To Berlin

On Friday, July 31^st, we had breakfast in the Colbert’s bright, cheerful and colorfully decorated breakfast room, then checked out around 8:30. 

We walked the few blocks to the station, bought our tickets for the train to the TGV station and went up to the platform to wait.  And wait: the train was late.  The train following it was late.  The train following that was late.  Our TGV train to Lyon was scheduled for 9:49, and it was now past 9:00.  We talked with a young Chinese woman who spoke very good English.  She and her friend were on their way to Mont St. Michel, and they had already missed their connection.  Eventually (9:12, I think), a train arrived and everybody who had been waiting piled on.  When we got to the TGV station we discovered that the problem (having to do with signals) that had stopped the trains going into Avignon Central had also delayed our TGV train from Marseille.  It arrived maybe half-an-hour late and we boarded.

As we already knew, the train had been overbooked, so there were people standing by their luggage at the ends of the cars, where you get on and off.  I got Mary Joy into her reserved seat, found a place to put my bag and went back to where the others were standing.  Once the train started, some pulled sown some seats from the wall and sat.  I checked to see if I could sit in the restaurant car, but the tables were mostly standup.  I came back to Mary Joy to see how she was doing, when the woman across from her, who was traveling with a teenager and a three-year-old, offered to take the little girl onto her lap and give me that seat.  They, like we, would be getting off at the next stop, which by then was less than an hour away.  That was very kind of her, and I accepted her offer.

Soon we were back at Lyon Part-Dieu Station.  We went out the front and there was the stop for the RhoneExpress train to the airport.  For some reason, the ticket machine wouldn’t take my Visa card, but it did accept my MasterCard ATM debit card, for a total of over 29 euros for the two of us, a price that surprised Mary Joy.  It was a half-hour ride along the line used by the trams, though farther, and I think the car was a tram car.  Across from us were a young Italian woman and her mother.  The younger woman got a round-trip ticket from the conductor, while she got the older woman a one-way ticket, handling the transaction in French.   The daughter was apparently living in Lyon and accompanying her mother to the airport for the latter’s flight back to Italy.  Toward the end of the ride the daughter laid her head on her mother’s shoulder.  Living alone in a foreign country must be hard for a young person.

At the airport station we walked and walked and walked until we reached the area to check our bags on EasyJet.  We did that, went through security, and walked to our gate, which, as usual for EasyJet, was a rather lengthy distance away.

The flight to Berlin Schoenefeld was uneventful, taking less than two hours, though, once we landed, the plane had to taxi a very long distance to get to the gate.   This airport was supposed to have closed in 2010, to be replaced by a new Berin-Brandenburg Airport next door.  When our friend Marika flew to join us in Venice in 2012, her ticket originally indicated that she would leave from and return to the new airport.  That had to be changed before she left.  Latest word is that the airport may open in 2017.  Or maybe 2018 or 2019.  Needless to say, this is something of a scandal and casts a blot upon the German reputation for efficiency.  Given the distance we had to taxi both coming in and going out, I wondered if they were already using the runways of the new airport, though my research hasn’t found any indication that they are.

Marika met us, joyfully, in the arrival hall.  We went out to the parking lot and got into her car, and she drove us into the city.  When we were settled, we, Marika and her brother, sister-in-law and two nieces had pizza for dinner up on the roof terrace of her building.  It was good pizza and very good company.

Around in Circles, Ending Up in Avignon

On Thursday, July 30^th, we had our last breakfast at Au Point de Lumiere—again wonderful.  This morning there was pain perdu (“lost bread,” i.e., French toast).  Annie and Jean-Claude were surprised that our four nights were up and we were leaving that day, but, unfortunately, there it was in the book.  After cordial goodbyes, we loaded up Francois and headed west.

We would have to catch a plane at Lyon Airport the next afternoon, which meant that we would have to catch Friday morning’s 9:49 train from Avignon TGV Station.  We had tickets for that train (bought in Basel), though only one seat reservation.  When we had planned this trip, I had considered spending this Thursday night in Avignon, to be ready to take the train the next day, but Mary Joy hadn’t liked the idea of being in a big city, and she liked the idea of seeing the Pont du Gard, which was relatively nearby.  Not far beyond the Pont du Gard was Uzes, a nice, small town, where we could spend the night.  So we now had a room reservation in Uzes.

But this was somewhat worrisome.  In order to catch our train, we would have to drive more than 40 kilometers (25 miles) in rush-hour traffic, then drop off our car.  How long would that take?  To be safe, we would have to leave before breakfast was available at our hotel.  What if there was a traffic jam or accident on the two-lane roads from Uzes to Avignon?

At this point, if we had it to do again, we would spend the night in Avignon instead, but we were committed to the hotel in Uzes, so, using a combination of our Michelin map (332, Drome, Vaucluse) and the Google Map directions, we headed into Avignon, found our way to the ring road around the city walls, and then over the Rhone.  Given the fact that the walls were an obvious landmark, it was hard to get lost, but, still, there was one point in Avignon where I didn’t know exactly where we were and had to rely on the assumption that we were headed in the correct general direction.

Once on the other side of the Rhone, there were a number of points where we needed to change from one highway to another, but those didn’t prove to be difficult if we always kept heading toward Ales and Uzes.  On the way, we passed the entrance road to the Pont du Gard, but since Uzes was only about 20 minutes away, we wanted to get settled first, then come back.  Eventually, we got onto the D979 going into town, and then things fell apart.

I didn’t see where we were to turn off for our hotel, so we found ourselves going all the way into town.  This was a problem, because we didn’t have a detailed map for the part of town where our hotel was.  We looped around through downtown.  It was jam-packed with people and vehicles.  We tried to get back to where we had come in, but in the one-way streets and heavy traffic, we couldn’t find it.  Then we tried to find a place to park, to go to the Tourist Information office, but couldn’t find a parking place.  We saw a ramp, but it was full the first two times we passed, going around and around downtown Uzes.  When Mary Joy and our friend Michelle had been there, back in the nineties, Uzes had been a quiet, pleasant little town, not this madhouse.  That had been in June, not July.  Finally, the electronic sign at the parking ramp showed green, and Mary Joy asked if we should go in, but at this point I said no, because we had decided to give up, eat the hotel bill and go back to Avignon.  We didn’t know how much the ramp cost or how one would pay it.  We didn’t know if the Tourist Information office was open.  We didn’t have a working telephone.  We were worried about catching our train to Lyon the next morning.  We were rapidly losing patience with the whole situation.  So we got out of town and headed back east.  As we approached the road to the Pont du Gard, Mary Joy asked if I wanted to see it.  I didn’t really need to, but she said that it would be simple, just a matter of driving up and looking at it from the road, so we turned in.

