Basquing in Bilboa

Arantzazuko Bascillica

The pictures from the trip are visible in the album.

Our last stop in Spain was the Bilbao area. We stayed in a Casa Rurale called Ametzola about a half hour outside of the city nestled in the hills. It's run by Mikel who originally turned part of it into a B&B in order to pay for the restoration of the building. It was originally built in the 16th century and is a very large, 3 story house just like every other old rural house in the area. Originally, each house held one, 3 generation, family. The bottom floor was the stable where the animals were kept. The second floor is where the humans lived. Finally, the top floor was for storage, mostly of foodstuffs and hay. Mikel has 6 guest rooms, which were mostly empty when we were there, while he cooked us breakfast and dinner each day, which was absolutely delicious, but more on that later.

On our way from Rioja to the Casa, we made a detour to the Arantzazuko Sanctuary. It's another stop on the Camino, south of San Sebastian. Originally built in in the 1500's, it's a bascillica and sanctuary for travelers up in the gorgeous mountains built on the spot where somebody had a vision of the Virgin Mary sitting in the hawthorn bushes. It's burned down twice in it's existence while both times, the altarpiece of the Virgin survived. In it's most recent incarnation, it was rebuilt in the 1950's in a wacky avante-guarde Spanish style. The outside is is a blocky structure covered in stone spikes meant to symbolize the hawthorns that are endemic to the area. It reminds me of Thwomp from Mario. The inside it just like famous architecture from the era where it's quite dark, while everything has strong lines, sometimes filled with organic curves. The whole building is nestled into a compound of dorms that is much more traditional. There is also a meditation space just up the hill from the church that follows a poem about running water, hawthorns and strangers.

Inside the Bascillica

From Arantzazuko, we drove to the Casa Rurale, settled in and had dinner. Dinner started with a potato cod soup, then the main was veal cheeks braised with potatoes, carrots and PX sherry. Finally, desert was a bowl of local yogurt and local apples. Mikel makes amazing food, mostly using family recipes and he definitely doesn't take shortcuts. The veal was made by first pressure cooking the veal by itself for an hour. Then, the potatoes and carrots were both poached separately in olive oil for many hours. Next, they are combined with the juices from the meat and the PX sherry and slow cooked for another couple of hours. Finally, in the last hour, the meat is added back in. Delicious, but time consuming.

San Juan de Gaztelugatxe Hermitage

The next day was a rainy Monday. All the museums were closed so we decided to go the hermitage San Juan de Gaztelugatxe out on the coast. It's a couple km walk from the parking lot down to the ocean and then you walk up a series of staircases up the rocks until you reach the hermitage perched on the top of the rock that's jutting into the sea. Along the way, you'll see the footprints of John the Baptist in the rock and be treated to some amazing scenery. Once you get to the top, you ring the bell three times and make a wish.

Stairs on the way to the hermitage.

From there, we stopped for lunch at the restaurant by the parking lot. They definitely take advantage of their location! Then we drove to a nearby town of Mundaka. It's a beautiful little port town with a beach, but because it was raining and a Monday, it was quiet and there wasn't much to see. So we didn't spend long.

From there, we went to the next town, Gernika. Gernika has a famous market every Monday and we figured that it worth trying to see it. Unfortunately, our timing wasn't great because the market was done by noon, so there really wasn't much to see. After that, we made one more stop. Near Gernika, there's a painted forest. In the 1980's an artist decided to paint some trees such that if you line up your view just right, you'll see an image painted across a number of trees. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see it. When we got there, it turned out that it would require a 7km hike. It was already getting later in the afternoon and importantly, Catherine had already done a lot of walking and didn't think that it would be a good idea to push it that far. So, we just headed back to the Casa to relax and have dinner. Dinner started with a goat cheese and zucchini soup, followed by some roasted duck breasts and finished with flan.

On our final day in Spain, we went in to Bilbao. We started at the river market, which is one of the bigger indoor markets in Spain. It was a little underwhelming even if it was good market. It is smaller than Kensington market in Toronto and didn't  have the variety of vendors that that market has. It was mostly just basic provisions, which is what you'd use if you lived there, but there wasn't really anything too unique.

From there, we wandered around the old part of town looking at shops for gifts and maybe souvenirs. There was a wide variety of shops lining the narrow, winding streets from higher end clothing stores, to weapon stores to your stereotypical souvenir shops. It's a beautiful area of town and was fun to explore and people watch. We finished by having lunch at the pintxo bars on the main square. These were not as extravagant as the ones in San Sebastian, so there was a lot less for Catherine. She ended up eating a number of slices of tortilla, that were flavoured differently at least.

