The young company Covoiture-Art.com offers “cultural ride-sharing,” a way of taking a daytrip to a monument, museum or heritage site if you need a ride to get there or if you have wheels and would like company.

Still in its infancy, Covoiture-Art.com has yet to reach the critical mass of offer and demand that would ensure frequent connections between drivers and passengers, but it has slowly garnered interest. While drivers and passengers have been signing up around the country, initial interest is greatest in northern France and the Paris regions.

Those sharing a ride may or may not end up visiting a monument at the same rhythm, but a Covoiture-Art destination is more than just a point on the map. Having agreed to take a round-trip together to a cultural destination, there’s likely to be greater bond beyond driver and passenger(s) than with a classic ride-share.

A typical trip is 30 to 90 minutes from the starting point, at a round-trip cost of 6 to 8 euros, more if involving toll roads. Of that, Covoiture-Art.com takes 1.90€, inlcuding tax. Partnerships with some museums and monuments provide reduced-price admission to those arriving via Covoiture-Art.com.

Covoiture-Art was born out of a fortuitous encounter during a classic ride-share. In 2013, Thibault Denis du Péage, a young jurist with a degree in public law, packed up his car to move to Lille from Paris. His luggage left room for one passenger so he offered the seat on a ride-share site and was soon picking up his passenger Adalaïs Choy, a young woman from Lille with plans to enter the Ecole du Louvre.

Getting stuck in heavy traffic turned what would normally be a 2½-hour drive into a 5-hour slog, which might have been more annoying for both of them had it not given them the time to discover their shared interest in starting a company involving in culture. By the time they reached Lille they were ready to partner for an adventure in cultural ride-sharing. They founded Covoiture-Art.com the following year, while continuing to pursue their respective careers.

Denis du Péage anticipates that further investments will increase public awareness of the site and the concept. He says that the site, currently in French only, will soon have an English-language version.

Asked of it could be awkward for both parties if either the driver or the passenger is less than fluent in French, Denis du Péage says, au contraire, that those French who are curious about culture and heritage are often also curious to meet foreigners and happy to share with them the treasures of France.

Covoiture-Art.com, www.covoiture-art.com.

© Gary Lee Kraut

This article first appeared in The Connexion.

The post Covoiture-Art Offers Ride-Sharing with a Cultural Twist appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Over equal distances, those differences are naturally less remarkable in the U.S. due to a briefer, more uniform history, a common language, and the ease with which citizens move and immigrants arrive.

Furthermore, we tend to approach American regions from the air rather than from the ground, leading us to think of major cities as hubs rather than an old center of regional civilization.

In December I took the one-the-ground European-style approach to touring during a week-long road trip from New Jersey to Florida, with stops at Philadelphia, Richmond, Raleigh, Charleston, Savannah, and Orlando before arriving in south Florida.

I logged about 1400 miles. In terms of distance that’s like going from Amsterdam to Lisbon, with overnights in Brussels, Paris, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Salamanca, and Porto. Imagine! (In terms of the cost of gas and tolls, you wouldn’t even get through France.)

New Jersey to Florida may sound less exotic than Amsterdam to Lisbon, but a road trip is a road trip, especially when going it alone. And I had mission—in addition to seeing people along the way (an old friend, a younger brother) and visiting places I’d never been (Raleigh, Charleston, Savannah), I wanted to find French bakeries along the way and try their pastries.

This was my second road trip for the year. In April I’d taken a largely alternate route on a week-long drive north from Florida—Naples, Tampa, Atlanta, Columbia, Myrtle Beach, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Arlington, Baltimore—and also tracked down several bakeries along the way.

A stay in and around Philadelphia brought resulted in these Franco-Philadelphia culinary observation.

– GLK

The post A Francophile East Coast U.S. Road Trip (1): French Bakeries, American History appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

By Kim Sotman

As I sat on the London Underground listening to the chatter of conversations around me the voices blended together. I couldn’t pick out individual conversations or understand actual words. That’s funny, I thought, what language is that?

Honing in on one single conversation, I listened intently, and suddenly realized that it was English! My ears have grown so accustomed to hearing French wherever I go that I actually didn’t recognize my native language. Granted, it was British English and I’m from Texas, but it was still harder for me to discern than if I’d been listening to a French conversation!

After two months in France, I made a trip to England to visit some friends who are studying there. The sea of people speaking English was a welcome sound to my ears, once I understood that’s what they were speaking, but it also made me realize how ingrained French has become in my brain.

Walking off the Eurostar train at London’s St Pancras station, I saw signs pointing me to the exit written in two languages. The first bold set of words said “Way Out” with an arrow. Way out? I thought …that’s not how I would say exit. I looked below and saw the French translation, “Sortie” which immediately clicked in my head with no hesitation.

How can it be that my native language was suddenly so foreign to me? This continued to happen to me throughout my five-day stay. When walking through a crowd, my first instinct was to utter the French “pardon” or “excusez-moi,” the simple English phrase escaping me. Ordering a coffee was effortlessly simple, and yet I found myself translating the phrase from French in my head when the words came out of my mouth in English. I didn’t have to plan what I was going to say or worry about conjugating my verbs correctly, but my head continued to do it anyway, the French gears still turning.

It was an odd sensation. It felt like my words were going through an extra distillation process—from English to French and back again. It made me realize how much my two months of full immersion in Paris have deepen my knowledge of French and how much deeper it’ll be by the time I leave Europe seven months from now.