When Mary Joy and Michelle had visited the Pont du Gard, nearly twenty years ago, it had been just a matter of driving up, but if we had read Rick Steves beforehand, we would have learned that that was no longer the case.  Before we realized it, we had taken a ticket from a machine and parked in a huge parking lot, next to an almost-as-huge complex of buildings.  No Pont du Gard in sight.

The Pont du Gard, by the way, is one of the most impressive remaining products of Roman engineering--a large bridge, carrying an aqueduct high over the river Gard.  In the 1990s, this didn’t require a huge interpretive center, with films and a food court, but that was then and this was now.  Mary Joy said that since she had already seen the bridge, she would stay in the car (more signs warning against leaving anything in your car), while I had a look.  At this point, all I wanted was to get out, turn the car in and find a hotel in Avignon.  However, our experience in Roussillon the day before indicated that I should go looking for a place to stamp our ticket, so we could get out of the lot.  I went up to the interpretive center, which was a set of buildings along two sides of a long central area.  At one end was the sidewalk from the parking lot.  At the other end was the path through the woods to the Pont du Gard.  I got in line for the ticket machine, where I stuck in my Visa card to pay 18 euros to get our ticket stamped.

Then I went back to Mary Joy and we left.  It turned out that, unlike in Roussillon, you could use your credit card in the machine as you went out.  This day was not starting out very well.
Along the way, we were held up for a few minutes by a traffic jam caused by an accident, which was still stopping traffic in the other direction as we left.  This reinforced our feeling that staying in Uzes would have been taking a risk.  Once across the Rhone again, we followed the directions given by Google Maps until the roundabout where those directions diverged from the sign that said “Gare TGV,” at which point I decided that we’d follow the sign and not the directions.  Immediately, it occurred to me that “TGV Station” was not exactly the same as “rental car lot just across the tracks north of the TGV Station,” and when we got to the front of the station we had to maneuver our way past and around various pay parking lots before we found a street under the tracks, just east of the station.

We parked Francois in the Avis lot and handed in the key.  In spite of the fact that it was around 2 p.m. and the car was due the next day at 1:00, they took a whole day off our rental.  In the beginning they had told us that before turning the car in, we could, at our option, either fill up the diesel tank or let them do it and charge us for a tankful.  We hadn’t quite used up a full tank, so we went for the latter option. 

In retrospect, paying for GPS along with our rental might have made things a lot easier.  On the other hand, GPS might have had as much trouble navigating this road system as we did, or it might have had as much trouble explaining exactly what to do as Google Maps did.  I don’t know.  In any case, just relying on printed-out directions from Google Maps was a disaster.   If we weren’t to use GPS (and even if we were), we needed to have much more detailed local maps, so that if we missed a turn, we could figure out where we were and how to get from there to where we wanted to go.

The next order of business was to find a hotel in Avignon.  The tourist information booth at the station was closed, so we asked at the railroad’s information booth, and they gave us a map and said that we should take the shuttle train in to the Avignon central station, then walk a few blocks north, to the main Tourist Information office.  So we bought our tickets and caught the train for the 6-kilometer ride into town.

The central station is across the street, south, from an opening in the medieval city wall.  From there it’s a walk of a few short blocks to the Tourist Information office.  They have a board showing hotels with available rooms, and we checked some of them with Rick Steves (I had torn the Lyon and Provence pages out of his 2013 France book) and Lonely Planet (still on the iPad).  When we reached the desk, the man there suggested some possibilities: we chose the nearby Hotel Colbert.  He called the hotel, and though he couldn’t make a booking for us, he could ask for availability and price.  There was a room available, the price was fine and the hotel was recommended by Rick Steves, so we thanked the man and went down to the corner, turned left, walked halfway down the block and there was our hotel.

The Colbert is a very pleasant little two-star hotel on a side street near the central station.  The owner has decorated it with posters for theatrical and film productions, mostly Polish.  He told us that the Poles do the best graphic art in the world, and that the theatrical bent of the art in the hotel related to the Avignon Festival (this year’s had just finished a few days before), which is primarily dedicated to theater.  Our room, up the staircase on the first (in the U.S., the second) floor had a small shower room, with odd, flashing, colored lights when the sink (blue) or shower (green) faucet was on.  The toilet was in a tiny, separate room.  There was a closet with a safe, and the WiFi was good, using an unusual password system.

We went out to see the city, going north up the rue de la Republique for about half a mile, until it reached the lively, pedestrianized Place de l’Horloge.  Then we walked past the Mercure Hotel to the Place du Palais, in front of and below the gigantic pile of the Palace of the Popes, the largest remaining medieval palace in Europe.

Avignon had its moment in history during the 14^th century.  As the Michelin Green Guide to Provence explains: “The court in Rome had become more or less impossible for the popes, who were incessantly the object of political differences.  The Frenchman Raymond Bertrand de Got, elected pope under the name Clement V (1305), decided to establish the court in France, where since 1274 the Holy See possessed the Comtat Venaissin [which surrounded Avignon].”  In 1348, Avignon itself was ceded to the popes, though they had already made it their seat, starting to build the Palace in 1334.  A succession of French popes reigned from Avignon until Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1376.  After his death in 1378, conflict between his Italian successor and the mostly French cardinals led to the latter electing a second, French pope, who returned to Avignon.  The Great Schism which followed led to there being two and at times three popes, all claiming to be the Vicar of Christ.  The schism was finally brought to an end by the Council of Constance, and all three popes were replaced by the newly elected Martin V in 1417, closing a century in which Avignon had claimed to be the center of world Christianity, with the pope, the whole papal court and all the economic, political and artistic baggage that brought along with it (such as the poet Petrarch, whose beloved Laura is supposedly buried here).

We went up the hill, the Rocher des Doms, to the north of the cathedral.  There is an outlook over the famous, broken-off Bridge of St.-Benezet, of the French children’s song: “On the Bridge of Avignon, there they dance, there they dance.”  At the top you turn into a pleasant park, with a pond and trees and benches, and children driving around toy cars.  We hadn’t managed to have a picnic the day before, so our cold meat and olives had spent most of the time since their purchase in the refrigerator in our room at Au Point de Lumiere.  Now they, and the small loaf of bread, came out and were eaten as we sat on a bench.  A yellow jacket wasp appeared and tried to get a share of our belated lunch, but we managed to gobble the meat up, whereupon the aggressive insect lost interest and disappeared.  It was a harbinger of what we’d run into in Berlin.

