It’s Monday morning and I am awake early in Provence. Paul and Annie have rented an old stone farmhouse in St. Remy de Provence for a week and we drove down from the Alps yesterday to stay the night here and visit. They have been in France for about 2 weeks already, most of the time in Nice and they went to Verona to see an opera. Laura is here too, but Matt and Vanessa are still in Nice with Annie’s sisters, coming today. Also here are Annie’s parents (who send their best to all), Annie’s cousin, Gil (owner of Gastro Louvre) and his wife Veronique (also an MD) and Gil’s mother, Nunu, who just lost her husband about two months ago. So we had a very full table at dinner last night!
The trip here was quite a driving adventure. We intended to leave Annecy about mid morning and finally got out around 11:30. First we had breakfast in the courtyard. The buffet breakfast (this time, not just coffee) is pretty spectacular. Different from a Hawaiian buffet breakfast. Baskets of breads, pastries (including pain chocolat) with a variety of jams. Also Nutella, which Emily has discovered tastes excellent atop a croissant. Then there was yogurt with an entire table of toppings of grains, seeds, nuts and dried fruit. Made for Marc. Some of the seeds we had never heard of and one of them even had a small grinder with it. We didn’t try that one. They also had an incredible cheese platter, a platter of charcuterie (avec cornichons) and if you want, they will bring you any type of eggs. We all had scrambled, which of course were very buttery and a bit runny for most of our tastes. Sarah polished off the entire bowl of eggs. The girls had hot chocolate and we had coffee. They also had bowls of fruit, which was go great. I hadn’t had a banana in awhile.
We checked out and set out for Provence. We had to get back up to Annecy and go down. Before we left the states, Marc had printed out the Michelin version of Map quest for our trips to Provence and Lyon. They were detailed, but unfortunately the numbers of the routes on the map don’t seem to always match the numbers (when they are posted) on the roads. We somehow got stuck in Annecy, trying to get on the road south. We could only get on the main road going north (toward Geneva). Some how we managed to do it and we were off. The drive should have taken about 3.5 hours but I think it took us over 5 hours. Much of the time we were on the major highway but we did go for sometime on the small parallel road and saw some incredible old farm towns and a lot of grass eating cows. This made Marc happy as he is reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma right now. After about 3 hours of driving we stopped in a small (very small) town of Montemilar. Turns out this is the Nougat capital of the world. Really. They even have a nougat museum, which, owning to the fact that it was Sunday, we were unable to visit. But we did stop in a gas station for a bathroom (where the girls were a bit freaked out by self cleaning toilet seats…they rotate after you are finished) and the minimart had a bar in it (seems like a particularly bad idea for a gas station off a major highway), and the girls had ice cream bars. We bought some nougat to bring to Paul and Annie (Marc reports that “when you get the real thing, from the nougat capital of the world, it doesn’t stick to your teeth!).
So we were off again, on the road to Provence. Most of the towns we went through were pretty quiet because it was Sunday, but they were small and exactly what you would think a small French farm town looks like. When we finally got closer, our directions failed us and we ended up in the town of St. Remy, but couldn’t find ANY of the streets on the map. We were wishing we had GPS (Marc had thought he had reserved a GPS system from Hertz, but in Annecy, was told by the same woman who couldn’t figure out how to open the trunk, that “This is not Paris, we do not have cars with GPS”). We didn’t really have a map of St. Remy and the streets were not wonderfully marked (and most one way), and they always seem to change name. The town is quaint, filled with people, a merry go round, lots of people, but we couldn’t find the street the map was telling us to turn on. Then, trying to adjust the air conditioning, I pushed a button that started the GPS! There was GPS after all. But then it started talking to us and we hadn’t given it any direction. All in French of course. We didn’t want to necessarily follow it, as we didn’t know where it was trying to take us, but if you can imagine how annoying it would be to be lost in a small town, know you are so close, but unable to get on the right road, to keep seeing the same shops, people and landmarks as you circle around and around and then on top of that to have some one giving you directions is French!!!
We finally broke down and called Annie and she came and met us in town and drove back with us. Not before Marc went down a small (and I mean small, now we know why they make such small cars in France) alley way, one way of course that dead ended in a T and we had to turn the car around (a nice sized, four door Peugeot) and some how get out and back on the street. He did it, but it was amazingly tight. It was a good thing that Annie came to meet us and lead us to the house, because the route was nothing we would have found independently and involved going down a one way street the wrong way.
We just rested for the rest of the evening. The girls played and we drank wine and had a lovely dinner outside on a big long table. We had a salad with tomatoes, beans and squash from Annie’s father’s garden outside Nice.