Three weeks into my stay in Paris, I had a friend come visit me before her classes started in England for the semester. (She was one of the friends that I was visiting on the above-mentioned trip.) She had decided to study abroad in an English-speaking country because she didn’t speak a foreign language, thus she was pretty nervous about coming to Paris; French was a complete mystery to her.

During her stay, I served as her interpreter. Otherwise she would ask for things by pointing or through elaborate sign language. So I handled all of our transactions, from ordering at restaurants, to buying metro tickets, to conversing with my host family who were kind enough to let her stay with me. Even though I pretty much stuck to the script of communicating her wishes to others, anytime I wasn’t specifically ordering her food, she got nervous that I was talking about her. Paranoid would be a better word. She would become even more nervous if laughter was involved. My host family and I did in fact have a good laugh about this, possibly at her expense, saying that I really could say anything I want about her and she would never know.

I wonder if my friend had a more relaxing time (paranoia aside) not speaking French when in Paris than I did speaking English yet thinking French in London. After all, while in France she got to sit back while I took her words and decoded them for other French speakers. On the other hand, when I was in London my words went from English to French and back again, as though the French gears in my brain were saying “Don’t forget about us!”

But I’m glad to have those French gears turning, even if it sometimes interrupts my English, because it’s a precious sign that I’m learning and changing, and will continue to do so for the rest of my time in Europe.

Kim Sotman is a junior at Tulane University who is studying in Paris for the 2009-2010 school year. She is from Fort Worth, Texas.

The post Junior Year Abroad: English as a Second Language appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

We would be in Paris in about six, actually, because we stopped to visit the town of Dinan, a 20-minute drive from Dinard inland along the Rance River.

Due to their proximity and the similarity of their names, no one who lives outside of Brittany can ever remember which is Dinard and which is Dinan. Dinard is the resort town along the coast; Dinan is the medieval town that’s inland. An easier way to remember is that Dinard is the place you go because your rich friends tell you to while Dinan is the place you go because your guidebook tells you to.

Henri and I had really been looking forward to going to Dinan, he because the ramparts of Dinan speak volumes about the efforts of the Duchy of Brittany to remain independent of the French Crown, I because I thought I could get an interesting article out of it.

The Blue Guide I had brought along calls it “one of the most beautiful towns in Brittany.” The dark stone towns of Brittany do indeed have a brutal beauty and a medieval timeliness. And Dinan’s old town is so well preserved, along with intact ramparts and a view of the Rance River, that it’s easy to understand why the guidebooks speak so highly of it. But Henri and I were both disappointed.

Henri wouldn’t say he was disappointed since failing to appreciate a town that was graced by a duke is bad for his self-esteem as it calls into question the very essence of his aspirations to live like one. But I could tell he wasn’t into the place because he only asked me once to take his picture, and in that picture, standing on a rampart overlooking the Rance (the view in this photo), his expression is as hard and cold as the very stone of those ramparts.

Perhaps it was the change of weather—after 48 hours of luxuriously clear skies the clouds of northwest France suddenly arrived. (Note the difference between the top photo and the others.) But it may actually have been the town itself at 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in September.

The old streets themselves felt like a weekend winding down, with stale kouign-amans (carmelized milkbread cakes) and fars bretons (pudding cakes) in the bakery windows, the sidestreets empty, and people milling about the main streets in the hopes that the old stones would tell them something about their past or perhaps about the direction of their lives, but the stones had nothing to say but “go home.”

It’s times like this when you realize that your guidebook can only take you so far and that the rest is up to you.

Forty-eight hours may not sound like a lot of travel, but it was indeed time to go home. We had a four-hour drive ahead of us. Before leaving we stopped for a drink a café on a grand old square that’s now mostly a vast parking lot. Our table was near an equestrian statue of Bertrand du Guesclin, a 14th-century warrior and nobleman from Brittany. Henri tried to tell me about the man but either his heart wasn’t in it or he really didn’t know himself why the guy deserved a statue in Dinan.

In any case I took the wheel and steered us onto the highway and didn’t let go, except to get gas, until I dropped myself off in front of my door. Henri made a feeble attempt to have me drive him home and return the car myself in the morning, but it was too late for negotiations.

Post Script
Six weeks after we returned from our trip to Brittany Henri called to say that a speeding ticket had arrived in the mail. One of us had been driving 57 km (35 mi.) per hour in a 50 km (31 mi) per hour zone—that one of us being me. It had happened on our way to Brittany, near Fougères. I’d suspected at the time if I’d been flashed by the radar post but I hadn’t said anything because Henri was sleeping at the time, and rather than disturb his peace, as well as my own, while driving through one of those plane-tree bordered routes that make driving in the French countryside so pleasant and dangerous, I’d continued on.

I naturally told him that I would pay the ticket—90 euros, about $135, argh!—but Henri would have none of that. He insisted on paying half. He’d received the ticket as the one whose credit card and address we’d used in renting the car, which also meant that the was the one to get the points deduced from his license. I offered to plead guilty to the authorities so as to restore his points, but Henri declined, saying that ever since he got rid of his car last year he doesn’t drive much anyway.

Gotta hand it to Henri, the man knows proper etiquette.

