L'Auvergne: pre-departure events

It's been a week since we left the Auvergne and returned to the Touraine. And every day for a week, the same thought has crossed my mind. I want to go back to the Auvergne. It was so beautiful and we had such a good time.

Because of the intensely green landscape and the fog and low clouds, it was other-worldly. The land was hilly, even mountainous, and it was emerald-colored. The Touraine isn't exactly flat, but right now it is all parched brown or yellow. It's home, so it's normal now. But the Auvergne is exotic, seen (or remembered) from here.

A valley near the town of Salers in the Cantal

The day we left Saint-Aignan to drive down there, our friends were going in their rented car and we were going in our little Peugeot. We all got up fairly early and had some bread, croissants, butter, and jam for breakfast, with coffee. Walt and I were busy packing for the trip. But Evelyn, Lewis, and Linda, who had already been traveling for a few days, were able to pack up faster than we were.

At about 11:00, they said they were ready and they wanted to go into Saint-Aignan to see the château and the church before we started our journey. That sounded like a good idea. We said we would be along shortly, and we would just find them in the old town, which is pretty small.

The church and château in Saint-Aignan
reflected in the Cher River

Half an hour or so later, we were ready. We had the car all packed, the dog on the back seat, the food in the cooler, and the wine in the trunk. We had closed up the house, except for the garage door, which is the door we enter through when we come back home after driving anywhere. Walt took out his key to lock that door, and it wouldn't work. We fiddled with the key and the lock, cursing it, for what seemed to be ten minutes, with no luck.

"Well, we can't go if we can't lock up the house," Walt said. "We'll just have to stay in Saint-Aignan — or at least I will." We were both pretty stressed. I got out my key and tried to lock the door, but the mechanism was jammed. It seemed hopeless. We would have to call a locksmith, and that might take the whole afternoon. And then suddenly, when W. tried it again, it worked. Success! We were free to leave. We didn't know if we'd be able to get back in without breaking a window, but tough. We were going.

We drove the two miles to Saint-Aignan, and turned off the main street onto the little dead-end lane that runs past the front door of the church up to the base of the château. There they were. Linda hurried into the church to look around while Evelyn and Lewis came to talk to us.

More reflections

"Does Linda know to go down into the crypt to see the frescoes?" I asked. No, they said. "Well, let me run in and show her." They said they would wander back to their car, which was parked a few hundred yards up the street, in the town's biggest parking lot. I pulled off the street, alongside the church, blocking in a car that was already— and illegally, I'm sure — parked there. Walt was going to stay with our car anyway.

I showed Linda the 12th and 15th century frescoes in the crypt of the Saint-Aignan church. It only took a minute or two. At the top of the steps leading down to the lower level, there is a light switch to turn on all the lights down below. There's also a bulb there that gets turned on so you can tell whether the lights in the crypt are on or off. It wasn't shining, so I flipped the switch.

The old frescoes in the crypt of the church at Saint-Aignan
date from the 12th and 15th centuries.

As we started down the steps, I heard a voice — clearly an Englishman's — booming from below. "Have you thrown a switch up there? If so, you've turned off the lights. I'm in the dark!" I yelled out an apology and went back up the stairs to flip the switch again and turn the lights back on.

Having admired the frescoes, we exited the church. Linda walked ahead to join Evelyn and Lewis at their car. I started to back out of my improvised parking space. Now if you've spent some time in France, 7especially in Paris, you know that French drivers are not the world's most disciplined when it comes to parking their vehicles. They drive right up onto the sidewalks and leave their cars there, if they feel like it. The double-park. Parking spaces? Ha! Connais pas !

Short concrete posts installed in front of the church
to keep people from parking their cars there
I backed into one at the worst moment...

To discourage such wildcat parking, the French authorities often erect posts and bollards of different kinds along the edges of streets where they really don't want people to park their cars. Some are tall, and some are short. In front of the church at Saint-Aignan, they've put up low, thick concrete posts for this purpose. I knew there was one such post on the right side of my car, so I wanted to be careful not to scrape against it as I back out of the parking space.

I pulled forward to the left, maneuvered into a position from which I thought I could back straight out into the street before turning right to go down the hill, and I threw the Peugeot into reverse. I didn't exactly floor it, but I backed up without hesitation. And suddenly, there was a grinding crunch and the car stopped short. I had backed squarely into a concrete post that I couldn't see from inside the car and whose existence I hadn't been aware of! Merde !

