Bellenaves

Good idea: take a day off, & take a train somewhere new.

Bad idea: 7 am train. I don't get up that early for work!

Good idea: 9 am trains. Hey, France, trains at nine are early enough for relaxing vacationers, and still early enough to get you somewhere with time to explore before lunch. So schedule some, please.

Today's random destination (within, of course, the limited selection of "trains leaving early and getting there not too late, with a train home again in time for bridge in the evening, going someplace I haven't been before") is Bellenaves. The season is late for sunflowers. In most fields they're starting to weigh down their stalks and look down at their feet, not the sun, but my train rounds a few bends where bright yellow fields are still blooming not very far away. Will have to find a trail that goes to one!

Bellenaves: the road into town from the station.

 The station is a bit out of town; in fact, it's in the next village over. Which way to go first...



You are now leaving Bellenaves.

Sunflowers must be this way, somewhere.

 There is a lot of nice countryside in this direction, but the gorgeous sunflower fields remain stubbornly on the other side of a gorge with no easy way across, and the road keeps turning the wrong way and not taking me around a bend to golden yellow glory.

So I turn around to look for a better road.



Apples are ready early this year. I swear this one made me think this was a plastic-apple tree!
No retouching has been done!



 On the way back I pass a neat little dovecote in an empty field.

Treasures in Bellenaves: a 12th century Roman church. Roman, they say. You can tell it's French by the chicken on top.

There's a panel out front detailing the sights of this church, from the façade featuring Jesus washing the feet of the apostles to the special stained glass portrait of Mary inside. I gather that the interior is still mostly decorated head to toe, but it's closed so I don't get to see it. Stained glass from the outside is just boring.

The second treasure in Bellenaves I saw from the train on my trip to Montluçon this spring. A nice castle in town, turrets and all. The village website promises it's open for visits in July and August (except Mondays). Today is Tuesday, but no luck: closed for repairs. Alas, there's no good view of it from outside the tall gates and walls.

So fine. A tour of the countryside is in order. The clock on the church says it's 10:35, so I've got two and a half hours.

There's a nice map posted in town, with all the roads, streams, sites, and hiking/biking/riding trails in the area. I take a quick sketch of the route I've decided will take me past the bright flower fields, with a couple of landmarks, and take off.

After 10 minutes or so, consulting my little sketch I wish I had added a few more roads. And then it hits me - I have an all-new camera with a screen that works! Just take a picture of the map.

Too late now.

 I did find some sunflowers. And I had some really great long shots of the fields, and one with a silly scarecrow in the middle and all, and then I played with the rapid-fire function shooting a pair of hawks in the air, but 87 of those photos have mysteriously disappeared in an accidental deletion.

Though I did get a shot of the sketch of the map!

Deauville notes

As I mentioned last time, the slow parts of a trip I have plenty of time to write about on the spot, but once stuff is happening, only the slightest notes get taken. Usually I depend on the photographs to jog my memory, though they often don't and it's a week before I get around to it, and well, I've been there. It's over. So here we are with some fragments.

The tourist office didn't have any small or handy maps of hiking in the area (what? physical activity beyond lugging shopping bags to the Benz???), so I popped into a bookstore to check out the travel section. There's this series of books that covers hiking trails all across the country, and each town stocks the book(s) covering the area. I love the series, but at 15 euros a shot it's a bit pricey when you're only ever going to do one hike from a given book. There is only one hike from Deauville, and one from Trouville.

I took the following note in the margin of a sudoku page: red/white from ch St Aug. That it was 12km and ended up on the beach about a mile north of town I could simply remember.

Roast local chicken and french fries for lunch, and off for the hills.

First interesting building come to is a great monastery complex and historic site. Open to the public (yea!) Saturdays from 3 to 5 (oh. never mind).

A few k on, the Touqueville Military Cemetery contains mostly WWI graves, and then from WW2: 11 British, 2 Canadian and 33 German soldiers. Just normal, I guess, but it struck me that you couldn't tell anyone apart at a glance. The two sides were just mixed in.Cows in the distance!The apple trees are just coming into bloom, but this place had a gigantic red apple already.

Not far from here I crossed a patch of woods, and having seen no other people on the trail so far, stopped for a pee. Thank goodness the dog and two passersby were paying attention to each other, because there wasn't all that much cover.