(c) Gary Lee Kraut

The post Destination Brittany, final part (5): The return home appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Just before the party on Saturday evening another guest arrived at the neighbor’s house where Henri and I were staying. He was a young actor from Paris and he, too, knocked at the door empty-handed except for his overnight bag. Our host was gracious enough to ignore the absence of preliminaries, as she had with us, but we were surprised to find that within five minutes the two of them were tutoying each other whereas after nearly 24 hours as guests—quite good guests, I might add—Henri and I were still addressing her with a noble vous.

The actor was young, relatively speaking, and also relatively cute, so it was expected that with one look at him she would readily switch to the more playful tu. Still, it made me and Henri feel that we had approached our host wrong from the start. But it was too late to do much about that now. For Henri it was inconceivable to tutoie a host, particularly without bringing a gift. My own hesitation was somewhat different.

There isn’t actually much difference between tu and vous during a weekend at the coast these days unless you live in the world of Proust, or, as in Henri’s case, Madame de Pompadour, but once I’ve been vouvoying for any length of time, say two minutes, I have trouble initiating the switch to the less formal tu.

As an English-speaker I naturally prefer tu because its conjugations are easier to pronounce in the more academic tenses, but I have trouble saying, “On peut se tutoyer, n’est ce pas?”/ “We can tutoyer each other, n’est ce pas?” One hears that all the time at dinner parties, but something about asking someone’s permission to be friendly disturbs me for it makes the contact seem very intimate, as though you’re asking for a kiss, whereas you just want the person to pass the bread. So I either start off with tu at the risk of shocking with my informality the person I’ve just met or, sometime during the conversation, I late slip in a tu as though by a mistake and hope that the person responds in kind. In the end, asking someone’s permission to tutoie them is like asking someone you don’t know to be your friend on Facebook: It’s harmless enough and doesn’t really signify anything, until the person says no.

Anyway, tu or vous, the fact remained that none of us had brought a house gift for our host, so the morning after the party Henri and the actor immediately went out to find one. There are two reasons why I wasn’t asked to go along: First, because Henri was looking for some informality with the actor himself and second because I wasn’t around, having already gone out for a walk.

Early in the morning the path above the coast of Dinard is a great place for a jog, if you don’t mind running on concrete, but by 10:30/11 a.m. when people are out on their morning promenade, the joggers ruin the leisurely atmosphere of the walkway. Sweating profusely and wearing their mean, jiggling jogger’s face, aggravated in its intensity by the fact that they feel the strollers are in their way, it takes some restraint to keep from pushing them onto the rocks below. Dinard has a magnificent seaside walk that it’s impossible to stroll it without feeling that jogging should be outlawed in certain places… and that no more than four people should allowed even to walk together at the same time. In short, it’s the kind of place that makes you feel like a soulful elitist, even when you’re only a weekend guest at the home of someone you vousvoie and didn’t even bring a gift.

Dinard developed across the estuary from Saint Malo as a resort destination for British visitors. The British began arriving in 1836 and by the end of the 19th century had greatly assisted in funding the main resort town of northern Brittany. Ferries to Saint Malo from Portsmouth and Weymouth continue to ensure a heavy English presence along the coast. It is to northern Brittany what Deauville is to Normandy, though Deauville, being easier to reach from Paris or from England, is far more popular for a weekending outside of summer.

The photos in this post (other than the satellite image) are  from that seaside promenade. You see in them the craggy cost, the choppy seascape, the luxury villas on the cliff, the band of the town’s main beach (the casino is nearby), the seawater pool that fills with high tide, and Saint Malo across the estuary. I had a beautiful walk.

I returned to my host’s house just before noon so as to get ready for brunch. There was now a tall bouquet in the living room. Upstairs, Henri told me that I owed him 27 euros.

– GLK

The post Destination Brittany, part 4 of 5: tu, vous, and ma promenade appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

By Lindsey Wallace

As I have grown older my perception of home has changed. Not just from moving around in general, but from the experiences of coming to college, traveling, meeting new friends, and having family that are now far away from my physical home address—Paris right now—but that still give me the same feeling of warmth, love, and comfort when I think of them.

Even smells, tastes, sounds can be home. The dusty smell of old books when I breathe in the scent just along their spine always brings me back to weekends at my grandmother’s house, sitting inside on rainy days playing with old Legos on the library/living room floor. The smell of lavender reminds me of homemade lavender apple sauce my Mom would make on cool summer nights, blinking fireflies lighting up the purple Southern sky.

But one home changes to another, past hearths are forgotten and filed away in the dusty troves in the back of the mind. It’s only been this semester, living in Paris, that I’ve begun to understand that my past homes have never truly left me – rather, they lie hidden, waiting to be stirred in the most curious of ways.

Recently I was awakened by the smell of lilies. I had up and been out of bed hours before, but the overwhelming perfume snapped me to my senses after a somnolent four hour-long bus ride from Paris to the Loire Valley. A white castle loomed in the distance, dripping with ivy-covered willow trees and framed by the halo of the golden morning sun. Pink and ivory roses perched regally on the path to Chateau Azay-le-Riveau in the Loire valley, the first stop on 28-hour whirlwind tour of the Loire chateaux.

The Loire Valley is one of the most visited tourist destinations in France, and for good reason. Often called the “Garden of France,” the region boasts of ethereal beauty in the form of rolling vineyards and countryside, glorious flowers and gardens, and of course, its majestic chateaux (over a thousand in the region!).

