Bordeaux!

Another early morning, up at 6:00am so we can leave right at 7:00am for a a secret "adventure" that Nathalie and Thiery have planned for us, but they won't tell us what it is. We roll out at 7:00am, and they tell us we are driving to Bordeaux, about 2 hours away, for a 9:30 appointment. It is a lovely drive through the countryside, and we arrive at the outer borders of Bordeaux, where there are parking lots and a very cool tram system that takes you into town (so there can be fewer cars in town). The 5 Euros for parking gives you unlimited riding on the tram all day for all people in your car, which is a great deal.

We go to the Palais de Justice, which is both an old traditional building and a new and somewhat odd one, with cone-like wooden structures enclosing the courtrooms. The group is led by a virbrant women who speaks only French, I understand some of what she says, and Nathalie does some translation. A young man who I think is her son is doing a video of the tour.

Our first stop is a wonderful gourmet boulangerie and patisserie, call Koin (a play on coin, as it is on the corner), owner by a man who used to be an architect. They take us down in the basement to see the Owens and pastry-making areas, which are large and have a lot of flour on the floor. The young baker, who started when he was 16, gives us details on how they approach their breads. Upstairs, they have set up a table for the group, and we get to taste three breads and two pastries. One bread is the young baker's own creation, a yellowish bread with bits of corn and papaya in it, which is good, a moderate whole wheat which is nice, and then a darker multi-seed bread which is delicious. They serve these with plenty of butter and strawberry jam that the woman who leads the tour made herself. Of course the croissant has a delicate crust and the pain au chocolate is terrific, Barney tells me.

We walk to our next stop, a shop founded in 1838 for traditional products of the region. There we taste a Dillon and rillette of duck liver, with the rillette being a bit more flavor awful and spicy, we are told, because it has less fat. We buy some of this, as well as a jar of the salted caramel sauce which we also taste. They serve a young local wine with the rillette, which is nice

Then on to La Dune Balance, named after the white sand dunes somewhere nearby (I did not get all of this) where they invented this extraordinary creme-filled puff that absolutely melts in your mouth.We each have one, the eyes close, the oohs and says comefrom everyone, and this is the lovely ending to our tour.
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We then walked around, following a path in the tourism map, though the old part of town, sa the Saint-Andre cathedral, and went to the waterfront, where a large group of 0' sloops were gathered for a race that would begin in a few days. MAIF, Theirry and Nathalie's employer, sponsors a boat in the race, and their virtual reality booth has a system that they had brought to the office one day as well.

It is very hot - almost 96 degrees - and we head over to the "water mirror" a think layer of water near the waterfront, from which come spurts of mist and burbles of water from time to time.This is very popular with children, and some adults, and we enjoy watching the reactions of the children when the water spurts up.

We continue our walk, decide we are getting hungry, and found a place with a large variety of main dish salads, just the thing for a hot day. We each get a different salad, so nice and cool and delicious.  We continue out]r walk, and I feel so tired and hot, at one point I saw "I wish I could lay down in the grass somewhere and sleep for a few minutes". And lo and behold, we find a little park in the middle of everything, with a small pond, and Thierry, Barney and I laid down for a nap on the grass (while Nathalie went to St. Catherine Street, the big shopping street) to look around. This was the very first time I have ever slept in a park and it felt so wonderful!


We continue out we all,and I am concerned about Barney getting sunburned, so I buy him a nice gray tweed-y looking cotton hat with a discreet Bordeaux sign on it. We stop at a tea shop for cool drinks, which helped cool us down, because there is really nothing else you can do when it is 96 degrees out, but then leaving brought all the heat back - the high was 96 that day around 5pm.
As we continued our walk, we found another plaza  and get some delicious ice cream and walk around a bit. We sat for about half an hour by the Place de la Bourse, people watching and waiting for it to cool off.

Dinner was at 7:30 at  the Brasserie Bordelaise, with delicious food and quite a huge array of wines. Fully sated with charcuterie, lamb and duck, we roll back to the car on the tram and head for Echire. Thierry was nice enough to drive home while we are all quite sleepy, and we did indeed sleep well that night. What a lovely adventure with our friends!