Colorful contrasts to all the white snow

Here are some pictures that will stand in contrast to the nearly monochrome images I posted of yesterday's snow. The day before yesterday, I noticed that our Christmas cactus (schlumbergera) — I might now call in my birthday cactus, and I see that it is also known as an Easter cactus — was in full bloom. It deserved some pictures.



We also have a new orchid — a gift from our friend who is now in the clinic, recuperating from her attack. She bought it for us to thank us for driving her back and forth to the hospital in Blois back in January, when she was having a series of tests done. There's an orchid greenhouse in the town of Contres, just 10 miles north of us.

And here's one more plant, a peace lily that our friends Geri and Phil from SF gave us in 2003. They were the first people to come visit and stay with us after we arrived in France. The peace lily (spathiphyllum wallisii) flowers in late winter and early spring.

Oh, and here's a cyclamen that I bought at a nursery last year. After a summer of dormancy, it came back this winter and has produced a lot of flowers.

To go with today's dinner of venison and Yorkshire pudding, I made a pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. I found a fresh pineapple at the Ed supermarket, and I used a recipe from this blog, which is a great food site. I didn't have brown sugar, so I used French sucre de canne (what I would call raw sugar) instead. The proof of the recipe will be in the eating, which we will put off until after lunch.

I actually ended up with two cakes, because I used a slightly smaller cakepan than the recipe called for. There was plenty of pineapple, plenty of caramel, and plenty of batter to make the two cakes.

The snow is starting to melt. The sun is shining brightly this morning. We're hoping to be able to drive on the little roads out through the vineyards later this morning. There's a good bakery up there that makes bread in wood-fired ovens.

The back yard again, in sunshine

A cushion of snow sitting on top of our bay laurel hedge

A rouge-gorge (European robin) looking for food in the snow

A Saturday surprise

Back yard at La Renaudière on March 4, 2006, 7:30 a.m.

The linden tree in the back yard

It's a surprise because yesterday it was downright warm (okay, only 12ºC, or 54ºF) in comparison to the temperatures we've experienced for the past 6 weeks or so. I just calculated our average high temperature for January and February 2006 and it came to 5.7ºC.

We had a few 10º days in January, and a couple of 11º days in the middle of February, so yesterday's 12 is our high temperature for the year so far. I have to say, though, that we haven't had any days when the temperature stayed below freezing. We've had snow more frequently this winter than we did during the last two, but we haven't had any significant accumulations.

View from the kitchen

The neighbor's house, hidden by frosted trees

On France Inter radio this morning I heard a report about driving conditions in the Alps. They said travel was difficult and the roads were slippery malgré le ballet des chasse-neige. At least that's what I understood: "the ballet of the snow chasers" — that is, the dance of the snowplows. Nice image, if I understand it correctly. The only problem is that there's another French word, balai, that's pronounced the same as ballet and means broom.

That in turn reminds me of a French professor I knew back in Illinois who said that when he was a little boy, he heard that people were going to Paris to see les ballets russes. He understood balais russes and wondered why people would go all the way to Paris to see some Russian brooms.

Kitchen window view

On the radio, they are calling this the winter that just won't quit (l'hiver qui n'en finit pas). It's now mid-morning and it's still snowing. It's starting to melt, I think. We are hoping the heavy wet snow won't take down any tree branches in the yard, or cause a power failure.

Our new British friends called yesterday and invited us to lunch tomorrow. Janet is going to cook a roast leg of venison en croûte. She and David live only about a mile from us, so we should be able to get to their house, even if the snowplows don't give a performance at Saint-Aignan and we have to walk. The special Sunday dinner is a nice birthday dinner for me, coincidentally. Tomorrow I celebrate my 57th. It's hard to believe.

Aiguevives abbey near Montrichard

Prelude: Here's the full-size version of the Blois panorama I tried to post yesterday. Click the thumbnail to display the full-size view and then use the horizontal scrollbar to pan across the whole picture.

Panorama of Blois taken from the south bank of the Loire river

Yesterday afternoon I went to see the ruins of an old abbey church called Aiguevives, near Montrichard. (I was on my way to visit the friend who had that attack last month when we were driving to Blois. She was in the hospital for more than two weeks, and now she is going through a month of rehabilitation in a clinic in Montrichard. She seemed to be doing well yesterday. Her daughter was there when I was. They had just come in from taking a walk around the grounds of the clinic.)

Aiguesvives abbey wasn't a spectacular sight but I took some pictures of it and other things. First, here's the church, built in the 12th century and pillaged during the Revolution at the end of the 18th.

Aiguevives abbey near Montrichard

The old church is in a nice setting, down a dead-end road a couple of miles from the highway and in a forest. There's a big house (it might even qualify as a château or at least a manoir or manor house).

The big house across the road from the Aiguevives church

The people who live there keep horses and other animals. When I stopped the car to take a picture of the church from a distance, two of them came running over to see what I was up to.

The steeple of Aiguevives church is visible in the background

And these two were in an enclosure on the opposite side of the little road.

Horses at Aiguevives

Here's a picture just to give you an idea of what the countryside south and west of Saint-Aignan looks like. It's rolling hills with forested areas and a lot of open fields where crops including canola, sunflowers, and wheat are grown.

A route départementale south of Saint-Aignan in Touraine

Finally, here are a couple of pictures of the old town in Montrichard. The old castle keep dominates the town's main shopping street and the banks of the Cher river.

Montrichard, 10 miles south of Amboise

The Hôtel Bellevue is a much more recent building that sits right on the banks of the Cher and on the edge of the old town. Those are pigeons roosting on the roof, I believe.