Then we went down the hill to the cathedral, but that appeared to be closed.  We decided that we didn’t, at this point, want to spend the money to go into the Palace.  We wandered around, following the Rick Steves book, visiting the Church of St.-Pierre

and in its square making a reservation for dinner at 7:30 at the restaurant L’Epicerie.  We followed one of the Rick Steves walking tours, into the old town, ending up at a water wheel on the rue des Teinturiers. 

We then went back to our room until it was time to go to dinner.

 At l'Epicerie, we had the usual bottle of mineral water, but decided to have a 25-centiliter carafe each of two different house wines, the red for Mary Joy and the white for me.  Not great.  We each had a wonderful mixed salad, with greens, tomatoes, grapes, apple slices, hazelnut pieces and maybe other nice ingredients that I don't remember.  Mary Joy's main dish was a lamb tajine, which arrived in a very Moroccan terra-cotta dish, with a towering cover and a terra-cotta bowl full of yellow couscous.  I had prawns (still in the shell) cooked in butter, with potatoes and vegetables.  For dessert, Mary Joy had a peach tarte tatin, while I had my third chocolate moelleux of the trip, this one, like the first, a small chocolate cake shell filled with a sort of chocolate pudding, but with a pistachio paste beneath.  Another exceptionally nice dinner.

Rousillon, Pont Julien, Lacoste, Menerbes, Oppede-le-Vieux

On Wednesday, July 29^th, we decided that we would picnic, so, after breakfast, we went into town and stopped at the boulangerie (bakery) for a small loaf of bread and at the charcuterie-epicerie (a sort of delicatessen) for sliced cold meat and olives.  We made a reservation for dinner for 7:30 at L’Estrade.  Then we headed off southwest.

Since Roussillon was on our way, we decided to try visiting it again, in spite of our negative experience the evening before.  This time, things turned out much better.  It wasn’t quite as crowded, and we found a parking place in a lot up a hill, by the Ochre Trail.  As we went in and picked up a ticket from the machine, we saw a sign saying that the first fifteen minutes were “gratis.”  This, of course, implied that longer stays would require payment.  We assumed that how that would be done would become apparent when we left the lot.  The lot was informal—dirt and grass, with no lines separating the cars.

We walked down into town.  Roussillon is famous for sitting on ochre-colored cliffs, the color of which is caused by (guess what) ochre, which has been mined on and off since Roman times. 

The town itself is ochre-colored, an explosion of reddish-brownish-orangeish-pink.  It is very artsy-craftsy, most of the art and pottery and textiles looking pretty high in quality—not too much kitsch.  We wandered around the pretty town, stopping in the church of St.-Michel, then passing under the Belfry to the Castrum, the old citadel and the highest part of the village.

We spent a substantial amount of time in Roussillon—certainly much more than fifteen minutes,

so we were expecting to have to pay something, and when we stuck the ticket into the exit machine, we were told so, but not how or where the caisse (cashier) was, and the machine arm blocking our way stayed resolutely down.  We managed to extricate Francois from the line of cars waiting to leave, then, while Mary Joy went to repark, I tried to find the caisse.  It was a ticket-vending machine at the far end of the lot, near the Ochre Trail (probably also for buying tickets to the Trail).  The man in front of me--also, I think, a foreigner, though not American—was having trouble with the machine and eventually gave up.  It took me a while to figure out where to put the ticket and where to put my credit card, but I succeeded in get my ticket back, stamped. 

Meanwhile, Mary Joy had had some trouble parking, due to the fact that someone had parked on one of the drive lanes, so she ended up having to ask an Italian family to back their car up, which they did, very genially.  When Mary Joy asked the mother how she had learned to speak English so well, she smiled and said: “We’re Italian.  We speak every language.”

My stamped ticket succeeded in causing the exit arm to go up, letting us out of the lot, so we continued on our way, heading south on the D106.
 

Next stop, just the other side of the D900, was the Pont Julien, an ancient Roman bridge that until recently had carried car traffic over the Calavon River, which this particular day was completely dried up.  The worn old bridge, now carrying only pedestrians and bikes, while the highway detours around it over a new bridge, looked a little forlorn, like an aged workman, retired against his will, who no longer knows what to do with himself.

From there we went to nearby Lacoste, parking in a free lot below the town and walking up.  While Roussillon was red-brown, Lacoste, like the towns we would visit later in the day, was a gray-white limestone (?). 

Most of the town appears to be occupied by artists related to the Savannah College of Art and Design, so you would hear, passing in the main street up the hill to the Chateau, young people having art-related conversations, in English.  The Chateau at the top of Lacoste, is being somewhat restored, with the help of Pierre Cardin, who also sponsors a classical music festival there (this year’s had finished the previous week).  This chateau was partly dismantled for building materials at the time of the French Revolution, but before that it had been the home and hideaway of the infamous Marquis de Sade.  You can cross a bridge over a dry moat to the Chateau’s ticket office.  When we asked what was inside, we were told that there were some restored rooms from the time of the Marquis and some art exhibits.  Looking over our shoulders from the courtyard, as were hearing this, was a pink metal elephant. 

We were about to decline this opportunity, when the guy in the ticket booth quickly offered to cut the price in half, from twelve euros to six.  Why not?  Especially since we needed to use the restrooms.  We eventually found them, though they probably weren’t intended for public use and didn’t have toilet paper.  We looked through the two or three rooms furnished with period stuff, then looked for the art exhibits.  Apparently, the pink elephant, along with three or four other metal animals, was it.  So we’d basically paid six euros apiece for a pit stop.

Rick Steves had recommended a particular restaurant there for lunch, but Mary Joy wanted to go on to Menerbes and eat there.  The problem with that was that once we arrived in Menerbes, it was just at two o’clock, and none of Lonely Planet’s recommended restaurants was still serving lunch.  We were stuck with a pizza place.  They had some other special—a salad or pasta?—that we tried, but Mary Joy didn’t finish hers.  I think this colored her view of Menerbes (home to Peter Mayle, author of A Year in Provence and a few hundred other books about his Luberon expat-ship). 

At this point I should explain that this whole area is called, loosely the Luberon, though the Luberon proper is the long mountain that looms behind and to the south of Bonnieux, Lacoste, Menerbes, Oppede, etc.

In any case, we wandered up the length of Menerbes, which appears to run along a ridge, and back again, not seeing anything of particular interest.