Enchanted by the mystery and beauty of these antique wonders of stone, we hurried through five chateaux in less than two days, promenading through whispering gardens of lavender and silky roses, living labyrinths of greenery in eerie clearings, wandering in amazement through echoing halls of stone, elaborate rooms where kings, queens, and more scandalous subjects lived and died.

Out of all the enchanting sights, tastes, and sounds that weekend, a tiny stone cottage, barely visible from the road, enthralled me most of all. That was where we went for a wine tasting at a local vineyard, “Les Caves du Père Auguste,” the owner of which was only a boy when his grandfather had planted the vines himself. The tips of his vines could be seen from beyond the cave where his wine matured.

As we drove away from the tiny home and garden, I remembered the petite French town where I had lived as a child, and a wave of quiet longing swept over me for my own childhood vineyard sanctuary.

I was nine when we moved to France, to Clermont-Ferrand, in the Auvergne region, the world capital of the tire company Michelin. Downtown Clermont was grey and industrial but my village, Pérignat-lès-Sarliève, lay on the edge of Clermont, in a nestled valley of quiet greenery and lavender-perfumed wind, near le Puy-de-Dôme (the mountain on the front of Volvic water bottles), and directly in front of the Plateau Gergovie, where Chieftain Vercingetorix gave Julius Caesar one of his only military losses. My street, “Rue des Vignes,” got its name, “Road of Vines,” from the ocean of emerald that lay behind it – the beautiful vineyard of my childhood.

Below is a view from my home in Pérignat towards the Plateau Gergovie. If you look closely you can see the tiny triangle monument to Vercingetorix on top of the Plateau.

I’m not sure what it was about the vineyard—it felt like such a sacred place, especially in the morning, in the sunrise. I would sit, mouth open tasting the softness of morning as the sunlight filled my eyes, my lungs. Dewy drops glinted off the birth of the day, bursts of golden sunlight swirling into waves of auburn, ruby, amber-rose, jasper and pink pearlescence, washing across the leafy vines, bathing them in jeweled rainbow light. The vineyard seemed so alive in the sunlight, the leaves swaying in symphony to the singing wind and rising ever so slowly to the warmth of the gently coaxing sun.

As I sat in the Loire Valley, delicately swishing white wine in my glass, listening to the old man tell the story of his grandfather, I felt the true warm embrace of home for the first time since arriving in Paris. I left the Caves du Père Auguste with bittersweet taste in my mouth, and not from the dry red I had just sampled; it felt like I was leaving Pérignat and my beautiful vineyard all over again.

I realized, then, that although we may leave them, our homes never leave us—they lie quietly, waiting for us to feel them with a breath of contented recognition and fall into their arms once more.

Home, then, is not one singular place, but rather a collection of memories—tastes, sights, sounds, hopes and dreams from the past and present. So though we move on in our lives—move away, move forward—we never lose our past. We are never really away from home after all.

And so I found home yet again in the beautiful countryside of France—a country that remains my home. Feeling the warm sun on my face as I gaze out the Loire tour bus window, watching the bright leaves of vineyards as they pass by, I closed my eyes. For a moment I was home again in Pérignat, in a different time – ten years old in my flowered sundress, running, laughing, through the maze of vines that was (and always will be) my home.

Lindsey Wallace is a junior at Duke University and is in Paris for the fall semester.

The post Home is where the vine is appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

On our way from Paris to Brittany Henri and I had talked a lot about what we should bring as a gift for the women who as putting us up for the weekend. We’d never met her. She was the neighbor of the friends who was having the party on Saturday and she had told them that she had extra room if any of the guests were reluctant to spring for a hotel. She didn’t actually say that last part but our friends immediately thought of me and Henri. We’d considered bringing chocolates, Champagne, or flowers as a house gift, finally deciding on flowers, but we arrived too late to buy them so we greeted her empty handed.

That wasn’t such a problem for me since I immediately complemented our host on her tchotchkes and her red Louis Vuitton handbag so as to reassure her that she was hosting a man of good taste. But for Henri, who is the kind of Frenchman for whom etiquette, grammar, and knowing all about Madame de Pompadour are all that is left to distinguish those you would accept in your home from those you would only accept in your bed, arriving empty handed was akin to slap in the face—his own, that is, for he immediately turned red. Our hostess then further displayed excellent etiquette by opening a bottle of Champagne to welcome us.

If there was one thing I’d learned about Henri after 24 hours on the road it was that you can tell him to pose anywhere and he’ll do it. So here is Henri on his bed in the cheery room we’d been given.

Henri and I had never spent the night in the same room, so I took the bed by the door in case it turned out that Henri snores or has other uncontrollable and unpleasant nighttime habits that would require me shifting to the couch in the living room. Turns out he refrained from doing any such thing that night. We both slept well.

Brittany is famous for its ever-changing weather, whereby you’re told to run outside as soon as the sun shines because it may not last long. So immediately upon waking up and eating the breakfast that our hostess had prepared for us (further embarrassing Henri for not having a brought a gift) we got in the car and drove off, planning to find a gift along the way.

Our good fortune with the weather is also the reason that we bypassed Saint-Malo. It was far too nice out to spend our time on and within the granite ramparts of that famous rebuilt town that was once made wealthy from the workings of privateers and merchant ship owners and once made rubble in August 1944 by the workings of war.