The crash knocked my Peugeot's back bumper loose.

I wasn't sure at first if the car was still driveable. Walt and I got out to inspect the damage. The man whose car I had parked behind came along, and looked at it with us. "Everybody runs into those damned posts, since they put them up a couple of years ago. I've complained to the mayor, but they won't do anything about the situation," he told us. He said he thought the damage wasn't too bad.

The bumper was — still is, actually — detached from the fenders on both sides of the car, and the muffler and tailpipe seemed to be hanging at a funny angle. Nothing was scraping the back tires, however, so we drove up to the big parking lot where our friends had left their car. I told them what had happened and said I need to go see my mechanic before we hit the road.

L'église de Saint-Aignan

The mechanic's garage had clearly closed for lunch when we got there. It was maybe five past twelve. Luckily, one of the employees was just letting himself out. I accosted him and asked him if he might have time to look at my car for a minute to assure me it was safe to drive. He kicked the bumper, pulled it back into place, and verified that it was not at risk of falling off the car as we drove down the autoroute. He wished us a bon voyage and said he could re-attach the bumper when we got back to Saint-Aignan

We started our five-hour drive, with our friends following us in their car. We hadn't had any brunch or lunch and I was already hungry.

Monday: back to the Loire Valley

After our weekend of walking around the center of Paris and eating late dinners in crowded restaurants, the rhythm of our time together was getting ready to change radically. On Monday morning, I met Evelyn, Lewis, and Linda at the Avis agency at the Paris train station called Gare d'Austerlitz. They were renting a car, which we would drive down to Saint-Aignan.

The weather was beautiful (though that turned out not to last very long). We had an easy drive out of Paris, with Evelyn at the wheel and me navigating. About 2 hours out of the city, before we arrived at Orléans, we stopped at an autoroute service area and got ourselves a sandwich and a soft drink for lunch at a Boulangerie Paul.

Evelyn in a field of sunflowersnear Beaugency






Then we drove over to Beaugency and got off the autoroute. We found ourselves on narrow country roads, going toward Chambord to see the château there. We passed at least one field of beautiful yellow sunflowers, where we stopped on the side of the road and took a picture or two. Then we got lost in forests and little towns where there were absolutely no road signs at the crossroads and other intersections.

Loire Valley vineyards
in early September







With the help of a GPS system and a strategically placed road sign pointing to the town of Bracieux, which I am very familiar with, we finally found our way into the park that surrounds the Château de Chambord. We parked the car and took a walk around the château, stopping for refreshments at a café on the grounds. I bought a venaison saucisson — a dry sausage like a salami — from a vendor selling local specialties, for dinner.

Green (or white) Sauvignon grapes














By about 5:00 p.m., after a stop at the wine co-op in Saint-Romain to get a couple of boxes of the local vino for the Auvergne trip, we arrived at our house near Saint-Aignan. We took a walk through the vineyards with Callie and picked and ate some fat yellow plums off a tree out back. They were sweet and juicy, and Lewis went back for seconds before we retreated into the house. The sun was hot, and the ground was dry and dusty here in the Loire Valley this summer. We've still had hardly any rain since July 1.

Pink
Pineau d'Aunis
grapes













Dinner was rabbit rillettes that I made, a tomato salad with tomatoes from the garden, and a good grated carrot salad that Walt made. It was all light and refreshing. We sat out on the front terrasse — I call it "the deck," as if I were still in California — until nightfall, watching bats swoop low in the air around us. There was a full moon, and Jupiter was shining brightly in the southeastern sky. Despite doubts, everybody seemed to like the potted rabbit meat.

Blue grapes















Our plan was to get some good rest, arise at a reasonable hour, and pack up for the five-hour drive down to the Cantal département of the Auvergne région. Walt and I needed to pack not only our clothes but bed and bathroom linens for everybody, and a cooler full of food we could eat when we arrived at the gîte, or vacation rental house, in the village of Saint-Chamant, near Salers.

Purple grapes















Walt and I thought we might have some kind of brunch before noon the next day and then hit the road at about that time, when the roads would be uncrowded — all the French drivers would be either at home or in restaurants having lunch. Tuesday was going to be another long day on the road. We would be leaving wine country and arriving in cheese country — trading vines for cow pastures.