And a few steps farther, I finally saw the difference between a rabbit and a hare. I swear, that sucker was three feet tall!

I would have read the trail book a little more carefully if the shopkeeper hadn't been watching me (and expecting me to buy the book, not copy it), and it would have been useful to know that the loop described was only one of several possibilities pieced together from a long-distance trail and its alternates that wander extensively through the area. I ended up overshooting my turning-point and going much farther. I could have gone to the next town, but prudently realized that going too far in one direction would mean foot agony by the time I got back. Once back at sea level I passed a sign saying Deauville, 5km (3.5km farther that I should have hit the beach). But it was a soft walk back on the sand.

Horses are indeed ridden up and down the beach.

Kid absolutely enthralled by his sand pile.

Along the Deauville boardwalk there was this strange serenade of, what, bells? Some kind of tin drum? Nope, the gently clanging of the unused flagpoles.

That was the end of Day 1's hike, about 20km all told. Time for a glorious soak in the tub and a bit of a nap before dinner.

Ah, yes, let's get to the eating part. Strolling around rich tourist-destination Deauville with its brand-name boutiques and day spas, it looked like I had to spend a fortune to dine. Across the river to more modest Trouville, perfectly affordable restaurants line the quay upstream, getting swankier as you approach the sea. Who knows what's good? Cloth napkins are no guarantee, so just pick one.

Fish soup, fresh mussels and fries, a glass of wine, perhaps some sorbet for dessert. That's exactly the menu I'm looking for, and I'm not disappointed. Not quite as good as the fish soup in Marseille last year (the southerners are bolder with the spices and garlic), but very nice.

Evenings like this... it's 8pm, the sun is just setting, the tourists have not yet arrived in force... really make me appreciate the French thing for eating on the sidewalk. They've turned on the heaters on the terrace, cleverly just a degree before I would have noticed needing them. As long as they don't seat smokers at the next table, it'll be a perfect dinner. And they don't.

Local Calvados apple sorbet! well, well, apple isn't my usual choice of sorbet, but this stuff is special. Not your supermarket junk!

I've taken my time at dinner, and still the sky is not quite black. Dusk lingers and lingers, fading ever so slowly. The river rushing the other way now, the 'right' way, makes the moored fishing boats look like they're underway, bow-wave and all.

Tomorrow I see there's a Kite Festival on the beach. That will be a sight. I hope they get going in the morning - a shame if my 1pm train makes me miss it by a whisker. I hate missing things by a whisker: better miss by a week and not regret it.

In the morning: a long walk up the Trouville-side beach, and back by the parallel road/hiking trail. The beach photos from the first post are all from that walk.

This line in the sand was much more noticable in person, but I had to lean way down to see what was making it.

Beachfront property.Fish market on the Trouville side of the river. Glorious offerings - I wish I had some means of getting the catch to my house in good condition! All I could do was eat as much as possible while there.

Tourist alert! Also while sitting at this table, having a beer and waiting for my train back to Paris, I overheard the following snippet of conversation:

kid: ...we can take a knife!

grandma: yes, that would be useful if they attack us

mom: and if they attack us with lots of cannonballs?...

And that's the story. I'll see about posting more photos tomorrow.

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Arriving in Deauville

The obligatory getting there. Less happening, but more time to write about it!

Elbowing my way through Paris on a Friday morning, it's such a beautiful spring day it would be a shame to go underground, though the metro would surely be faster. To favor public transport, they've put in bus corridors all over the city. My bus, however, hardly gets to use them: they've become parking strips for taxis, delivery vans, and cars just waiting, blinkers on as if that made a difference.

The stop outside Letitia and Bruno's apartment is a lane going against the flow of a one-way boulevard, and there's a moving van parked in it just before the stop. Three buses wait for a break in the oncoming traffic to go around. When my bus approaches, she stops and blasts the air horn - loud as a fire engine - until the guy lounging around (he's not actually moving anything, just waiting to) gets in and clears the road. Other buslane obstacles the driver just goes around. There's simply no gain in trying to get all of them to move. For the fine-levying traffic cops to do that (and better the fine be in cash on the spot!), not the bus driver with a load of passengers, however outraged.

There's Paris for you.