We went on to Oppede-le-Vieux.  This town, like Jerome, Arizona, is a former ghost town, abandoned by its inhabitants around the turn of the twentieth century, but reinhabited by artists and writers, starting in the 1940s. 

You park down below and walk up, first to the village square, and then up and up to the old church and castle.  We didn’t get that far, only reaching a ruined chapel at the first hairpin above the square.  I thought that it was too far up—too ambitious a hike this late in the day.  Mary Joy thought the village was charming, in contrast to Lacoste and Menerbes.  I’ll have to say that I didn’t see what she saw in the place.

We went down and drove off.  There was a circus set up in tents near the town--we had seen it as we came in.  A day or two earlier, we had seen another circus somewhere along the way, and we had seen posters for various circuses everywhere we went in Provence.  Apparently, small circuses are still an important form of entertainment there.

We went through Maubec and Coustellet, picking up the D2.  Once we’d crossed the D900, we followed the route we’d taken coming in on Sunday, passing below Gordes. 

We had time for a swim in the infinity pool at Au Pointe de Lumiere—very, very pleasant.  Then we got dressed and headed for St.-Saturnin.  Since our normal lot, by the Salle de Fetes, was closed that night, in preparation for something going on the next day, we ended up, after searching for some time, parking below and farther back from our restaurant, so we arrived about ten minutes late.  However, they still had a small table reserved for us, which was good, because L’Estrade, in a relatively small room, with a small deck in front, filled up pretty quickly.

We had a bottle of cold tap water and a 50-centiliter bottle of white wine from the region.  The amuse-bouche was a slice of toasted baguette spread with a tomato sauce, topped by a little filet from a very small fish (a sardine or fresh anchovie?).

We didn't order an appetizer (everything was a la carte).  Mary Joy had a tuna steak, thick and just a little seared, with a tomato-vegetable sauce and some potatoes.  I had a duck breast in a wonderful honey-balsamic vinegar sauce, with some vegetables and potatoes.  For dessert, Mary Joy had a peach clafoutis, while I had a wonderful chocolate Charlotte with raspberry sorbet.  This was one of the best meals we had on the whole trip.  We hadn’t gotten our picnic, but that could wait for another day.

 

Another Market, Bories, Senanque, Venasque

Tuesday is market day in St. Saturnin, so on July 28th, after another very good breakfast, served along with pleasant conversation by Jean-Claude and Annie, we drove into town and parked in front of the Post Office, which is on the highway, across from its intersection with the main street up the hill. Mary Joy needed some stamps and I needed to mail a key to Switzerland. With the enthusiastic help of a woman in line and the postal clerk, the key was soon in a padded envelope and on its way to Gimmelwald.

We then parked in our usual place, in the lot up by the Salle des Fetes. On that or the previous day Mary Joy spoke with a German who had parked his BMW in town overnight, only to find it the next morning crowbarred open. Nothing had been taken, but the car suffered serious damage. Every parking lot we went to in Provence had signs warning you to leave absolutely nothing in your car. Provence is, as you might guess from that, famous for car break-ins.

The market was nice.

We bought a bottle of wine, some napkins and a table runner. We went back to our room to drop off our acquisitions and to make a reservation for dinner at Le Table de Pablo, a highly recommended restaurant in nearby Villars. We used Skype, and the call went through, but there was apparently something odd about it, because the man at the other end sounded confused, asked where we were staying, and immediately called Au Point de Lumiere, so Annie was kind enough to make our reservation again.

That business done, we went to the Village of the Bories, near Gordes. Bories are odd huts made of thin stone slabs, piled up in layers, meeting at the top.

There are about 3,000 of them in the area, but the Village des Bories is a group of about 20 of them, hundreds of years old, occupied until the 19th century.

Then we headed north on the D177 to the Abbey of Senanque. Just before the road goes down into the valley where the abbey is located, there is a turnout overlook that provides the best-known view of Senanque: the abbey below, surrounded by fields of lavender

. When the plants are in full bloom, it is a spectacular picture. Unfortunately, this day the lavender was a little past its prime, so the color was comparatively muted.

Coming down into the valley, we were disheartened to see cars lined up at the abbey gates and parked and parking along the road is it continued up the other side of the valley. We considered parking out there, but later were glad that we didn’t. Once you got into the gate, there was plenty of parking in the lots near the buildings.

Other than the church, the abbey is open to the public only with a guided tour, in French, though brochures in other languages would be provided and, with a limit of 50 people, it might be hard to hear anything anyway. In any case, Rick Steves says that it isn’t worthwhile, so, after some time in the shop, where we picked up some more lavender products, we went into the church, very plain and spare, like all Cistercian monastery churches—very quiet and prayerful.

We continued north, driving through some impressive gorges, coming out at the D4, which we took west, to Venasque. There we had lunch on the pleasant terrace at the Restaurant Les Remparts. We both had a tomato tarte tatin, with a salad of greens that had bits of tomato and zucchini. I had a Kronenbourg 1664 Blonde beer, while Mary Joy had a nice glass of fresh cherry juice. That tomato tart was very, very good.

The 6th-century baptistry of Venasque is, according to Michelin, one of the oldest religious buildings in France. We visited it. We also looked out from the city toward Mont Ventoux, to the north. Ventoux is famous as one of the most grueling climbs in the Tour de France.

We went on to St.-Didier, where we parked and walked around a little. We couldn’t figure how to get into the church, and the town didn’t seem to be of much interest, otherwise. From there we went to Pernes-les-Fontaines, stopping in the tourist information office, but we decided that we didn’t have time to wander around there, so we drove back southeast on D4. Instead of turning onto D15, however, we decided to go to Rousillon, a mistake. The town was crowded to the gills with tourists, and, rather than trying to hunt out a parking spot, we went back to Au Point de Lumiere.

I had very explicit directions from Google Maps as to how to get to Le Table de Pablo, which was out in the country south of St.-Saturnin, but we nevertheless missed some turn along the way and ended up getting there by a more roundabout route, following signs for the place. This should have soured us once and for all on using Google Maps directions in France. I should have ditched the directions I had printed out at home and relied instead on getting detailed maps of where we were going. But at this point we couldn’t have printed them out, and I had other things to think about than getting directions for places that I thought were no problem to get to.

We were the second group to arrive at the restaurant, right at 7:30, and throughout the evening we were served by the restaurant's tag team of two waitresses--an older woman who explained every dish in exuberant French, and a younger woman with very good English, who explained that by saying she must have been English in a former life, since she had never been to an English-speaking country..