Today we plan to head down to Aix to have lunch with the Cohen’s. It’s about 45 minutes away (presumably), but I am a bit worried. Paul emailed that we should call him when we are close and he would come out to the road to guide us in….sounds familiar.
After lunch we plan to head up to Lyon (about 3.5 hours) and we will stay the night at a hotel near the airport so that we can catch an early plane to Venice on Tuesday morning.
The trip here was quite a driving adventure. We intended to leave Annecy about mid morning and finally got out around 11:30. First we had breakfast in the courtyard. The buffet breakfast (this time, not just coffee) is pretty spectacular. Different from a Hawaiian buffet breakfast. Baskets of breads, pastries (including pain chocolat) with a variety of jams. Also Nutella, which Emily has discovered tastes excellent atop a croissant. Then there was yogurt with an entire table of toppings of grains, seeds, nuts and dried fruit. Made for Marc. Some of the seeds we had never heard of and one of them even had a small grinder with it. We didn’t try that one. They also had an incredible cheese platter, a platter of charcuterie (avec cornichons) and if you want, they will bring you any type of eggs. We all had scrambled, which of course were very buttery and a bit runny for most of our tastes. Sarah polished off the entire bowl of eggs. The girls had hot chocolate and we had coffee. They also had bowls of fruit, which was go great. I hadn’t had a banana in awhile.
We checked out and set out for Provence. We had to get back up to Annecy and go down. Before we left the states, Marc had printed out the Michelin version of Map quest for our trips to Provence and Lyon. They were detailed, but unfortunately the numbers of the routes on the map don’t seem to always match the numbers (when they are posted) on the roads. We somehow got stuck in Annecy, trying to get on the road south. We could only get on the main road going north (toward Geneva). Some how we managed to do it and we were off. The drive should have taken about 3.5 hours but I think it took us over 5 hours. Much of the time we were on the major highway but we did go for sometime on the small parallel road and saw some incredible old farm towns and a lot of grass eating cows. This made Marc happy as he is reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma right now. After about 3 hours of driving we stopped in a small (very small) town of Montemilar. Turns out this is the Nougat capital of the world. Really. They even have a nougat museum, which, owning to the fact that it was Sunday, we were unable to visit. But we did stop in a gas station for a bathroom (where the girls were a bit freaked out by self cleaning toilet seats…they rotate after you are finished) and the minimart had a bar in it (seems like a particularly bad idea for a gas station off a major highway), and the girls had ice cream bars. We bought some nougat to bring to Paul and Annie (Marc reports that “when you get the real thing, from the nougat capital of the world, it doesn’t stick to your teeth!).
So we were off again, on the road to Provence. Most of the towns we went through were pretty quiet because it was Sunday, but they were small and exactly what you would think a small French farm town looks like. When we finally got closer, our directions failed us and we ended up in the town of St. Remy, but couldn’t find ANY of the streets on the map. We were wishing we had GPS (Marc had thought he had reserved a GPS system from Hertz, but in Annecy, was told by the same woman who couldn’t figure out how to open the trunk, that “This is not Paris, we do not have cars with GPS”). We didn’t really have a map of St. Remy and the streets were not wonderfully marked (and most one way), and they always seem to change name. The town is quaint, filled with people, a merry go round, lots of people, but we couldn’t find the street the map was telling us to turn on. Then, trying to adjust the air conditioning, I pushed a button that started the GPS! There was GPS after all. But then it started talking to us and we hadn’t given it any direction. All in French of course. We didn’t want to necessarily follow it, as we didn’t know where it was trying to take us, but if you can imagine how annoying it would be to be lost in a small town, know you are so close, but unable to get on the right road, to keep seeing the same shops, people and landmarks as you circle around and around and then on top of that to have some one giving you directions is French!!!
We finally broke down and called Annie and she came and met us in town and drove back with us. Not before Marc went down a small (and I mean small, now we know why they make such small cars in France) alley way, one way of course that dead ended in a T and we had to turn the car around (a nice sized, four door Peugeot) and some how get out and back on the street. He did it, but it was amazingly tight. It was a good thing that Annie came to meet us and lead us to the house, because the route was nothing we would have found independently and involved going down a one way street the wrong way.
We just rested for the rest of the evening. The girls played and we drank wine and had a lovely dinner outside on a big long table. We had a salad with tomatoes, beans and squash from Annie’s father’s garden outside Nice.
Today we plan to head down to Aix to have lunch with the Cohen’s. It’s about 45 minutes away (presumably), but I am a bit worried. Paul emailed that we should call him when we are close and he would come out to the road to guide us in….sounds familiar.
After lunch we plan to head up to Lyon (about 3.5 hours) and we will stay the night at a hotel near the airport so that we can catch an early plane to Venice on Tuesday morning.
posted by csmcid at 11:02 AM
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