Starbucks across from Gare St Lazare. I do love their lemon loaf, but alas they have none. What they do have is the slowest Starbuck's staff ever. More employees than people in line, but they're just not getting the American production-line service into their heads. We all want our coffee to go. We want to go with our coffee. Please take our orders. Please let us pay. And where's the half & half? Even whole milk I have to ask for at the counter, in this land of crème.

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Once in the station, the quay for my train should be posted already, but isn't. Eventually they announce it's being cleaned and will be available shortly. An American tourist wonders aloud where the train is, and I tell him, sarcastically adding that they just announced it was being cleaned. I think he took me wrong - that my tone meant he was defective for not understanding the announcement, but really I was quite doubtful of the eventual spickety-spanness of our train. Sorry! And I was right. No room for my empty coffee cup and napkin in the overflowing trash can by my seat.

Passing through Lisieux - oh! that looks interesting! - but it'll have to wait for another trip. Only ten minutes to change for the train to the surf and turf of Deauville/Trouville.

And here it is, pleasure port of the well heeled or trying to be. A rapid turn around the boutique town, a hotel room reserved, the marketplace seen, a message to Letitia I'm staying here overnight, a quick lunch, and it's off for 20km in the gentle Calvados hills and along the coast. There's reason people like it here, and it's not just the racecourse and the casino, right?

This is just so wrong. Some company actually sells American flags attached to the pole the wrong way? Or are these people making a statement of some kind?

More tomorrow, or possibly the day after.

Cosne sur Loire

I spent a drizzly Sunday afternoon in Cosne sur Loire last weekend. (is it Thursday already? where did the week go?) Looking through my photos today, I realise I didn't take a single one of the town. There weren't any really interesting perspectives, and the light was poor, and, well, it was just so much like so many other small French towns. If I were to mix up my Small French Town photos instead of classing them neatly into folders, I'd never be able to tell them apart.

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A stroll around town looking for a room for the night revealed five hotels, two of which seemed deserted, one wasn't open Sundays (???), one was full, and the last one, the one right across from the train station and over the inevitable near-station bar, had a room. A surprisingly nice room, considering, though I didn't score a bathtub. I didn't even have neighbors.

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After another stroll around town looking for a picnic lunch to take away pretty much did it for the town. The Grand Chateau advertised on the map was meerly a large wall around a crowded parking lot, with a bit of city hall attached in a 19th century addition, so off I went up the hiking and mountain bike trail that follows the Loire upstream for several miles. One of the houses overlooking the river. There's a whole string of these mansions with their enormous yards. Most of them put up a great hedge along the bottom fence for a bit more privacy. Nobody much was out in the sporadic drizzle except for the birds. Woodpeckers, herons, coots, swans, songbirds, all along the waterfront. And crows. France is a country of crows. Contentious. Building their condominiums with a view. Repositioning themselves in the trees. Cawing, cawing, cawing.

I eventually came to the railroad bridge across the river. Unused by trains these days, it's now part of a rail-bike route that goes 20 km or so.

Here's the railbike contraption. All the bicycle seats are stored in a neighboring shed, awaiting The Season when families will reserve their places and go cycling up and down the railway. It still being March, nobody was out and I had the bridge to myself.

At the turnaround point for the short version of the hiking loop is St Bridget's chapel. Locked up tight. It must be awfully dim inside, because there aren't any more windows on the far side than there are on this side. That's dark.

My feet declared themselves not up for the long version (it is a biking trail; the long version is pretty long), so I took the short way back to town.

The angels on one of the churches in town hold a miniature version of the church, which I thought was kind of fun. Locked up tight like St Bridget's, alas. Unusually, all three of the historical monument churches were locked.

Duck on one of the canals channelling water through the town to the Loire.

That canal opens up into a sort of kayak playground, where today a youth competition was in its final stages. Kids as young as 8 or 9 were negotiating the complicated course, cheered on by family and friends from the banks and the bridge.

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Back at the station I bought my ticket to Paris for my Monday meeting, then hung out at the hotel for a rest and a shower. Around 7 I went out for another stroll, thinking that the light from across the river in the west might give me at last a nice panoramic of the town. So I crossed the bridge, but the clouds were uncooperative and there was ugly scaffolding in unfortunate spots and it just wasn't pretty.