So we leap-frogged Saint-Malo proper and headed to its suburban the coast by way of the Lemoëlou Manor, which once belonged to Jacques Cartier (1491-1557).

Cartier, you may remember from history class (particularly if you’re Canadian), left from Saint-Malo in 1534 to find a northern route to Asia and instead discovered Canada, which he claimed in the name of King Francis I. I’m writing this on Columbus Day and am aware that it is politically incorrect to say that Europeans discovered the Americas since there were already people here, but all traveling, I think, can be considered as discovery—or rediscovery—no matter how many people have been there before, so let’s all take a break with the anti-discovery crusade.

Not that that thought made me particularly anxious to visit Jacques Cartier’s house, now a museum that reveals manor life in these parts in the 16th century. We couldn’t have visited even if we wanted to because they were closing for lunch shortly after 11am even though the sign out front says that they close for lunch at 11:30. Still, an employee let us enter into the courtyard to take the above picture before she closed the gate and drove off for a 3-hour lunch.

The manor is located less than a mile inland from Rothéneuf. We followed the signs to Rochers Sculptés to see rocks along the cliff that had been sculpted into 300 characters by a priest named Abbé Adolphe Fouré (1839-1910). At age 55 he had a stroke, which left him deaf and mute yet able to wield a pick and hammer. He then withdrew to this windy corner of Brittany (actually, all corners of Brittany are windy) and set about sculpting the rock over an area of 5000 square feet into characters inspired by local legend.

Henri and I nearly turned back when we discovered that we had to pay 3€ each to climb on the rocks when nearly the entire coast of Brittany is full of rocks to climb on for free. But I felt a sense of investigative duty to see it since we were right there, so I sported up the 6€ and off we traipsed on the rocks. And I’m glad we did because now I can tell you that it isn’t worth driving out of your way to visit the Rochers Sculptés, however, if you ever do come this way and there aren’t more than a few other cars in the lot you might was well fork over the few euros and behold the monk’s work and have a climb on the rocks—at your own risk of breaking an ankle or being blown off the cliff in the wind, I might add.

Afterwards we continued along the coast and stopped to admire some beautiful seascapes after that. Such as this:

and this

and this, where you’ll see why this is called the Emerald Coast.

We then drove to the Point de Grouin, which is the northeastern most point of the peninsula and in fact of all of Brittany considering that when you look out you see Normandy.

After parking our car, we couldn’t agree on which path to take out to the point. Henri wanted to take the high road out and I wanted to take the low road, which pretty much sums up the difference between us, and unwilling to fathom a compromise in which one of us would have to give in and the other one smirk, we separated, which was just as well because after a couple of hours with Henri a little break is always welcome.

I eventually found Henri back near the car (I had the keys). I could tell by the way he asked what had taken me so long that he had either missed me or had taken the less interesting path. When I asked him if he’d seen Le Mont Saint Michel in the distance he nodded “Mm” in such a way that I knew he was lying. Here’s Le Mont Saint Michel beyond the rocks:

We then stopped at Cancale. I’d been here briefly on a weekday in early June this year when there wasn’t a tourist in sight and found it a wonderfully charming little port town where I wish I’d been able to spend more than an hour. Now, on a sunny September weekend it was quite crowded, and even though I didn’t feel the need to stay for long I was very glad that I did have another hour here.

Cancale, which faces the bay of Le Mont Saint Michel and finally afforded Henri a distant glimpse of the Mount, is famous for its oysters, which enjoy the refreshing current of some of the strongest tides in the world. The Cancale is a firm, salty everyman’s oyster that makes its way onto tables throughout France, especially during the Christmas-New Year season.

To best appreciate Cancale oysters in Cancale you should go directly to the oystermongers at the northern end of the port and ask them to open up a dozen that you can then down (with a spritz of lemon) on the ledge with a view out to the oyster farms and, on a bright day, Le Mont Saint Michel in the distance.

Henri and I would have done just that if we’d known the stands were there before we took a seat in a creperie. No regrets, though. We enjoyed the crepes, which are also very much a part of Brittany. Henri was feeling particularly Breton by the time we left.

We were so happy with our little excursion that it wasn’t until we got back to the house in Dinard that we realized that we’d yet to get a thank-you gift for our hostess. We didn’t have time go back out though as we had a party to dress for.

(c) 2009, Gary Lee Kraut.

The post Destination Brittany, part 2 of 5: Exploring the Coast appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

But how to get to know the wine that is Champagne? Ideally by visiting the region where it’s produced and by coming into contact with all that contributes to producing and enjoying it: professionals, towns and villages, vineyards, grapes, cellars, methods, marketing, history, food, drinking companions… and a designated driver.

In late September, while the harvest was winding up and the first fermentation was underway, all of those came into play as I joined four English journalists and a Canadian journalist on a 72-hour tour in the Champagne-Ardenne region, whose Champagne-producing zone mostly lies 90-110 miles east of Paris.

Here below is my Champagne diary, a drink-by-drink and dish-by-dish account (excluding breakfast) of 72 hours in the southern half of the Champagne-Ardenne region. Getting to know Champagne means drinking sometimes as an aperitif, sometimes at a tasting, sometimes with a meal, with the appetizer, with the main course, and even with dessert. This diary therefore offers a glimpse of the variety of both the wines and cuisine in the region, along with a glimpse of over-indulgence à la française.