First, we were offered an aperitif of perry (pear hard cider), followed by an amuse-bouche of a little salmon mousse and a little tomato stuffed with a tuna paste. We ordered a liter bottle of sparkling mineral water and a 50-centiliter bottle (I.e., 2/3 normal size) of local Ventoux rose wine. We decided to take the three-course menu, but first we each received a tall, thin glass of gazpacho--Mary Joy chose the green one (we didn't hear what made it green--she thought it was avocado), while I chose the orange (a hint of pineapple). For the first course, I had a pistou, a thick, tasty Provençal vegetable soup. Mary Joy had the chef's "trilogy": a zucchini mousse in a drinking glass, a poultry pate and a small block of goat cheese that was designed to look exactly like a piece of white nougat candy, with pieces of hazelnut and pistachio visible in it!

My main course was a cod mousse--pale-yellow, creamy and light--with a number of small grilled vegetables. Mary Joy had roast pigeon. The thigh of the bird was stuffed with foie gras. Unfortunately, never having had pigeon before, she now learned that it was a little too gamy for her taste.

The older waitress now suggested that we have some chèvre cheese from Banon (which we had passed through the day before, on the way from Forcalquier to Sault), toasted a little in marc (brandy distilled, like grappa, from grape stalks, skins and seeds, byproducts of the winemaking process). I don’t remember what we had for dessert, but I do remember that is was very good.

These two waitresses and one busboy covered the whole, packed restaurant. Mary Joy had a good view of the station where they staged what they were about to serve, and she says that the precision, speed and efficiency of the process was very, very impressive.

What they had to serve was wonderful, except for the fact that Mary Joy discovered that she doesn’t like pigeon.

Salagon, Forcalquier and Lavender

On Monday, July 27th, we went to the porch of the main house, overlooking the pool, and sat down to a wonderful breakfast, served by Annie and her husband, Jean-Claude. They, like Karine, had apricot jam with lavender seeds--not something you would find in Minnesota!

Afterwards, we got into Francois and headed down the D943 to Apt. We turned onto the D900, heading east. While still in town, we tried to stop at the post office, but traffic was so heavy and parking so scarce that we gave up and continued onward. The principal reason we needed to find a post office was because while we were in Zug I found, in my pocket, the key to room 6 at Pension Gimmelwald. We had not yet had time or opportunity to mail it back, though I had been exchanging very pleasant, very low-key, very British-understatement e-mails with Phil at the Pension, on the order of: "We'll get it back to you as soon as we can." "Thanks very much. That would help, since it's the only key we have for that room. Old house."

We were on our way to Forcalquier, one of the few places in the area where there is a Monday market. The traffic on the D900, a two-lane highway, was bad, full of trucks. Annie had suggested that we stop at Salagon. In medieval times, Salagon was a very minor monastery, with a small church.

Now, the priory is a museum, the 11th-century church, with medieval sculpture and paintings and 20th-century stained glass by artist Aurelie Nemours, is interesting, but the place is mostly known for its gardens. As the Salagon website says: “With 1,700 plants, this green idyll has so much to communicate. Salagon gardens have been created on ethnobotany principles and laid out to fit the site's agricultural history. They show the relationship between humans and the plants around them: the way plants are used, knowledge about them, representations of them, etc. They are also an aesthetic creation, an educational tool and a facility for the conservation of plants and knowledge.”

We spent most of our time in the medieval garden, which exhibits plants that were not brought over from the New World. Mary Joy, our household's gardener, liked Salagon, but I’ll have to say that it left me rather lukewarm.

It was only a few minutes’ drive from there to Forcalquier. Though it was after 11 a.m., the market was still going full blast, and we had to park Francois out of town and walk in.

We ended up buying a few things for gifts--fruit tea and some packets of lavender--as well as a picnic lunch: some quiche slices, apricots and local cherry juice. Then we had our picnic on a streetside bench a block or so from the market. Problem that I had foreseen as a possibility: opening the bottle of cherry juice without a bottle opener or without my Swiss Army knife (left in the U.S. because we didn’t check luggage and, as I had experienced at Beijing Airport in 2002, airport security frowns on one absent-mindedly carrying a Swiss Army knife in one’s carry-on bag). Solution: use a ballpoint pen.

We looked into the church, and then went all the way up to the citadel, destroyed in 1601 and now surmounted with a chapel built, like Fourviere and Sacre Coeur, in the 1870s.

We had dessert at a creperie, principally in order to use the toilet. A creperie in France is a café that serves specialties of Britanny, such as crepes, galettes (crepes that are savory rather than sweet) and hard apple cider, just as a brasserie is a restaurant specializing in Alsatian fare (beer, sauerkraut, onion tarts, etc.). Mary Joy had a walnut crepe while I had a fruit crepe and some Breton cider. This was, of course, cheating, since we should have been eating Provencal specialties instead. The market had, by then, disappeared, almost by magic, when the clock had struck one.

We headed out of town northwest, toward Sault (pronounced “So”), which seemed like an interesting town, in the heart of lavender-growing country. The drive was pretty (it’s mostly marked in green on the Michelin map). Just before Sault, we turned off at St.-Trinit, because the Michelin Green Guide to Provence said that the church there “is a fine example of Romanesque architecture in Haute Provence.” First, we had trouble finding the church, then we had trouble getting near it, so we just continued on. As we approached Sault, we started seeing blue-purple fields of lavender. The fields seemed to be a little past their blooming prime, but were pretty nonetheless.

When we got into town we drove around, looking vainly for a parking place—Sault, which we had never heard of before doing research for this trip, was overflowing with people, including Chinese or Japanese on tour buses. This was lavender season, and Sault is the capital of lavender, home of an annual Lavender Festival in early August. Eventually, we gave up and headed out of town, but even that proved problematic. We wanted to start out heading south toward Apt on the D943, but couldn’t find it. If I’d had time to stop and sort it out, I could have figured out from the map, as I eventually did, that D943, heading south, must peel off from D1, which heads west, and not from D30, which goes southeast with signs saying “Apt,” but which doesn’t go anywhere near St.-Saturnin.

So, after several false starts, we got on D943 and started climbing up the Vaucluse Plateau, stopping at a scenic turnout to look back.

At St.-Jean-de-Sault we turned onto the D230, to continue up over the plateau. Lavender proper, unlike the hybrid, lavandin, which isn’t as intense and is used in soaps, etc., can only be cultivated at relatively high altitudes—such as on the Vaucluse Plateau. We hadn’t gone very far before we came to a large roadside stand, covered with lavender and lavandin products—oils, soaps, sachets, etc.