Sunday in Paris

I've gone into a lot of detail about that recent Saturday afternoon and evening I spent in Paris, just to try to give the flavor of that kind of adventure in the city. The fun is in the little memorable details. Things I didn't mention:

• The older (than us) Americans from New York that we met in the Luxembourg Gardens, who were talkative, laughing, and very spry. They took a group picture for us. The man warned us about pickpockets — his wallet had been "lifted" in the metro a day earlier.
• The young gay couple — one of the guys was our waiter — that we met at the café on the Place Dauphine, where Evelyn had her first-ever pastis. They had a 10-week-old Jack Russell Terrier that had to be one of the cutest puppies we'd ever seen and that we played with as we sat at our sidewalk table having a drink.
• The three honeymooning couples from North America we met along the way. They were basking in the glow of that beautiful weather in Paris at the end of August and enjoying the beauty of the city.
  
• The red-headed Breton woman selling her watercolor paintings on the Place des Vosges who talked with us for a while about the Auvergne and the Aveyron regions, where she had been on vacation for much of the summer. We were getting ready to go to the Auvergne.
• The African juggler on the Rue Mouffetard who amazed us with his dexterity and talent.

Lobby of the Hôtel du Panthéon

On Sunday, I met my friends over at the Hôtel du Panthéon and we decided to walk to the nearby markets at Place Monge and the Rue Mouffetard. They were feeling slightly jet-lagged still, and arriving back at their hotel at 1:30 a.m. after a day of strenuous walking and dining had taken its toll.

One of us really wanted a croissant and the bakeries around the Place du Panthéon all seemed to be closed on a Sunday morning. At the Place Monge market, a short walk from the hotel, there seemed to be only one vendor selling breads and pastries, and his croissants just didn't look right — they were gigantic and bready-looking.

A poster we noticed in the window
of a Paris bookstore

We walked quite a way down the Rue Mouffetard after rejecting those croissants, and we finally found some good-looking ones in a bakery there. Meanwhile, I got hungry and stopped to buy a piece of Cantal cheese in a fromagerie — in anticipation of our upcoming trip to the Cantal department in the Auvergne. I nibbled on it as we walked through the market street.

An old sign in the Musée Carnavalet

On a square at the bottom of the Mouffetard market, there was a little musical group playing accordeon music, and couples were dancing. It was very old-style Parisian and kind of hokey, but fun to watch anyway.

We sat down in a café for a cup of espresso and in the distance we could hear what sounded like a church choir singing hymns. That seemed unusual in Paris. But there was a church across the way. The café was bustling with people having either their breakfast or a pre-lunch apéritif.

How well-off people lived in Paris in past centuries
(and even now)

After that, we took a bus for a ways, and then we walked across the river into the Marais neighborhood. We wanted to go to the restaurant called L'As du Fallafel and have a fallafel sandwich. Many Americans who participate in travel forums on the Internet dealing with Paris and France rave about the sandwiches at L'As, as they call it.

The line was long but the wait was only about 5 minutes. It's a take-out place. I have to say the fallafel, served in a pita bread with cabbage salad (cole slaw) and hot harissa sauce, was really good. We carried the food over to the Place des Vosges and found a bench in the park where we could sit and eat our picnic lunch, taking advantage of the people-watching and warm sunny weather.

Portrait of an 18th-century Paris family

After lunch we spent an hour or two in the Musée Carnavelet, which is free and is the museum of the history of the city of Paris. There are replicas of rooms full of furniture from centuries past, a lot of old Paris street signs, and an extensive gallery of paintings — not to mention a nice garden.

It was getting close to dinner time. CHM was coming to the restaurant with us all, as was Claude of PhotoBlogging in Paris. Evelyn was looking forward to meeting both of them, and Marie, who already knew CHM, was happy to meet Claude, because they have mutual friends in the English-teaching profession. I was glad to be with a nice group of friends new and old.

Sculpted boxwood at the Musée Carnavalet in the Marais

For our Sunday dinner we had chosen the restaurant called La Fontaine de Mars, partly because it's the restaurant where Michelle and Barack Obama had dinner out when they were in Paris back in June. After the afternoon in the Marais, I went back to CHM's place at around 7:00 and he and I got a taxi over to the Fontaine de Mars, which is on Rue St-Dominique in the 7th.