The Hôtel Bellevue in Montrichard

Lunch in Blois

Over the weekend Mme V. called and invited us to come for lunch on Wednesday at her new apartment in Blois. Mme V. is the woman who recently sold her house in the country to friends of ours from California. We met her last September, and this was the first time she had invited us over to her place. She had lived in the country, 10 miles south of Saint-Aignan, for eight years, after a career in the Paris area. She decided last year to leave the country, where she was lonely, and move to the “city.”

To my eyes, Blois doesn't really qualify as a city. It is a large town, population 75,000 or so. That said, it is the biggest town in our département, and is the administrative capital.

Panorama of Blois taken from the south bank of the Loire river
(click on the picture to see a larger view)

We drove up to Blois yesterday morning. Weather reports called for snow, but it was bright and sunny when we left Saint-Aignan at 11:00 a.m. We stopped at the Intermarché in Contres to fill the fuel tank and buy a bouquet of flowers to present to Mme V. when we arrived at her house.

It takes about 45 minutes to drive to Blois from our house. It’s only 25 miles, but you have to drive through the middle of several towns and villages along the way — Saint-Romain, Couddes, Contres, Cormeray, and Cellettes — so it’s slow going. There always seems to be some road works project going on as well, so that slows you down.

An old half-timbered house near the cathedral and,
below, architectural details from the same house

The town of Saint-Romain, a wine village, has been redoing its main street for more than a year now, putting in stone curbs and dozens and dozens of head-in parking spaces along the road. It’s a small village with no tourist attractions or supermarkets, so I don’t know who they think will ever park there.

Contres is a town (population 3,000, maybe) with a very narrow main street that is also the highway to Blois. If two big trucks try to pass at the same time, the roadway is too narrow and sometimes one driver has to back up and let the other pass through the narrow section before he can proceed. It happens more often than you’d think, and it ties up traffic for a few minutes. There is no bypass around the town.

Central Blois, with the cathedral dominating the old town.
By afternoon, clouds had rolled in and there were snow showers.

In Cellettes, closer to Blois, there’s a big canvas banner strung across the road with a message saying that 15,000 vehicles pass through there every day and demanding that a bypass be built to take traffic out of the center of the town.

Anyway, we made it to Blois in the usual amount of time. There’s a big road construction project going on there too, on the east side of town, which is how we get into town. That is another bottleneck.

La Cathédrale St-Louis à Blois

Mme Vallée lives near the cathedral in the old part of Blois. We hadn’t been to her apartment before. She just moved in December. I wasn’t sure what kind of building it would be. Somehow I had in my head that it would be a modern apartment in a fairly new building. But it wasn’t. It’s a nice old stone building, as you can see in the pictures posted here.

We parked near the cathedral, at the top of the hill, at noon. We hadn’t studied the map carefully enough, and we ended up walking down the wrong street, all the way to the bottom. We realized our mistake and had to walk all the way back up on a steep, cobblestone street.

This is the street we had to walk up after we got lost.

Mme. V. has a very nice old apartment. From the living room window, there’s a fine view out over the rooftops of the old town, down to the Loire and the town’s old bridge. The window faces south, so it’s very bright, and you can see the horizon on the other side of the Loire, which is nice.

The view from the living room window in the apartment

There were four of us for lunch. Mme V. had invited a friend named Mireille who lives near Montrichard but is thinking about selling her house and buying one in Chinon, on the other side of Tours.

This is the building our friend's apartment is in

We had a kir as an apéritif before Mme V. served lunch. Lunch itself started with an appetizer of céleri rémoulade (shredded celery root in a mustard sauce) and sliced avocados. The main course was braised beef with mushrooms and potatoes. Then came salad and a couple of cheeses (one a local goat cheese, the other a comté or gruyère from the Alps). Dessert was an apple tart Mme V. made. She spread some cherry preserves over the top to glaze the apples. It was all very good, I thought. Oh, and the wine was a 1993 St-Emilion from the Bordeaux area. We had coffee after dessert. This was a very typical French meal.

Mme V. seems happy in her apartment, and it is beautiful, but she says she misses being in the country. In Blois, she says, she can walk to the cinema, as well as to a couple of theatres to see plays. She can also walk to the train station and catch the train to Paris, which is less than two hours distant. She has children and grandchildren who live there, near Vincennes. Her daughter-in-law is American.

Blois is an old royal town. There is an enormous château, which was built over the centuries and includes buildings and wings in a variety of architectural styles -- medieval, Gothic, Renaissance, and Classical. The cathedral was almost completely destroyed by a violent windstorm in 1678, according to the Michelin Guide, and rebuilt in Gothic style. City hall and a big rose garden are located just behind the cathrdral, and from there you get great views of the town and the river.

The Eglise St-Nicolas and an old convent on the banks of the Loire in Blois

I’m just starting to discover Blois, after living here for nearly three years. Up to now, it has seemed to me to be a large town with all the disadvantages of a city -- traffic, mainly -- but few of the advantages. Maybe it’s because our trips to Blois often involve going to the train station on the edge of town to pick people up or drop them off, to the police headquarters to get our residency papers, to the big shopping center in what is charmingly called the zone industrielle south of town, and to the hospital to visit friends who are ill. And just getting to Blois sometimes feels like a chore, as I described above.

Last August we had lunch with our other friends who live in Blois but own the house across the street from us. They took us on a walk around the old town in the afternoon. I was surprised to see the steep old cobblestone streets and the panoramic views. We also had a very nice Thanksgiving dinner at another friend's house in Blois. The town has a lot more charm than I had realized.