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Strolling around town there weren't many places open for dinner. I thought I might be dining on oreos from the station vending machine when at last I found an open restaurant. They were serving a fairly classic french menu, nothing fancy, from which I ordered the goat cheese salad, steak with pepper sauce, and crème brulée. The salad did not bode well for the rest of the meal - sad greens topped with a multitude of bacon pieces that would have been ok if not nearly raw, goat cheese on toast (burnt), the whole thing drowned in bottled dressing. The main dish, however, was quite tasty. A small steak but I didn't need more, not overcooked, delightfully peppery sauce, with super-garlic wild mushrooms (I like garlic), green beans, and potato gratinée. None of it fresh but the steak, I'm sure, but I'm easy to please with garlic and potatos.

Anyway, on a Sunday evening with only me and a pair of friends for customers, is our chef restauranteur really properly serving the whole menu? There's rabbit and lamb and salmon and chicken available in various forms, a whole battery of starters, a big list of desserts - how do you keep a restaurant open if you have all that, fresh, at your fingertips for just three plates at highly reasonable prices?

I was just happy my host was even open, the alternative being takeout pizza, or machine food at the station.

And that was it for Cosne. Next adventure next weekend, destination as yet undecided.

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Aigueperse

Well, it's Friday, and I'm sick&tired of working. It's not so much the impressive mass of documentation we need to create and/or summarize and/or gather together from diverse notebooks, but the incessant negativity of a particular colleague that has made it such a difficult week.

The work to do, I'm up for it. Evenings, crunch time, alright (as long as it's over in a week or two). But the constant "we'll never get this done" and "what a mess" and "there's nothing behind these documents" (which is false - there's plenty) just makes me want to kick this girl in the butt and out the door. Though I won't, because for all the whinging she has got a lot done this week. I've rarely met such a negative person. It's often a trial to work with her.

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oof. 5 pm Friday and I'm the only one left.

Except for our exceptionally stinky cleaning guy. I almost fell over choking yesterday when he emptied my waste basket, though today thank goodness he's changed his clothes.

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So it's time for a little zen-time. Last Friday I was out and about in the countryside a bit to the north of here, and I never did show you those photos.

This is the village of Aigueperse, which is about 45 minutes north-north-west by train. It's a two-street town. This is the main street, about a mile long, and there's a secondary one parallel to it. And a bunch of little connectors, but they don't really count.

As you might know, churches aren't much my thing, but when I'm wandering about like this I do often stop in, just to see. The church is usually the fanciest building in a small town here. And the light was just right.

The town hall has a fantastic clock tower. I missed the hour, and so didn't get to see the figures move, but figured I could try again on the way back to the station.

The crow condos are filling up for the season.

I know there's a hiking path starting out from Aigueperse; I've read about it in a book I left at home, and it's just out of the area covered by the book I bought in Gannat the previous day. Keeping an eye out for the yellow trail marks pays off eventually, and off I go on the 10km circuit. There's a castle mentioned on roadsigns around - I hope the trail goes there.

It starts off crossing farmland. The wheat is coming up. I'm not sure the corn is in the ground yet.

It isn't the weekend or a holiday, but plenty of people are out walking this trail. At one point, an old woman with a cane is being coaxed along by a younger woman. They seemed to be going visiting, not taking a hike for the heck of it. This couple in the photo I trailed for almost an hour. They walked as fast as I did, but kept stopping to talk, or call their dog. Just after I passed them they turned around.

There is a castle. We haven't been going straight toward it, and every time we turn squarely away I say to myself if we don't turn back soon I'll just make my own way on available tracks. This seems to be a big loop around it - I hope there's a visit eventually.

More tree portraits. I'm going to put an album together some day. Really.

Closer!

And here we are. I realize I've been here before. That's the Taxol tree! Olivier brought me here years ago (in a car, of course), and we visited the visitable part of the castle (closed today - it's only March, after all), and he told me all about this yew tree being the local source of taxol when that chemotherapy molecule had just been discovered.

After the castle, the trail goes more or less straight down a wooded slope back to town. Going the other way around you'd be there in just half an hour!

The last bit of trail back to town.

Then back to the station for the 6 o'clock train. Time to head home. The cats are hungry!

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