The dinner was a lot of fun. There were seven of us around a big round table up on the second floor of the restaurant. Claude and I had salads of leeks in vinaigrette as our appetizers, and then Claude, Marie and I had a dish of boudin noir on a bed of sautéed apples. Boudin noir is called blood sausage or black pudding in English, and it was delicious with the apples and a salad of frisée lettuce — curly endive.

People waiting in line to buy a cone of
Berthillon ice cream on the Ile St-Louis

Others had other appetizers — I didn't take notes — and then some had the plat du jour, which was roast chicken with mashed potatoes, as their main course. Or fish. CHM had a light dinner of œufs en meurette — poached eggs served with carrots, onions, and pork lardons (bacon) in a red wine sauce. He said it was delicious.

We had much lively, even boisterous conversation about blogging, all kinds of technology from Kendalls to digital cameras to iPhones, and about life in Paris and our travels in France. As I said, it was a lot of fun and the food and wine were good. The evening was a great way to wrap up our weekend in Paris. Here's a link to a picture Claude took during dinner and posted on her blog.

Dinner at 10:00, and French in 10 hours

When we finally went upstairs at the Café Louis-Philippe for dinner, it was probably a little past 10:00 p.m. I had hoped we would be seated outside on the terrace, but the restaurant didn't take reservations for the outside tables. And they were all full. Going upstairs involved climbing up a very narrow, very steep spiral staircase inside the restaurant. That lent "atmosphere" to the experience.

There were six of us — Evelyn, husband Lewis, American friend Linda, French friend Marie, Marie's son, and me — and we were seated at a long table next to a window with a view, if you craned your neck just slightly, of the towers of Notre Dame across the river. The view of the actual Pont Louis-Philippe down below was also atmospheric.

Our restaurant experience was probably different from what it
would have been at the Tour d'Argent, but so surely were the prices!

The dinner, I have to say, was unremarkable. It wasn't bad, overall, but it wasn't anything to write home about, at least from my point of view. I did have a very nice salade frisée aux lardons topped with an œuf poché — nicely cooked white, perfectly liquid yolk. This kind of salad, a specialty of the restaurants of Lyon, I think, is a little like having bacon and eggs with a salad of curly endive. It is really delicious when it is well executed. This one was.

Marie had a filet de canard avec une sauce aux cerises — grilled duck breast with cherry sauce — and she said it was excellent. Her son had an entrecôte grillée — a grilled rib steak of beef — and I noticed that he finished it all; I was seated next to him. He did ask the waiter for a sauce to go with it, suggesting mayonnaise, and he got it (or maybe it was a pot of sauce béarnaise).

A painting we admired in a shop window on the Place des Vosges.
It was called « Un père et son enfant ».

Others ordered either duck breast or steak, and I'm not sure it was cooked enough for American tastes. But I can't affirm that. Maybe it was. Linda at first wanted bœuf bourguignon after I told her it was beef cooked in a red wine sauce with lardons and mushrooms, but when I talked to the waiter about it he said there were no mushrooms in the Louis-Philippe's version of the dish. I thought that was strange, and Linda was less interested in the bourguignon when she learned it was served sans champignons.

As a main course, I had the plat du jour, an estouffade de bœuf aux olives — beef stewed in a red wine sauce with olives. I liked the idea of having olives cooked in the sauce; cooked olives, green or black, are tasty. And these olives were good. The problem was that the meat was a little stringy and dry. I ate some of it, but mostly I enjoyed the olives, the red wine sauce with some bread, and the memory of the perfect salade aux lardons and the poached egg that I had enjoyed as a starter.

CHM and I had a discussion about questches on Saturday
— and ate some that I had brought to Paris from Saint-Aignan.
I saw these on the rue Mouffetard Sunday morning.
Quetsches [pronounced kwetch] are purple plums.

With all this food, we had a red wine from the Médoc region of Bordeaux. Marie's son, who is in his mid-twenties, wanted to choose and pay for the wine as his contribution to the evening. He talked to the waiter about the wine selection, and suddenly the waiter invited him to go down to the cellar with him to pick one out. I thought that was a nice way to do things, and I'm sure it was an enjoyable experience. The wine was very good. I have no idea how expensive it was.

