The Lune de Miel continues...Enjoy

Day 3

10:00
We check out of our hotel, even though it is our honeymoon, and wander two blocks to another one. We spend the morning poking around a weekly market in Arles. Many of the cities and towns in France have market days when vendors of all types set up shop. There is an amazing array of foods – lovely moldy cheeses, oysters, baskets of spices, and olives – plus textiles and other things. We attempt to buy oysters and have them opened right there but alas, that is not allowed. We buy some presents and some olives for a snack.

12:00
We consult the guide book and find out that we are supposed to be looking at a Cloister. We look at it from the outside. We go into a church next door. It’s a nice church. We decide that it’s time to go to a winery.

2:00
We are on the road to the winery. We have about four different useless maps. This exact journey, from the center of Arles, to a small farmhouse where they make what is supposed to be terrific wine, is rumored to be about two miles. It is the worst marked journey in France, and we drive around a lot before finding a store (more presents for…somebody else) where we get more directions. It’s about half a mile from the store.

2:02
We know we’re lost. We retrace our steps.

2:15
We find the winery. They seem to be using the same HVAC consultant as the Palace of Popes. Plus, the wine is awful. While the proprietor is helping another customer, we quickly say “merci” and run away.

3:00
We return to the hotel to drop off all of your presents and, since it is well past lunch, begin to think about dinner. We decide to return to St-Remy and eat in a Corsican restaurant that we had skipped on the first night.

6:00
Opie is hungry. We fill the tank of our economy car: 37 Euros. Essex County has this one on France. This must be how they pay for all those road signs. Or maybe with the tolls.

6:30
Back in St-Remy, we find the restaurant and set out to make a reservation. A small glitch involving a preposition leads the restaurateur to believe that we want a reservation for many people: seven and a half, to be exact. He is, understandably, confused. He tells us that there is no room. Since the place is completely empty, we are confused and ask again. He asks a question that contains the word “enfant” and Leah figures out that he thinks we want to bring a child (the half perhaps). We manage to communicate that there will no children, only the two of us and slowly, we move down the road toward understanding. He is more than happy to reserve a table for us for seven-thirty and after asking our names, tells us that he has an American friend named Lee.

6:40
We walk around the town for a while buying more of you more presents. You’re going to love this stuff; we promise.

7:30
We return to the restaurant, which is called L’Assiette de Marie and is full of antiques and interesting decorations. We order dinner and a half-bottle of wine. We forget to mention that it is our honeymoon. The waiter returns to inform us that they are out of half-bottles and that we will be receiving a full bottle for the price of a half. The French are redeemed.

8:00
Food arrives. Corsican food is part Italian, part Provencal, part French, and so there is a lot of cheese everywhere and confits of everything that isn’t nailed down. There is also duck, lamb, tomatoes, cumin, zucchini, and chocolate cake. Everything is delicious. We have not been so full in two days.

Day 4

10:00
Feeling a pang of guilt about having started to discuss dinner over breakfast, we decide to atone by seeing some real sites today. We are leaving Arles, and we need to finish the day in Toulouse, about three hours East, but we are going to pack in as much Provence as we can.

11:00
We drive out of Arles and towards Les Baux, which is a little town built into the side of a mountain. The views are excellent and all one need pay for here is parking. Aside from dynamite vistas of mountains, streams, little towns, and vineyards, though, Les Baux is pretty much a tourist trap. Face out and it’s terrific. Face the town itself and you want to turn around again. We focus on the view.

12:30
We decide to leave and head for a very, very old Greek and Roman ruin called Glanum. Not a very French sounding name, but French it is.

1:30
We reach Glanum and park, like everyone else, on the side of the highway. We get some maps and begin to take in the ruins. The ruins are, as promised, very old and interesting - to a point. It’s pretty amazing to think about how old these structures are but as they are ruins, it’s difficult to picture what the whole thing actually looked like.

1:33
Leah begins talking about where we might go for lunch.

1:45
We find a small hill to climb, from which we can see all of Glanum. Yet another good view.

3:00
We’re on the road for Châteauneuf-de-Pape. We have heard good things about the wine in these parts. We drive up to a winery with an advertisement on the road. There are cars in the driveway. Good sign. There are also about seven pairs of shoes on the front step. We realize that the cars belong to the people who live there, and that those people aren’t answering the door on a Sunday afternoon. They’re inside, hanging around barefoot.

3:15
We find the “downtown” and walk into a bar. We ask about eating. The bartender laughs and says doesn’t even have any bread to give us. We decide against making any attempt to work, "Let us eat cake," into the conversation. Apparently, Châteauneuf-de-Pape pretty much shuts down during the winter. “Go to Orange,” he says. He does not mean Orange, New Jersey.

3:20
We wander into a basement wine store where there are tastings. We point and gesture and say enough words that the woman figures out that we want to taste the famous wine. Lune de miel is among the words. It seems to have no effect. We decide to buy some of the wine, at which point we decide, given the prices, that it would be worth a second effort to get free honeymoon wine. We work lune de miel into the “conversation” as much as we can. She gets very excited and congratulatory. “Soon, a baby?” she says. We pay retail for the wine.

4:00
We’re in Orange, looking for food. Nearly everything here is closed, too, but we find a kebab stand. The Turkish men who own it are excited to meet Americans, because they have a friend in American and they will be going to visit her in the summer. “San Diego, San Diego,” they say. “California, Las Vegas. Vegas!” They produce an envelope with a letter from their friend. The return address is Smyrna, Georgia. We finish our kebabs and wish them bon chance in Vegas, then drive to Toulouse.

