significance of having these carved figures

standing on the backs of animals is all about? I surely don't.

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This morning I came across a blog with many dozens of beautiful photos of the cathedral at Laon.

Laon : gros plans

I've been entertaining myself by working with photos I took in Laon to see what kinds of close-ups I can make out of them. Here are a few. All of them can be enlarged. Walt tells me he enjoyed a day trip to the town in 1981 or 1982, when he was spending a year in Paris. He and I went back there in 1994. The next and most recent visit for me was in 2011 with CHM. I need to go back again.

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