After lunch, we walked through the newer area of town over to the Guggenheim museum. The Guggenheim is a great museum. There aren't many pieces showing at any one time, but every gallery has a theme, so it's reasonable to go through in an afternoon. Admittedly, some of it was modern art with a lot of bloviating, but some of the pieces were really fun. In particular, there was one exhibit designed for a corner of the Frank Gehry building. It was a series of 8 or so pillars of LED lights where messages are moving from the ground to the ceiling. The messages were from an event about AIDS from when the piece was built. You can walk between the pillars and get a very different view. The other amazing piece was the Matter of Time. It's a series of gigantic steel sheets that you walk through. Each piece is a part of a conic section and they are put together such that as you walk through them, you have an illusion of space contracting or expanding around you. It's hard to describe since it's one of those things you have to experience. It's worth going to the museum just for that piece.

Around the outside of the museum, there are a number of other large pieces that are part of the park along the river near the building. Just like many cities, it's right downtown and used to be an industrial area but now, it is being rejuvenated.

After walking through the park, we headed back to the B&B for our last dinner in Spain. It was a special one because Mikel made a traditional basque delicacy of cod collars. The collars have a lot of collagen and are slow cooked. So they have a chunks of gelatinous texture. It is served in a olive oil and cod fat emulsion. It was absolutely delicious but could be a challenge for some people. It was a good way to end the trip.

Red Wine in Rioja

A vineyard sentry hut.

We arrived at our hotel in Abalos in the evening. Abalos is a very small town of 200 people with over a dozen wineries, one hotel, three bars a bunch of buildings owned by the Marquis and not much else. Our hotel was a nice little casa ruales (like a B&B) with 9 rooms and a bar out front which has a cast of locals each night enjoying 80 cent glasses of wine. After unpacking, we had dinner at the bar, which consisted of 3 different wines, getting progressively more complex, and some tapas. Every Friday night, the bar does free tapas and as a result, it's super busy with locals and people staying at the hotel.

The next morning, we had a tour of the vineyard followed by a tasting with lunch. It was part of a special program at the hotel where the owner, who has a small winery on the side, took us out to his grapes and we talked about how he grows them. The main difference is that he uses a traditional pruning system that creates 3 main vine trunks as opposed to putting them on a trellis. As a result, they must be picked by hand, but you can get more vines per acre. This year, they had a hard frost right after bud break at the end of April, so the yield is going to be super low. That likely means that the grapes will have a much more intense flavour, so it'll be an interesting vintage to watch down the road.

A >500 year old wine press.
Bring your own feet!

He also showed us these stone huts on the side of the road and a traditional wine stomping ground cut into the rock. The stone huts were for the vineyard sentries. Around 1890, phyloxera had hit a lot of Europe, but it hadn't hit the region yet. The French had already figured out how to graft the vines onto North American rootstock, but it wasn't necessary yet in the Rioja. That being said, vines take a number years to start bearing fruit, so some farmers were starting to transition their vines so that when phyloxera arrived, they wouldn't be wiped out. Of course, these new vines were expensive, and so some unscrupulous souls decided it's easier to just dig up your somebody else's vines. To combat the thieves, the growers and wineries hired sentries to guard the vineyards and the huts were built to given them shelter.

For lunch, we had a vertical tasting of his wines with the 2008, 2010 and 2011 vintages. All were excellent, but you could definitely see the difference in age. His wines are a very low production so he only makes one wine per year and then it's sold exclusively in the hotel. Eventually, he wants to grow it into a bigger winery that sells elsewhere, but it's a long, slow process.

The church in Abalos

After lunch, we drove to Haro to do some more tastings. There is a group of wineries all clustered in the same spot, so it's easy to park at one and walk to the others. We ended up going to López de Heredia and Roda. Roda was really interesting because we were able to do a vertical tasting of one of their reservas with samples from 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2010. It's possible because they have a corovin system that uses a needle to go through the cork and then injects argon into the bottle to force the wine out. This ensures that no extra oxygen gets in. Surprisingly in the tasting, there wasn't that much difference between the 1995 and the 2002. The old wines were surprisingly fresh and definitely didn't taste like a 20 year old wine. They were starting to get tawny and get a touch of those leathery notes, but the fruit and spice was still the dominant note. In Rioja, they typically age their wine a lot, with the grand reservas requiring at least 5 years of aging. This works great with the tempranillo because it has structure that can hold up for a long time.

After the tasting, we returned to the hotel for dinner. Food is cooked by the owner's wife and she's one hell of a cook. She goes in to San Sebastian for cooking classes each year at the culinary institute started by Ferran Adria and it shows. We had appetizers of avocado and tomato terrine, a steak main and dessert was a cheesecake for Catherine (the best she's ever had) and a chocolate molten cake for me, which was great.

Vineyard run by the hotel owners.