The most memorable part of the evening was the waiter. He was a young Polish man who spoke nearly perfect French and nearly perfect American English. He had lived in Michigan for years, he told us, and attended both high school and college there. We talked about the Obama presidency and American politics in general. The waiter had definite, well-stated opinions. I won't go into the details, but it was all highly entertaining.

An old Renault 4 parked on the Rue de Vaugirard in Paris

Another area where the young waiter's opinions were clear was the question of languages. He said he spoke six or seven of them fluently. Polish, obviously, and Russian, which he said everybody in Poland learned along with German. French and English. That makes five languages. I don't remember what the others might have been.

The waiter lost me, however, when he proclaimed that it was very easy to learn a language like French. You can master French grammar in a matter of ten hours of study, he asserted. English grammar is easier, and you can learn that in six or seven hours. Either the man is a linguistic prodigy, or he is delusional!

A neighborhood grocery store in Paris

It was about a quarter past midnight when we left the restaurant. Marie used her mobile phone to call a taxi to take her back to the apartment where she was staying in the city. Her son had left a little earlier to go back out to his apartment in the Paris suburbs by public transportation. I wanted to get the metro back to CHM's apartment.

Evelyn, Lewis, and Linda weren't sure how they were going to get back to the Hôtel du Panthéon, but they didn't want to walk. They told me to go ahead so that I wouldn't miss the last metro train, and they waited with Marie for her taxi to come. I walked across the river and the islands to the Place Maubert in the Latin Quarter and caught the metro there. It's a direct line over to CHM's neighborhood. I got to his apartment at 12:45 and let myself in with the set of keys he had kindly lent me earlier in the day.

Also seen on the Rue de Vaugirard

The next day, I heard the rest of the story of the taxi and all. The Americans waited with Marie and the taxi finally arrived. When it did, two passersby spotted it, ran to the car, jumped in, and essentially "stole" it from its intended passenger. Marie had to call again, and again wait for 15 or 20 minutes, with her friends, for another taxi to show up. She got that one.

The American friends then walked over toward the Hôtel de Ville and the Place du Châtelet to look for a night bus back to the Latin Quarter. They asked a gendarme for directions to a bus stop, but then they got turned around and couldn't find it. They ended up in the Châtelet metro station again, and took the train back to the Luxembourg station, from where they had a short walk to the hotel up the Rue Soufflot. They didn't get back to the hotel until 1:30 a.m. and were pretty tired when I saw them again the next morning.

The Paris Métro experience

We had walked for three or even four hours. Paris was hot and dusty. Le Jardin du Luxembourg, Odéon, Le Pont Neuf, Place Dauphine, Notre Dame. Everybody was tired. We are all what the French call « seniors », after all. That part is hard to believe. The dictionary defines « les seniors » as "the over-fifties."

It was getting to be 7:15 p.m. or so and there we were standing on the sidewalk behind Notre Dame, looking at the permanent crowd gathered on the little footbridge that leads over to the Ile St-Louis. We realized that we needed to walk back up to the hotel on the Place du Panthéon before we went for dinner at the Café Louis-Philippe (which is right there across the river from where we were standing). Our reservation was for 8:00.

A statue in the Luxembourg Gardens, with its nameplate

So we walked up the hill — they call it the « Montagne » Ste-Geneviève, and it felt like a mountain at that point — back to the Panthéon. That trudge did some of us in. There is no practical way to take the metro or a bus from the Place du Panthéon down to the banks of the Seine at the Pont Louis-Philippe. We even asked the man at the hotel's front desk for advice. Walking was no longer an option.

We could take a bus over toward the Place de la Bastille, but then we'd have to get off that bus and get onto another one. The connection might take a while, especially on a Saturday evening, when bus service on some lines is reduced. Or we could take the metro from Luxembourg, a short walk from the hotel, over to Châtelet-Les-Halles. From there we could walk to the restaurant or change to the line that would take us to the Pont-Marie metro stop, the one closest to the Café Louis-Philippe.

Relaxing is not always an easy thing to do in Paris —
« relax&vous » is a pun on the expression « relaxez-vous »

We did that. It was an experience. Once we found the entrance to the RER/metro at Luxembourg — it's on the other side of the Boulevard St-Michel from where it used to be years ago, when I was a frequent metro rider — it only took five minutes to get to Châtelet, which is the central metro and RER hub for the whole city.