9:00
We arrive at the Hôtel Albert I, which is quite nice, very reasonably priced, and staffed with extremely helpful people. One of them locks herself out of the room next to ours - while standing on the balcony, cleaning the windows - on the first morning we are there. She climbs over a little fence and knocks on our window, which is something of a surprise, to say the least. We let her in and, wordlessly, she goes through our room and out the door. Later, when she has composed herself, she will explain the whole story.

9:15
We strike out to find cassoulet. For weeks, we have been talking about cassoulet. When we told Gloria that we were excited for cassoulet in France, she scoffed. “The best cassoulet is here in Barcelona,” she said, before adding a quick concession. “Or in Castelnoudary.” It arrives in a huge bubbling ceramic dish, about a thousand degrees. There’s duck in there. And sausage. And more duck. And…a sort of round gelatinous thing. Hmm…could it be? Yes – a pig’s ear! More lune de miel luck. We also have a salad with hot foie gras. No two foods could be more opposite: lettuce and foie gras. But they are meant to be together.


Day 5

1:00
Having eaten a breakfast of nutella and some other things, we take Opie to Albi. Somehow we had gotten it in our heads that we needed to see the Toulouse-Latrec Museum. We decide to take the back roads and immediately wind up behind a house. Yes, a house. On a truck, but a house all the same. It is driving about as fast as you might imagine a house could go. The countryside is beautiful but the trip becomes dull. We switch to the highway.

3:00
We’re in the museum. Now we remember what Toulouse-Latrec paintings look like. They mostly look like you were looking at a cartoon of the Moulin Rouge, whatever that is, and a woman in black stockings and a blue hat with a big feather stepped right in front of you. But, ok, we’re in the man’s hometown. He deserves our respect.

3:20
After walking as slowly as possible through the rooms, we reach the end of the collection. Leah decides to enjoy the Toulouse-Latrec Comfortable Red Couch in the second of the four rooms, and Dan decides that seeing the entire collection again will make it worth six Euros. It works. The building and grounds of the museum are beautiful and we spend some time walking around. We leave and go to a fancy tea restaurant.

7:00
We’ve thoroughly researched Toulouse’s restaurants, and we’re having oysters tonight. They’re different from oysters in the US. They’re more…European. We order six and our waiter tries the hard sell. All around us, tables of people on holiday are ordering thirty and forty oysters at a time. “Six each?” he says. We stick. Then, later, we order six more. They are very good oysters. The only problem is our inability to ask for horseradish. If you can come up with a good way to order “horseradish” with only gestures and the words, “Je parle un petit peu de Francais”; “tres bien”; “pamplemousse”; and “Je me souviens,” then you can have one of the presents we bought.

9:00
Oysters do not a dinner make. We head back to the cassoulet restaurant for real food. We ask for a wine recommendation. They are confused. “This is France,” says the waiter. “All the wine is good.”

But you must like something better than something else, we say. He isn’t budging. He wants our order. After we order our food, he instructs us which wine will go best with our meal. He does not ask us if we want it, he just tells us what we are going to get. This is France. We happily overeat yet again.

Day 6

10:00
It is time to go home. We cannot eat any more liver. But cheese is a different story. We go to the big market on Rue Victor Hugo and ask a cheese man about cheese. In a moment of brilliance that would make Monsieur Richardson (Leah’s high school French teacher) beam with pride, Leah declares “J’adore fromage” (I love cheese) and manages to ask for a recommendation. We settle on a wonderfully melty-looking brie and a muenster. We are a little nervous about that one. Who hasn’t already had muenster cheese. It’s a little boring, no? Leah asks if it is strong, wanting to make sure that we have not been mistaken for cheese wimps. The cheese man assures us that it is strong and very good.

12:00
We pack up Opie with the cheese and a baguette and leave Toulouse for Carcassone, another old walled city. When we pull in the parking lot, it begins to pour. We decide that it would be a good time for lunch. We discover that French muenster is nothing like the orange-sided stuff of school lunches. It is a very good lunch.

1:00
The rain stops and we enter Carcassone over a drawbridge. There are many, many stores selling armor, plastic swords, and postcards with pictures of Carcassone. We walk around, trying to find our way onto the one thing we really want to see: the outside wall. Inside, it’s just winding streets with shops, but from the wall you can see for miles.

2:00
It’s impossible. The wall is closed in the winter, it’s closed on New Year’s Eve, it costs money to enter. We give up and head back to find Opie.

2:15
The streets are more winding than we remember.

2:25
We make our way out. Just before the drawbridge that takes you to the parking lot, we find the access to the wall. Very nice views, just like we thought.

2:33
Opie is on his way to Barcelona.

4:30
We cross the border into Spain. This time, no one is staffing it.

6:00
We pay our last toll: 9 more Euros.

6:30
We refill the tank: 22 more Euros. Compared to France, Spain is a gasoline-buyer’s paradise. Have you ever saved 15 dollars on a tank of gas? That’s how we’re looking at it.

7:30
We take Opie home. Of course, the rental car place is closed. We call the main office. No answer. We call the 24-hour emergency helpline. No answer. Hey, it’s New Year’s Eve. We call the airport office. They tell us to leave it by the curb and put the keys in the mailbox. No problem. Somehow, they must know it’s our honeymoon.