Tending it was a young woman who was about eight months pregnant. She said that it was all grown right there—the fields were around us and the farm buildings were across the road, including a distillery. Her husband was over there, she said, so why didn’t we go over and have a look? So, after Mary Joy picked up some more gifts, we drove across the road, parked and looked into the shed where harvested lavender was fed into vats.

We continued on D230, gradually climbing to the high point, 998 meters (around 3300 feet), then gradually went back down again, through what looked like olive groves, until we came to the edge of the plateau and dropped down on switchbacks, with the long, low Luberon Mountain in scenic sight across the valley to the south.

Before getting all the way down to St.-Saturnin (below 400 meters in altitude—around 1300 feet) and rejoining D943, we stopped at an old, stone windmill above the town.

There was a small group of people already there (not Americans), being addressed by some longwinded person who appeared to be a guide of some sort. I don’t remember what the language was—probably French, but I didn’t pay enough attention to pick out any tidbits of information.

After getting back to our room, we decided to eat again in town—L’Estrade, down the street from St. Hubert, had better reviews on Tripadvisor, and the menu, which we had looked at the night before, appeared interesting. Two restaurants outside of town, with very good reviews, had left their cards in our room, but neither was open on Monday. It turned out that L’Estrade wasn’t either. The pizza place down on the corner with the highway was full. So we ate again at St. Hubert, which was listed in Lonely Planet for its hotel, not for its restaurant. This time, I had the fish, which was good. I don’t remember what Mary Joy had.

At one point or other we used the ATM down the street, closer to the highway. We ended up using this machine twice while we were there, in spite of the fact that the screen display was malfunctioning—there was a border down the middle and the right half of the display was over on the left side of the screen, and vice-versa. This meant that the labels for the touchscreen buttons were next to buttons that did something else—i.e., “Cancel” instead of “Approve.” Once we had figured this out, it only required some mental dexterity to keep the true labels in our heads and press the correct buttons to get our euros.

To Provence

We got up early on Sunday, July 26th, and walked down and across the Saone to the cathedral for 8 o'clock mass. The priest presiding at mass in Interlaken had been Indian; the priest here was African. Mary Joy liked the organ and organ-playing.

We returned to Nos Chambres en Ville and had our last, very nice breakfast there. We said goodbye to Karine and went down to the Metro station. At first, this was problematic, because the entrance we had used before was only for the direction opposite to the one we wanted to go. We had to go farther down the street, on the other side. The Metro was on Sunday schedule, but that meant that trains were running every ten minutes instead of every five. After changing at Charpennes, we got to Part-Dieu Station without any trouble.

Lyon has a TGV high-speed train station out at the airport, but many TGV trains depart from or arrive at Part-Dieu instead. You have to be careful to know where to catch your particular train. We had reserved seats (back in Basel) on a train that should take a little more than an hour to go from Part-Dieu all the way to Avignon. And that's what it did, uneventfully.

The Avignon TGV station is in the south suburbs, about five kilometers south of the main rail station, which is just south of the old city wall. The rental cars at the TGV station are in a big lot just to the north, next to a series of little square buildings holding the desks of the individual rental companies. Back home, I had reserved a car with Avis, through the AARP-Expedia website. The last time we had reserved a car in France through AARP-Expedia, 2009, things had not worked out well. We had arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport to claim our car at the Enterprise counter, at what I had thought was a very good price for an automatic-transmission car in Europe. Almost all cars in Europe have manual transmission, while almost all cars in the U.S. have automatic transmission. It is nearly impossible to rent a manual transmission car in the U.S. In Europe, on the other hand, it is more difficult and expensive to rent an automatic than to rent a stick-shift. Mary Joy and I have no real experience driving manual transmission. So, back in 2009, when we were presented with the key to a manual-transmission car, I pointed out where, in our e-mail from Expedia, we were promised an automatic transmission. "But," said the woman behind the desk, "we don't have automatic cars at Charles de Gaulle." In that case, I replied, we would go to Hertz or Avis. After some frantic consultation and calling, they announced that they were able to find us one automatic-transmission car, but . . . It was a seven-passenger Grand Caravan mini-van!

With no real alternative, we accepted, dubbing the monstrosity (hard to park on narrow Norman and Breton streets, but easy to find among the pigmy French cars) "Pierre." Now, in Avignon, I had visions of getting stuck with another Pierre, or worse. But, in the first of a number of pleasant experiences with Avis on this trip, we learned that we would, indeed, have automatic transmission. When we found our boxy little black Citroen Picasso, which we named "Francois," we at first had a little trouble figuring it out. The left side of the shifter had "M," apparently indicating "Manual." The right side had options "R," "N" and "A." Thus, "Reverse" was where "Park" would normally be, and there was no "Park" at all! In fact, there were indications on the dash that instead of starting and turning off the engine in "Park," you had to do so in "Neutral," with your foot on the brake pedal. "A" for "Automatic" stood in for the usual "D" for "Drive." Once we had this figured out, which also meant always using the parking brake when we parked, Francois didn't present us with any problems and, in fact, Mary Joy, who, as usual, did all the driving while I navigated, liked very much how it handled.

The only problem was getting out of the lot.  Most car rentals we've used have a booth at the exit where a person checks your papers before letting you out.  Here, after going back to the station for a bathroom stop, then spending time figuring out how to drive the car, we finally got behind another car that was at the machine and arm (no human) that was the last bar to our leaving the car rental lot.  However, the car in front of us was stuck there.  The driver was typing numbers onto the keypad (there was a number code on our rental papers), with no result.  Finally, a member of their party returned from the rental office, they typed in a number, the arm went up and they drove out.

Now it was our turn.  Mary Joy typed in the number that we had been given.  Nothing happened.  She tried again.  Nothing.  Finally, someone in back of us got out of his car and came up and typed a different number onto the keypad.  Voila!  We were out!

I had previously worked out our route on Google Maps, printing out detailed directions. Not for the last time, this was almost immediately frustrated by the complications of French highway layout and signage. After a while, none of the roundabouts were presenting us with the directions indicated by the narrative from Google Maps. When I realized that we were north of Avignon and headed in the direction of Orange, instead of east of Avignon and headed in the direction of Apt, I had Mary Joy get off the highway immediately, so I could recalculate where we were on our Michelin map and where to head from there. Mary Joy now reminded me rather pointedly that we could have paid to have GPS. I reminded her, in turn, that she had her own personal GPS, namely me. She made it clear that this system appeared to her not to be functioning very well. However, after a while, with a little luck, we found ourselves driving eastward on the D900

Mary Joy didn't like the heavy truck traffic on this road, but eventually we turned off onto the D2, toward Gordes. Gordes is one of the spectacular "hanging villages" that Provence is known for. It is therefore very touristy. We hadn't been there since our circumnavigation of France in 1999, so we decided to stop there, parking below the town and walking up. It was hot, crowded, hard to find any interesting view. We finally ate a quick lunch at an outdoor counter--I don't remember what or why.