You will note that on this trip we aimed for variety of regional drink rather than top-of-the-line grandness.

Three major facets of Champagne production define the taste and quality of the final product, and these became evident in drinking the wine (and noting the label):
1. the quality of the grapes,
2. the percentage in the final blend of the three Champagne grapes: Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay.
3. the dosage of sugar and liqueur that is added (or in rare cases not) to a bottle after its second fermentation.

I am not necessarily recommending these particular wines other than to note the enjoyment of tasting them all and their contribution to my own sense of Champagne over this 72 hour period. Some of the restaurants, however, are quite recommendable should you venture this way, as you will see in my comments below.

My Champagne Diary

September 22
A. Place: Troyes (Click on “View Map” to see the location of the towns and villages where we stopped)

Dinner: Valentino, 35 rue Paillot-de-Montabert, 10000 Troyes. Tel 06 25 73 14 14. Open Tues.-Sat.
Comment: Fine dining, strong leaning toward fish, notable if spending the night in Troyes.
Aperitif: Ratafia, more precisely Ratafia Champenois or Ratafia de Champagne, an 18° aperitif from the Champagne region made of grape juice (in this case Pinot Noir grapes) and marc de Champagne, grape pulp distilled after the juice has been pressed out for wine.
Wine: Rosé des Riceys, Guy de Forez 2005. Not all grapes in Champagne go toward making sparkling wine. This is a still rosé made from Pinot Noir grapes.
Appetizer: Fricassée d’asperge et scampi, omelette noire et huile parfumée
Main course: Râble de lapereau rôti (saddle of rabbit), aubergine en tandoori, asperges vertes et jus réduit à l’orange
Dessert: Soupe de fraise pétillante et baba bouchon. Strawberries with fizz crystal thrown in the bowl.

September 23
B. Place: Urville

Champagne house: Drappier, in the Côte des Bar area of Champagne.
Champagnes tasted: Brut, rosé brut, and, most interestingly, “brut nature,” “zero dosage,” which dryer than regular brut in that the sugar-liqueur that is added Champagnes in varying doses is absent. Interestingly, the various professionals encountered over these 72 each had a different opinion on zero dosage and low dosage Champagnes, with comments from “it’s a fad that didn’t last” to “we tried it but consumers didn’t go for it” to “if the market warrants it we can always produce some” to “real Champagne requires the dosage.” I liked its dryness.

C. Place: Magnant

Lunch: Le Val Moret, 10110 Magnant. Tel 03 25 29 85 12. Open daily. Also a 3-star hotel.
Comment: A roadside stop with a view of the countryside. No need to go out of your way to come here, but it made for a nice lingering lunch off the highway, 20 miles east of Troyes just off exit 22 of Autoroute A5.
Aperitif: Pass, just came from a morning wine tasting.
Wine: Coteaux Champenois, a local red made from Pinot Noir grapes. Bouzy rouge is the most famous of these.
Appetizer: Salade estivale : noisette de melon (cantaloupe) au Magra Bendi, jambon cru (cured ham), galantine de pintadeau (young guinea fowl), salade (lettuce). Magra Bendi, a cousin to ratafia, is another aperitif/dessert wine made in the Champagne region. It is often peach- or pear-flavored.
Main course: Noix de veau sauce forestière (veal fillet from leg portion with a mushroom sauce.
Dessert: Tarte fine aux pommes sauce miel et glace vanille gousse (thin apple tart with honey sauce and vanilla ice cream).

D. Place: Matougues

Dinner: Auberge des Moissons, 6 Route Nationale, 51510 Matougues. Tel. 03 26 70 99 17. Also a 3-star hotel.
Comment: Another roadside stop, this time worth the detour. Relaxed, rustic gastronomy deeply rooted in the earth. We went truffle hunting with the owner and his dog here in the late afternoon and then enjoyed a dinner of truffles and Champagne. The harvest for the local truffle, tuber uncinatum, known as the truffle (truffe) of Burgundy or Champagne or Lorraine, is September to December. I slept well after this lengthy meal.
1st Champagne: Janisson Baradon, non-dosé/ultra brut (i.e. without sugar added), Epernay.
Appetizer: Four bites, variations on the theme of truffles: foie gras with tuffle, “sandwich” with truffle and butter, scrambled egg with truffle, truffle mousse.
2nd Champagne: Mandois, Blanc de Blancs (100% chardonnay), Vintage 2004, Pierry.
Main course: Pavé de boeuf, sauce au Ratafia, purée au truffe (thick piece of beef with a Ratafia sauce, pureed potatoes with bits of tuffle.
Cheese: Langres (from southern Champagne), Brie (just west of Champagne)
3rd Champagne: Château Jacques Rousseaux, rosé (color by brief maceration of Pinot Noir, i.e. méthode par saignée), from the village of Verzenay.
Dessert: Croustillant de framboise, crème pistache.

September 24
E. Place: Chalons-en-Champagne

Champagne house: Joseph Perrier, the only Champagne house in Chalons.
Champagnes tasted: Brut, rosé, blanc de blancs, demi-sec, and JP’s fine top-of-the-line vintage Cuvée Josephine 1998.