The Châtelet station was mobbed. I knew better than to pass through there, but after that forced march up the "mountain" an hour earlier, nobody was willing to go any farther on foot. Hoofing it would have been the most practical solution, and it is in fact all downhill from the Panthéon. But never mind.

At Châtelet, there were still two options: (a) go back up to street level and walk to the Café Louis-Philippe, or (b) make a connection to the metro line that goes to the Pont-Marie metro stop. Again, the consensus was that walking was not especially attractive. So we made the connection, with all that involved.

The Palais du Luxembourg, where the French Senate meets

I don't know if you've ever changed metro lines at Châtelet, but if you haven't, be prepared. The station is nearly always a zoo. That Saturday evening, with the beautiful weather, the whole population of Paris was out and about. And it was August 30, so there were many thousands of tourists everywhere, all lost and wandering around looking at the profusion of signs pointing to different metro lines going to different parts of the city and suburbs.

We joined the throng, located the signs pointing to our line (no. 7, direction Mairie d'Ivry/Villejuif), and headed off. The five of us managed to stay together, despite the pushing and shoving of the crowds, with people dashing in every direction to get ahead of somebody else. And we ended up walking farther underground, through endless tunnels and on a series of moving sidewalks, than we would have walked if we had gone up to the street and strolled on over to the restaurant.

Why the funny quotation marks?
Any idea what the word « Aviatic » means?

It was certainly a great cultural experience. Only two of us, Evelyn and I, have any real experience of the metro. We both worked in Paris many years ago and cherish memories of crowded stations, packed subway cars, and the general feeling of chaos and claustrophobia that the Paris metro inspires at rush hour or when their are strikes and slowdowns on the system. Our three companions had probably never imagined such a scene — not even Marie from Normandy, who was with us and who is French.

By the way, we were supposed to be meeting our Normandy friend Marie's son and cousins at the Café Louis-Philippe for a pre-dinner drink and social hour, and we were late. The son had called his mother on her mobile phone while we were still at the Hôtel du Panthéon to say he and his cousins were at the restaurant and waiting for us to arrive. Where were we? Well, we were late. In Paris, it seems, one is always late for something.

Besides, the son said, he had asked at the restaurant about our reservation for six for dinner, giving the name Marie had told him the reservation was made in. The restaurant staff said they did not have any such reservation on the books. Marie told her son to ask if there was a reservation in my name, Broadhurst, since I was the one who had called it in. Good luck! First of all, my name looks perfectly barbaric to anybody who speaks French but not much English. All those consonants! And that OA vowel combination — it doesn't exist in French. It's impossible to remember or pronounce.

The late Serge Gainsbourg, an icon of French pop music,

in a shop window in the Marais neighborhood

So as we rode the metro and pushed and shoved out way through the madding crowds at the Châtelet station, I kept asking myself what had happened to the reservation I had requested. I had telephoned the Café Louis-Philippe twice over the previous few days, from Saint-Aignan, and I was convinced my reservation had been duly noted and recorded. It was just one more thing to worry about, along with getting lost in the Châtelet confusion and being seriously late, as we made our way across the city center. What would we do if the restaurant was full and we didn't have a reservation?

We did finally arrive at the restaurant at about 8:30 p.m. And there had been a misunderstanding, but not between me and the restaurant staff. Our reservation was on the books. I never figured out why Marie's relatives got the wrong information. The restaurant staff had been kind enough to seat Marie's son and cousins — all in their 20s — outside at a table on the sidewalk, where they had started having their drinks without us. We joined them and the restaurant host said we could take our time and our table would be ready when we were.

We weren't "ready" until about 10:15. We had a nice conversation — or several of them — with the cousins and son, mixing French and English as best we could to understand one another. Marie's son stayed with us for dinner, which was obviously a late affair. Most of us were starving by then. More about that tomorrow...

Notes from a jailbird

Wait a minute now. I never said I got arrested in Paris. I just spent a night in a jail cell. French kindness was overflowing. And no, I didn't have to bust out. The authorities threw me out!

It was May 1, 1970. I was a student on a year-abroad program in Aix-en-Provence. The other students, from two different, well-known Southern U.S., robber-baron universities, were a great group.

The Tour St-Jacques and the Pompidou center seen from across the river

It was 1970, remember? On May 1 or 2, Simon and Garfunkel were giving a concert in Paris, at the Olympia theater. I had been to one of their concerts a year earlier in North Carolina, and it was a mind-blowing experience. I wanted to go to Paris for the S&G concert, and so did at least four other students on the program in Aix.