This is in some ways a distillation of our experience of Provence on this trip. If we had to do it again, we wouldn't go there in July, when the French are on vacation, and certainly not in August, when the Italians are on vacation, too.

We drove on down the D2 toward St. Saturnin-les-Apt, looking for signs for our B&B, Au Point de Lumiere. Eventually, we saw a little sign, and followed it and others like it through several turns down various country roads, ending up on a narrow route up the Perreal Hill, finally turning into a gated driveway, where there was a large house, with an "infinity" swimming pool. We met our delightful hostess, Annie, who, like Karine in Lyon, could speak English, but was glad to speak French when it became clear that Mary Joy could carry on a conversation in that language. She showed us our "Sienne" room,

which was very pleasant and had its own porch with a table and chairs, on which Mary Joy and I were soon having a snack, with a carafe of wine.

We asked Annie about restaurants and she offered to make a reservation for us at the St. Hubert in St. Saturnin, so that's where we had dinner, on the terrace.

The meal was good, but not memorable (it had too much competition on this trip). I remember that I had duck breast in cherry sauce, while Mary Joy had fish.

Then we went back to our room and were finally able to phone Mary Joy's mother, using Skype. When we had e-mailed saying that we'd been trying to call, they realized that these calls were not "Spam" after all, and now picked up the phone. One peculiarity of WiFi in our room was that it only worked on our iPad (which sometimes has WiFi range difficulties) in the bathroom and at the corner of the bed that was closest to the bathroom!

And so to bed.

Market Table

Normally, breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays at Nos Chambres en Ville starts at 9 a.m., but on Saturday, July 25th, Karine was kind enough to have our breakfast ready at 8:30 so that we could walk a few blocks up the hill by 9:00 for Plum Teaching Kitchen's all-day Market Table cooking class.

Our instructor, Lucy, is an American married to a Frenchman. She is a French-trained pastry chef who teaches various classes out of a storefront kitchen on the Croix-Rousse hill. Our group consisted of five not-young Americans and a young Australian, all but one female and, by coincidence, most trained as nurses.

Lucy got out a market basket and a two-wheeled market bag and we went to the Montee de la Grande Cote, the pedestrianized street up the hill.

At stops on the way up, Lucy explained the history of this street and the Croix-Rousse generally. Before the French Revolution, this was the only road up a hill covered with monastery gardens and vineyards. The buildings toward the bottom of the Montee were the only non-church-related buildings on the hill. After the Revolution, silk production was moved from Vieux Lyon to the Croix-Rousse, where new buildings with large windows, on the south-facing hill, brought much better light to the silk-making process. This industry, once primary to Lyon's identity, has now disappeared, except for a little artisan or artistic silk production.

At the top of the hill, for many blocks along a street, was the market, a crowded, booming, buzzing affair. We spent over an hour there, deciding what to pick up for our meal, based on what was available. We collected our purchases and headed for a boulangerie (bakery).

The French buy their baguettes daily. Next was the fromagerie (cheese shop). Lucy said that she doesn't normally buy cheese at the market, because it isn't as fresh. Across the street was a chocolatier (called "Chokola") that Lucy recommended. While we were waiting for the cheese purchase some of us went over and bought some very nice chocolate.

Now we went back down the hill and, first, had a snack: three different types of meat pate, with little thumb-sized cheeses and berries.

Very nice. Then, to work, all of us being given various tasks involving washing and chopping. Beets were cooked and sliced and interspersed on the plate with goat cheese: our first course. We took it into the dining room behind the kitchen and enjoyed the first fruits of our labor, along with some wine.

Next we created three different sauces for lamb chops and cooked the chops themselves. Meanwhile, Mary Joy, who had said that she couldn't bake, was given most of the responsibility for dessert: a tart of apricot slices in a bed of almond paste.

After artistically plating the main dish,

we went back to the dining room and ate it, along with more wine. Then came a course of several different cheeses, followed by Mary Joy's wonderful apricot tart. By then it was nearly 6 p.m.

This was one of the best cooking classes we've ever taken. Lucy kept things running very smoothly, involving everyone.

Afterwards, we wandered around a little, finding the Amphitheater of the Three Gauls and, down by the Saone, the Fresque des Lyonnais, a windowless seven-story building wall that had been painted with a trompe-l'oeil mural of famous lyonnais, leaning on balconies, including chef Paul Bocuse and the Little Prince (along with his author, Antoine de St.-Exupery).

We went back by the Hotel de Ville and Opera, then crossed the bridge over the Rhone. By then it was getting dark, so we went back to our room.

Lyon

On Friday, July 24th, we had breakfast out in a little garden terrace atrium, which served as a very nice breakfast room.    I think their was fruit, soft-boiled eggs, croissants, bread and Karine's wonderful homemade jams: apple-cinnamon and apricot-lavender--all very nice.

We walked down to the Hotel de Ville, where we caught the Metro to Bellecourt, a very large dirt square with an equestrian statue of Louis XIV in Roman dress, very similar to the somewhat later statue of Frederick V of Denmark we had seen in the square of the Amalienborg in Copenhagen.

 There are fashions in autocratic self-aggrandizement as there are in anything else, and, as in anything else, the fashions were often set by the French.  On the south side of the square is the main Lyon tourist information office.  Back home, I had bought us Lyon City Cards, which gave us free public transit and museum entry all day, as well as one free walking tour and one free boat tour.  Now we picked up our City Cards and headed over the bridge across the Saone River to Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon).

Lyon was founded in 43 B.C. as the Roman colony of Lugdunum, where the Saone, coming from the north, joins the Rhone, coming from the east and Lake Geneva before heading south to the Mediterranean.  It has been an important city ever since.  It is the third-largest city in France and the proud capital of French cuisine.  The original Gallo-Roman town was built on the heights above the right, western bank of the Saone, just above its confluence with the Rhone.  The main commercial area developed across the Saone, on the flatter Presque'ile (Peninsula), between the two rivers.  Lugdunum was the principal city of Roman Gaul, the capital of one of its three provinces and the site of the annual meeting of the three Gauls on the Croix-Rousse hill, above and north of the Presque'ile.