Lunch: Les Caudalies, 2 rue de l’Abbé Lambert, 51000 Chalons-en-Champagne. Tel. 03 26 65 07 87.
Comment: Turn-of-the-century kitsch (19th-20th) meets turn-of-the-century kitsch (20th-21st) in this mansion serving polished brasserie fare at lunchtime.
Wine: Pays d’Oc, Chardonny, 2006. A Chardonnay from southwest France while in Champagne? Well, Chalons is outside of the zone of Champagne vineyards despite the presence of the Joseph Perrier Champagne house in town, and we’d had enough Champagne already that morning.
Appetizer: Tartine de saumon fumé au fromage de chèvre.
Main course: Choucroute de la mer (fish, seafood, cabbage, potatoes)
Dessert: Crème brulée à la vanille.

F. Place: Epernay

Chocolate tasting: Chocolatier Vincent Dallet, 4 rue du Capitaine Deulin, 51200 Epernay. Tel. 03 26 55 31 08. www.chocolat-vincentdallet.fr.
Comment: Behind his pastry and chocolate shop, Vincent Dallet, one of the top chocolate chefs of France, offered us a tasting of chocolates and ganaches in his demonstration kitchen while he demonstrated his recipe for the biscuit rose de Reims, a pink biscuit that is the tradition sweet treat in the Champagne region that goes well with a glass a bubbly or at teatime.
Chocolates tasted: Too many to recall, and furthermore, knowing that that we had a full evening of eating and drinking ahead, I merely took a nibble of each offering. Wonderful nibbles through. Ate the whole biscuit fresh from the oven.

Aperitif/Champagne tasting: C Comme, 8 rue Gambetta, 51200 Epernay. Tel. 03 26 32 09 55. www.c-comme.fr. Open daily 10am-8pm, Fri. and Sat. until midnight.
Comment: This Champagne bar and wine shop provides both an excellent introduction to the various types of Champagne. The sparkling and other regional wines of Champagne sold here mostly come from small and medium-size producers, mostly family-owned. The originality of the bar is that you can order a series of small or large glasses of Champagne selected to give a sense of the different grape varieties or blends available. You can also simply order a bottle or a glass as in a wine bar. C Comme (C as in) is short for C.Comme Champagne de Propriétaires.
Champagnes tasted: Five of them. Didn’t note names, but the idea was to taste the grape, so one (small) glass was Chardonnay, one was mostly Pinot Noir, one was mostly Pinot Meunier, the other two blends.

Dinner: La Cave à Champagne, 16 rue Gambetta, 51200 Epernay. Tel. 03 26 55 50 70. www.la-cave-a-champagne.com.
Comment: This was clearly a long day of eating and drinking, but I was still able to enjoy the various sips and tastes of this hearty, relaxed yet genteel restaurant.
1st Champagne: Marizy, blanc de blancs, 2002. From the village of Cumières in the Marne Valley.
Appetizer: Matelot de poisson, a fish, langoustine, and leek starter.
2nd Champagne: Eric Taillet, brut, 100% Pinot Meunier. From the village of Baslieux sous Chatillon in the Marne Valley.
Main course: Chicken breast stuffed with foie gras and with a Champagne sauce.
3rd Champagne: Marizy, rosé.
Dessert: Coupe de vigneron, a ice cream cup of filled with vanilla ice cream, peach liqueur, grapes, topped with whipped cream.

September 25

G. Place: Hautvillers

Champagne house: G. Tribaut, 88 rue d’Eguisheim, 51160 Hautvillers. Tel. 03 26 59 40 57. www.champagne.g.tribaut.com.
Comment: Family-owned and operated, producing sincere and inexpensive Champagnes, with most of the sales being out the side door. The setting overlooking the vineyards along the southern slopes of the Montagne de Reims, with harvesters out in one of the fields, was so pretty on a sunny September morning that it was hard to leave the back yard and then hard to leave without buying a couple of bottles.
Champagnes tasted: Cuvée de Réserve (1/3 Chardonnay, 1/3 Pinot Noir, 1/3 Pinot Meunier), Grande Cuvée Spéciale (50% Chardonnay, 50% Pinot Noir), Vintage 2002 (50% Chardonnay, 50% Pinot Noir), Rosé de Réserve (80% Chardonnay, 20% red wine)

Lunch: Le Restaurant de l’Abbaye, rue de l’Eglise, 51160 Hautvillers. Tel. 03 26 59 44 79. www.abbayehautvillers.org.
Comment: The billowing plaster ceiling here is so disturbingly ugly so you’ll just have to ignore it as best you can. Otherwise, the regional, well-cheffed cuisine here makes for a delicious complement to an hour or two of visiting one of the most famous villages of the region since it is here, a few miles outside of Epernay, that Dom Perignon (the man not the brand) helped develop the Champagne as we know it.
1st wine: Coteaux Champenois from the village of St. Martin d’Ablois. The wine tasting above had lasted for two hours so I ignored the wine at this point.
Appetizer: None. We were short on time and short on appetite.
Main course: Cassoulet of scallops and prawns in a Champagne bisque with small lentils (lentillons de Reims), girolle mushrooms and purple basil.
2nd wine (with dessert): Magra Bendi, pear-flavored. Just a sip.
Dessert: Charlotte of biscuit de Reims and pear with a syrup from Champagne grape juice and some Pinot Noir grapes.