We were three women and two men. (Should that be "girls" and "boys"? We were all 20 or 21 years old.) We decided to hitchhike to Paris, because we didn't have much money and train tickets were expensive. Back then, we hitchhiked a lot. I did it in France but also in America. It was dangerous, I'm sure, but the hitchhikers I knew never had a big problem. One guy in N.C. waved a gun around at me once, but never mind...

Place Dauphine on the Ile de la Cité

Because there were five of us trying to get from Aix to Paris by thumbing, we split up into two groups. The other guy was going to hitch with two women, and the other woman and I were going to hitch together. She was from Chicago and went to the other university, not the one I went to.

We set out from Aix in the morning. I think Fran and I got one ride that took us for maybe 20 or 30 miles and then dropped us off, probably near Avignon. Then another driver picked us up. I don't remember him, really. But he took us all the way to Lyon, which was about half way to Paris. He was going to Paris himself, but at that point his car started acting up. He let us off and told us he was going to go to a garage and get the car fixed. If we were still there when he drove by again, he would pick us up. We were still there. No other rides had come along. The guy with the newly repaired car came along and, as promised, he picked us up again. And he drove us all the way to Paris. Our three other friends, by the way, never made it to Paris. They had to give up and stay in Aix that weekend.

French kids sail model boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Fran and I were dropped off in Paris -- near the Place de la Concorde, I think -- about 10:00 p.m. that night. We made our way over to the Latin Quarter to find a hotel room. I had spent two weeks in a little hotel near the Place Maubert in late March and early April that spring -- it was spring break. Fran and I went to that hotel, but there was no room at the inn. We wandered around the neighborhood until about midnight, from hotel to hotel, but in vain. We didn't know May 1 was such a big holiday in France. And it was a Friday night, after all.

Somewhere along the way, in the four months I had been in France, somebody had told me that the thing to do, if you were in a town and couldn't find a place to stay, was to stop a policeman and ask for assistance. So that's what I did. The agent de police told us to go the the poste de police at the Mairie du 5e on the Place du Panthéon and there they would help us.

Each Paris arrondissement has its own mairie, or town hall. This one is in the Latin Quarter.

We went there. And there the people at the front desk took our passports away and showed us to a cell. It was a concrete room with a glass front. In the glass was embedded something resembling chicken wire, as reinforcement. So you couldn't easily break out. All around the concrete cell there was a narrow wooden bench, attached by brackets to the walls. In one corner there was a toilet — a commode just sitting out in the open, with not so much as a partition or screen to hide it — and it flushed automatically every couple of minutes. I think we were in the drunk tank.

We had thought the police would know of a nice hotel in the neighborhood, with some vacant rooms. They would call the hotel for us, and give us the name and address. Maybe they would give us a ride to the hotel, because we were obviously tired. Ha!

I remember that there was a kind of big cage in the main lobby of the police station. In it were half a dozen people, and they were obviously either drunk or drugged up. It was scary. I guess we were lucky they didn't throw us in with that crowd.

Once 35 years ago I stayed at this hotel on the Place du Panthéon. The rooms were not much nicer than the jail cells across the street. Nowadays it's a three-star palace.

Fran and I made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the narrow wooden benches in our own private cell. We tried to sleep. We were locked in. The toilet kept flushing at regular intervals all night. And then at about 5:30 a.m. — the crack of dawn — a policeman came and opened the cell door, handed us our passports, and put us out on the street again. A new day had dawned.

We went back to the first hotel we had tried, and Mme Suzanne, the front desk clerk, had a room that had been or was going to be vacated. That night, Fran and I made our way to the Oympia theater, over near Opéra and Madeleine, and walked up the the ticket booth to see if we could get in to see Simon and Garfunkel. No problem. It was another great concert.

A day or two later, we took the train back to Aix. We had set aside enough money to buy those tickets.

A wild week, starting in Paris

It was. When you have become a complete homebody, a week during which you spend a couple of hot days in the center of Paris, eat dinner in two crowded Paris restaurants, ride subway trains, drive hundreds of miles, and discover a part of France that you had hardly ever seen before... well, that's wild.