Medieval Lyon (Vieux Lyon) came down from the heights but stayed on the right bank of the Saone.  During the Renaissance, Lyon became a major center of silk production.  The Presque Ile eventually developed as the administrative center of the city.  After the French Revolution, silk production mostly moved to the Croix-Rousse, which had previously been monastery gardens and vineyards.  The modern city, with its skyscrapers, shopping malls and the main train station, developed on the other side of the Rhone, the eastern, left bank.  In summary, from left to right on the map are: the heights of the old Gallo-Roman city and the Fourviere hill; the lower, medieval Vieux Lyon; the Presque'ile, in the V of the confluence of the two rivers, capped by the heights of the Croix-Rousse (with our B&B on the hillside, a few blocks north of the Hotel de Ville and Opera, which are just at the foot of the hill); finally, the modern city, east of the Rhone.

We took the funicular (free with our City Card) up the Fourviere hill to the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere.

We went through the church and looked around.  Like Sacre Coeur in Paris, it is a grandiose statement of late-nineteenth-century Catholic triumphalism in the face of the militantly secular and anti-clerical Third Republic, on the highest available point.  It is of little interest, architecturally, artistically or religiously.  (Mary Joy finds this statement a little harsh.)

We walked down to the Roman Theatre, which was set up for a concert that evening,

then over to the Gallo-Roman Museum (free entry with the Lyon City Card).  This museum is so interesting, covering the period from prehistory to early medieval times, that we spent much more time there than we had expected.

 We went back up to the basilica and had a quick but very good (salads lyonnaise--greens, shallot, bacon, egg, mustard, vinegar) lunch,

before taking the funicular down to the Vieux Lyon Tourist Information office, for our 2:30 walking tour.  However, we needn't have hurried, since the tour took awhile to get itself together, what with confusion with other (French-language) tours gathering at the same spot out front, and problems with some of the audio sets that would enable our guide, a young woman named Claire, to communicate with the group of a dozen or so English-speaking people via microphone and radio.

Finally, around 2:45, we set off, and Claire gave us some historical background on Vieux Lyon, as we walked over to the Cathedral of Saint-Jean.   The "Primatiale," as it is called, since the Archbishop of Lyon has had the title of "Primate of the Gauls" since 1079, was started in the twelfth century and finished in the fifteenth.  It has nice thirteenth-century stained glass.

Claire talked about how, during the Renaissance, Lyon became an important center for the manufacture of silk cloth.  Most buildings had interior courtyards, and many of these connect to streets on both sides of the block, so that one can pass through (in classical Latin, transambulare; in late Latin, trabulare) the building to get one side to the other.  These "traboules" are common in Vieux Lyon and the Croix-Rousse, the early and later silk-working districts, because their principal use was to enable silk workers to easily move their products down to the river.  Dozens of these passageways are still open to the public, by contract between the city and the building owners.  The public is asked to be quiet and respect the privacy and property of the inhabitants.  Claire took us through a number of these traboules.  Most of them are designated by a particular sort of plate next to the door, but others aren't--you have to know they're there, or have a map that shows them.

It was an interesting tour, lasting an hour and forty-five minutes, and Claire was a good guide.   We decided to get in a quick visit to the nearby Gadagne Museums while our City Card was still valid.  On the way there, we noticed a family with ice cream cones and asked where they'd gotten them.  As a result, we stumbled onto what we later learned is the best ice cream parlor in Lyon, La Terre Adelices.  It was, indeed, terrific ice cream.

The Gadagne Museums are an old mansion containing a rather odd combination of museums: the Museum of the History of the City of Lyon and the Puppet Museum.  Both are interesting, but not something that one absolutely needs to see.

We walked back over the Saone and to the Place des Terreaux, where we got a better look at Bartholdi's fountain representing the Saone.  Actually it was designed to represent the River Garonne, with its four sources, for the City of Bordeaux, but Bordeaux couldn't come up with the money for it, while Lyon could, so the lady depicted in bronze changed her name from Garonne to Saone!

We went back to our chambre en ville to decide what to do for dinner.  Our choice was a modern version of a classic Lyon bouchon.  Back in the early twentieth century, during an economic downturn, a number of wealthy lyonnais had to let go of their private cooks.  These women, with their training in upper-class cuisine, went into the male-dominated restaurant business, cooking a refined version of local working-class dishes.  These Meres (mothers), with their bouchon (bottle stopper) restaurants, soon made Lyon the go-to place for French cooking, earning stars in the first Michelin restaurant guides.  Le Bouchon des Filles (the Bouchon of the Daughters) plays off of the idea of a homage of a younger generation of women chefs to the Meres.

We got there a little after 7:30--half an hour after it opened, but early for the French.  When we arrived, there were only two other parties there, but by 9:30 the place was jam-packed  (literally--most of the guests are seated at large tables next to strangers, though we were early enough to get a table of our own in the corner) and they were turning people away.

They have a single menu, for 25 euros, though you get a choice from four or five main dishes and a number of desserts.  Otherwise, everyone started with an amuse-bouche of a small piece of cornbread, but not your mother's cornbread--I forget exactly what flavor were in and on it.  Then came the salad course--French lentils in a mayonnaise-scallion sauce, a smoked herring mousse and a hog-jowl and carrot terrine.

Then came a palate-cleanser--a tiny soup of some sort, topped by a single pea.  As a main course, Mary Joy had quenelle de brochet--according to Lonely Planet, "pike dumplings served in a creamy crayfish sauce."  I had boudin noir aux pommes ("blood sausage with apples"), with a puff pastry crust.  Both very good, both classically bouchon lyonnais food.

Next were three cheeses, followed by dessert: Mary Joy had a peach cake with pistachio ice cream; I had a chocolate mousse cake with some sort of ice cream.

While waiting for dessert, Mary Joy said: "One has never eaten until one has eaten in Lyon."   Coming from Mary Joy, this was the highest of praise.  We found Lyon's reputation for great food to be fully deserved.

Mary Joy had entertained the idea of taking a free (with the City Card) boat tour at 9 p.m., but I hadn't thought that would be possible, and it wasn't.  In France, you have to expect that dinner will take at least two-and-a-half hours.  By American standards, wait-staff is too small and service is therefore too slow.  But French restaurants do not expect to turn over your table, even if you arrive at an hour at which no self-respecting Frenchperson would yet even think of dinner (and as for Spain, where the restaurants don't even open until 8:30 . . .).   So when we left, sometime after ten, we went back to our room.