Because We Can

Breakfast came very early this morning, but there was a cure for making sure Linda was wide awake, this automatic coffee machine. Put your cup in it, select from the many options available (Linda chose cappuccino) and within a few seconds your cup is filled. My adventure was with the machine next to it where I learned that just because it has a photo of mixed fruit on it, if you can’t read French you will get a glass full of extremely sour grapefruit juice. Now that first mouthful was a real wake me up drink. A very long road lined on both sides by trees. People taking photos of it. Not really, it’s what’s up ahead that counts. Because what’s up ahead was the residence of the King’s Mistress, then when the King dies, the Queen after she boots the mistress out, and later other Queens and still later there is a high count of Counts. Looks like a castle, not the fighting medieval kind of castle, but the residence type of castle from the 1600’s when peace was more the norm in Fr...

It looked from the itinerary that we would have a full day, and that was what it was. Full in the sense that we were doing a lot of things, and also in the sense that we were eating a lot of awesome food. It’s France, we eat foods we wouldn’t normally find, let a lone try. We drink wines we normally wouldn’t find, and we visit castles of kings that have as many fireplaces as there are days in the year. Now if we were only doing that at the pace of the French instead of the hurried pace that American’s seem to prize, it would be perfect. Since we can’t have everything we will savor what we do have. That wine tasting and picnic on the schedule meant that we needed picnic food. We went by the local farmers market but didn’t find anything that we wanted. We did find fresh killed and plucked chickens with their heads still one, but that wasn’t okay according to Linda. We ended up going to a nearby shop and getting a couple of take away sandwiches and a huge cookie apiece. We real...