I'm exhausted. But in a good way. The undiscovered part of France was the Auvergne, a mountainous area in the center of the country. We saw millions of cows, extinct volcanoes, waterfalls, and medieval villages and castles. It rained. We watched Cantal cheese being made on a farm, with milk from the afternoon milking. We ate a lot of Cantal cheese, and others. Oh, and I had a minor car accident.

The Panthéon, in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris

The Paris part of the trip was just two days. I left Saint-Aignan at about 8:30 on Saturday morning, a week ago, and arrived at the Gare d'Austerlitz at 11:45. I had a couple of tickets, so I just hauled my little rolling suitcase down stairs and escalators into the metro and caught a train over to CHM's neighborhood. It's a straight shot — no correspondances (line changes).

Our fine home-grown tomatoes and plums, which I had packed in a little cardboard box that fit inside my suitcase, made the trip just fine. CHM peeled them by dunking them in boiling water for a few seconds, and then sliced them up into a bowl. We had tomatoes with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, slices of ham with bread and butter, and part of a 1988 bottle of Côtes du Ventoux red wine for lunch. The weather was hot and sunny.

This was the amazing view from a friend's 7th-floor room
at the Hôtel du Panthéon in Paris. It had a great balcony.
That's Montmartre and Sacré Cœur in the distance.

Then I headed over to the Hôtel du Panthéon, in the Latin Quarter, to meet my friends who were staying there. We had three or four hours "to kill" before dinner at the Café Louis-Philippe, and we decided just to walk for a while. It was walking weather, though hot.

Saturday afternoon in the Jardin du Luxembourg

Our first leg was a stroll around the Jardin du Luxembourg. But before that we stopped in at the police station in the Mairie du Vème Arrondissement, right across the street from the hotel and the Panthéon. I had told Evelyn and our friends about the night I spent in a cell there in 1970 — it's a long story. They wanted to see the jail.

The Panthéon seen from the Luxemburg Gardens

We walked in and a woman in police uniform came out to greet us. I tried to explain why we were there. I said I had spent a night there 40 years ago. She said, no, that wasn't possible. I must be mistaken. Then I told her I spent that night in a cell. She laughed and said yes, this must be the place. We all laughed. She must have thought we were crazy.

After the Luxemburg Gardens, we walked over to the Place Dauphine on the Ile de la Cité. We were thirsty after an hour or so of walking in the hot, dusty parks and streets, so we sat down at a café. Evelyn ordered a Pastis, because she had never had one before (I think). Pastis is an anis-flavored drink that you mix with water. It's popular in Provence, when the weather is hot. It replaced absinthe when that drink was outlawed 100 years ago. I think Evelyn enjoyed it. I had a glass of Chablis (a Chardonnay wine from Burgundy).

The Paris Hôtel de Ville — city hall —seen from the Ile de la Cité

We walked all the way around the Ile de la Cité, through the flower and bird market, through narrow streets, around Notre Dame cathedral. The river was pretty and there were many people out doing what we were doing. Then we realized we needed to go back to the hotel to freshen up and pick up a few things before we went to dinner. It was getting late...

Samedi

On the road again. We'll be back in Saint-Aignan by nightfall.

These are pictures from 5 years ago. You turn around twice, look back, and realize 5 or 6 years just went by. Be back tomorrow...

As early as 2004, I wondered if anybody else in France
was growing collard greens. And why not?

Vendredi

Day 3 in the Cantal.

These are pictures from 5 years ago. You turn around twice, look back, and realize 5 or 6 years just went by. Be back soon...

2004 sunflowers and bees

The view from the kitchen window, August 2004

Jeudi

Day 2 in the Cantal.

These are pictures from 5 years ago. You turn around twice, look back, and realize 5 or 6 years just went by. Be back soon...

Stuffed summer squashes...

...and a tian of courgettes, aubergines, and tomatoes,
just right for the end of summer

Mercredi

Day 1 in the Cantal.

These are pictures from 5 years ago. You turn around twice, look back, and realize 5 or 6 years just went by. Be back soon...

Summertime 2004: blue skies over Saint-Aignan

Mardi

Leaving for the Cantal — Salers — today. We'll be on the road for 4 or 5 hours, headed south.

These are pictures from 5 years ago. You turn around twice, look back, and realize 5 or 6 years just went by. Be back soon...

Mirabelle plums...

...and wild blackberries

Summer 2004 was a lot like summer 2009.