© 2009, Gary Lee Kraut

The post A Champagne Diary: 3 Grapes, 3 Lunches, 3 Dinners, a Bit of Chocolate, and Countless Bubbles appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

But we’d both been invited to a party in Dinard, in Brittany, so we decided to rent a car in Paris and do some visiting along the way.

Between car rental, gas, and tolls, a Paris/Brittany round-trip can cost about the same as a week in a 5-star hotel in Tunisia, flight included, but Henri and I found a comparatively decent price with an agency called Rent-a-Car-with-One-Taillight-Missing. The car came with a quarter tank of gas, which may or may not have been what the guy meant when he told us that we were getting an upgrade.

Anyway, the car moved and Henri managed to avoid getting us crunched by a bus (i.e. he almost got us crunched by a bus), so by the time we made it out of Paris I wasn’t worried about compatibility so much as survival.

Dinard is just past Saint Malo, which is just past Le Mont Saint Michel, so we had a choice between the north route going through Normandy or the southern route going past Chartres and Le Mans. Henri didn’t care as long as there was a palace to visit along the way—all Henri wants to do is visit palaces—so I decided that we would take the southern route and told him to pull off the toll road at La Ferté Bernard.

La Ferté Bernard doesn’t have a palace. It doesn’t have much of anything, to tell the truth, but part of the interest of a road trip is to stop where there isn’t much of anything, otherwise it isn’t a road trip but an itinerary. Henri only agreed to stop at La Ferté Bernard because I told him that something really important had happened there in the 15th century. Being French he couldn’t stand the idea that I might know something about his country that he doesn’t.

La Ferté Bernard is a very nice town as far as towns with nothing to see go. Its main attraction is the church Notre-Dame-des-Marais that’s a mix of flamboyant Gothic and let’s just finish the damn thing. I took the picture of the scribe (above) there.

There’s also a late-15th-century entrance gate to the old town, below left, where Henri stopped complaining about the lack of a palace at La Ferté Bernard long enough to pose. Henri’s face is not normally as blurred as in these photos but you really don’t want to see his expression here. I also got him to pose on the other side of the gate, below right, without him seeing that I’d placed by a sign that says “I’m waiting for my master.”

One of the nicest things about La Ferté Bernard is that at lunchtime, when the streets are deserted, you can have a pee by a plane tree without worrying about passersby.

La Ferté Bernard is only a few miles off the A11 toll road, so it was well worth the 30-minutes stop, though we didn’t realize at the time that in addition to paying something like 200 euros to get off the toll road we had to pay another 200 to get back on.

By now we were getting hungry so we took a vote as to where we should stop for lunch. Henri voted for a quick lunch at a rest stop so that we would have plenty of time in the afternoon to visit palaces. I voted for Laval, which is an actual town where I told him there was lots to see. We went to Laval, not because my argument was so convincing but because I was driving.

Laval, as far as we could tell, is famous for having parking unimeters so far from most of the parking spaces that you risk getting a ticket during the 10 minutes it takes you to find it.

We had lunch on the terrace of a brasserie by the River Mayenne facing the ramparts and fortress castle that define the old town. I don’t care much for omelets but I ordered one anyway because road trips are for eating things you don’t normally eat (I’ll tell you sometime about my meal at Shoney’s when driving through South Carolina last April.) I regretted the omelet as soon as it arrived, but the view was indeed quite nice from where we sat, the sun was out, and Henri tends to complain less when he’s eating.

We then headed into Brittany through less traveled roads so as to visit Fougères, which actually does have a palace. Well, sort of. It’s actually a fortress-castle, half in ruins, but Henri bounded from the car as though we’d just entered an oasis after three days in a cultural desert.

Like other fortress-castles on the former border between the Duchy of Brittany and the Kingdom of France, the castle was built, rebuilt, and refortified from the 12th through 14th centuries at a time when Brittany when trying to stave off advances by the French kings with the Normans lurking nearby. Between the castle and the under-visited town nearby, Fougères is a great introduction to the growth and medieval history of France and to the slate and schist that defines Brittany’s architecture as well as a great example of the pleasures of traveling in off the main tourist paths, even with Henri for company.

Actually, Henri’s mood had changed by the time we cross the drawbridge into the castle complex. He was now in full, Euro-cultured glory. It’s quite amazing to see how connected Europeans feel at times to the full length of their national and continental history. At most, even well-educated Americans will connect to only a portion of their history—for example, the “In God We Trust” part or the free market part or the pioneering part or the immigrant part or the I-can-eat-pray-etc-anyway-I-want part—but Europeans, particularly when they have a diploma or two on their CV, have a way of embracing their entire past no matter how obscure it may appear.

We were lucky enough to have arrived shortly before a guided tour was setting out. The guide gathered together the entire crowd of visitors that afternoon. There were three of us: me, Henri, and a woman who looked like she was trying to escape a bad marriage only to realize that the ruins of an old fortress were not the answer. But for Henri this was the answer. He was now in ecstasy.

Here is a glimpse of Henri’s smile against a backdrop of the Château de Fougères.

The post Destination Brittany, part 1 of 5: Travels with Henri appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

CASE 1: When a lax agency and an inefficient intermediary allow matters to go from bad to worse

CASE 2: When the online agreement doesn’t jive with local policy: The Avis fail

The post How to Avoid Descending into Rental Car Hell in Europe appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.