Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Do-it-yourself land cruise: the experience

In the last blog post we talked about our “slow travel” discovery of canal cruising in France. On four different trips, with the barge as our floating hotel, we’ve been on excursions to châteaux, museums, champagne caves, and fascinating historical sites. Back on the boat we enjoyed all of our meals, an open bar, and even learned how to make Chantilly that we might otherwise call whipped cream. While each waterway vacation shared similarities, there were enough differences to make them unique and encourage us to try another. When an advertisement for a trip on the canal de Bourgogne (Burgundy) arrived, we took a look at the port stops and the planned excursions to see if we could arrange something comparable on our own using the train.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Do-it-yourself land cruise: the inspiration

When we lived in the US, a favorite annual vacation was a week-long cruise in the Caribbean. For one upfront price we could include our accommodation, meals, and drinks. It was possible to add in the cost of excursions in advance as well, but at ports of call we preferred to walk around the harbor or simply stay onboard. After all, we’d already paid for food and beverages and with most of the other passengers out for the day, it felt as if we had the ship to ourselves. After moving to France we discovered canal cruising that was similar to what we had experienced in the Caribbean except instead of being with thousands of other travelers, we shared the floating hotel with only 20 others. When an email announcement of sailing through the “heart of Burgundy, its wines and regional flavors” arrived, it caught our attention.

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Life in France

French bread: worth the pain

If you know a bit of French, you’ll understand the play on words with today’s title since “pain” translates to “bread” in English. And if you’ve ever enjoyed a fresh, crunchy baguette still warm from the oven of a boulangerie (bakery), then you’ll also comprehend why a podcast entitled, “Why the French are obsessed with bread” piqued my interest. Narrator Pierre begins his story by saying, “in France, there are bakeries on every street corner. Literally.” and we can attest to that. It takes about 15 minutes for us to walk from our house to the center of downtown, and along that direct route we pass four bakeries—plus two more if we take just a one-street detour. Somebody is always selling bread.

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Life in France

Monuments men for real

If you saw the movie Monuments Men, you may remember that it tells the story of art historians, curators, and museum directors during World War II who set out to rescue and preserve works of art and cultural artifacts stolen by the Nazis. They were in a race against Hitler’s “Nero Decree” that ordered the destruction of anything of value to prevent it from falling into Allied hands. This collection of civilians from 13 different countries, generally not trained as soldiers, worked side-by-side with the military to locate, protect, and recover the looted treasures. We knew that the film was based on true events but we had no idea that our own local Fine Arts museum was connected with the restoration and repatriation effort.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Niort, Niort, what a wonderful town

Just like the sailors in the Broadway musical, “On the Town”, who sang of New York, “We’ve got one day here and not another minute to see the famous sights!”, Bill and I had the same in  Niort. We were spending the week in nearby Poitiers with chances to visit a few other towns in the area. Adding to our collection of blog posts with “pun-ny” names like the one about asparagus from northwest France called “Brittany Spears” and the springtime fruits of “Kumquat May”, today’s story title was inevitable. With the song lyrics promising, “We’ll find the romance and danger waiting in it…” we were off on a new adventure.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

TV picture perfect: Chauvigny & Parthenay

Whenever we’re watching our favorite French TV travel show, Les 100 lieux qu’il faut voir (The 100 Places You Must See), Bill keeps his phone handy for two reasons. When a destination looks interesting, he first locates it on an online map to determine if there is a train station in town and if so, he then adds it to our ever-growing list entitled, “Want to Go”. While that initial map check lets us know if we can get there on public transportation, it doesn’t always guarantee that it will be on a train. Despite a train station building still existing, the tracks might no longer be in use and often now serves instead as the central bus stop. Such was the case for two towns around Poitiers, where we were staying for a week to discover that area of the country.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Poitiers as home base

Whenever we vacation in a new part of the country, we always book accommodations in a central location in the area that we’re going to explore. That way it’s easy to make day trips to the surrounding destinations and still be back “home” in time for an apéro and dinner. Staying near the train station has at least 2 advantages: you don’t have far to go to catch your train for your day out and the station is often close to or in downtown near the sites you want to see in your base city. A third advantage in Poitiers, at least, is that the station is multimodal; that is, you can catch a train, a long distance bus, or the city bus, all in the same location. For this trip that was important because 2 of the towns we were going to visit are served only by motorcoach. More on those starting next week but first we wanted to discover the “City of a Hundred Steeples”.

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