In the morning, we went to a tasting at Miguel Merino with a couple from Russia. They also had excellent wines, but only started making wine in the mid 1990's, released their first vintage in 2002 and only recently started to make money. It's a brutal business to be in.

Sumptuous San Sebastian

Our first day in San Sebastian was mostly about walking. We started the day by heading to the main market downtown. It's a large, indoor, food market with specialized stalls. Some sold charcuterie, some sold meat, some sold fish, some sold fruits and vegetables etc. We ended up getting roped in by a stall that sold dried fruits and turkish delight and tried a number of interesting creations. The best of which was dried, green pomello rind.

Catherine's feet had been hurting a lot, so when we started walking, we switched shoes. It made a big difference, so, near the market, we went into an athetic shoe store and bought her some more comfortable shoes.

Amusement park overlooking
San Sebastian

After than we went in to gourmet food shop and found some pimente d'Esplette and rosemary honey. The pimente d'Esplette is larger chili flakes made from a pepper in the French Basque town of Esplette. It's AOC specific. We knew about it because a grower in the Anderson valley produces it after learning about it in Basque country. However it's quite expensive. Since it's similar to the Turkish chilies I found in Istanbul, we were hoping that we could get large quantities on the trip, but it was only available in small jars and still relatively expensive. It's amazingly delicious though, so we did get a jar.

After shopping we hunted for some lunch in the form of pintxos. They are the Basque version of tapas. It's a little different than further south, like Grenda, where you order a drink and they will give you a simple tapas for free (e.g. bread smeared with fresh tomatoes). San Sebastian pintxos range from a simple piece of ham on a piece of bread, to a tower of ingredients on the top of the bread so high it needs to be held together with a long toothpick to warm dishes, served in small portions. When you walk into a bar in the old town, the counter is covered with creations, while if you want something warm, you can order it from the bartender. Two of the traditional drinks are txocoli (an acidic, low alcohol white wine) and cider poured from a meter up into a wide glass in order to express the carbonation. Most of the space is standing only, but there are a few bar stools around. The idea is that you get your snack, a drink, and consume quickly before heading home after work. It's way more healthy than a bag of potato chips! Our first sampling included some incredibly fresh anchovies served on ham and topped with a fried green pepper, a jaw dropping langoustine ravioli, and some perfectly cooked squid with caramelized onions.

After lunch, we meandered over to the beach and walked along the 6km crescent. There were hundreds of people enjoying the perfect day. Some were sun bathing, some were surfing, many were just walking in the surf, either stridently or leisurely. The boardwalk is actually on one of the arms of the Camino de Santiago, so there were even some hikers going by. It's a gorgeous protected harbor with perfect sand. I can see why it's just a tourist destination to enjoy the beach!

At the other end of the beach, we took the old funicular up to the top of the cliff. Up top, there is this bizarre, semi rundown amusement park. It was built in 1914 and was surely the height of fashion then to go on the flume ride with a view of the city, or to play carni games. Half of it was closed, but some parts were still opened, so you could play some of the games, or go on the mini roller coaster.

For dinner on our first night, we had a special treat! We went to Akalare, one of the three star restaurants in San Sebastian. The city has the most Michelin stars per capita in the world and Akalare was an experience. It's not one of the super avante guard restaurants as the dishes are quite recognizable. However, they do surprise you at times. We chose to go here because there are three different tasting menus that you can choose from and so we could each order a different one and try twice as many creations. Expert tip: do the wine tasting! The somellier put together one of the best wine tastings we have every had. He did an incredible job matching the dishes and delighting us. It also wasn't very expensive relative to ordering by the bottle. The pairing wasn't listed in the menu or the wine list, but ask for it. Every other table was ordering two or three bottles, not getting as good a variety or pairing, and paying more that we did. The highlights of the meal were:

Spilled yogurt desert

- Oyster leaf and hake. It's a succulent piece of hake with a delicious sauce, but the unique piece was a garnish. It was garnished with an oyster leaf. It's a green from Greenland, Newfoundland or Norway that tastes exactly like an oyster when you eat it. I'm going to try and get seeds to grow it in the garden.
- Pungent leaves with fois gras. It's a dish that looks like a plate of leaves with morning dew on it. The dew is actually a lemongrass jelly. The "leaves" at the bottom were actually fois gras shaped like leaves and colored with an herb dust. The real greens were some of the most pungent I have ever tasted.
- Pork shoulder with garlic 3 ways. The pork was cooked medium rare while the garlic on the dish was 1) a bitter, green garlic sauce 2) a slice of black garlic and 3) not really garlic, but it looked like a roasted clove and was made of a foam in a candied shell.
- A coconut egg. It looks like an artistic sunny side up egg, but the white is a block of hard coconut foam that melts in your mouth, while the yolk was a passion fruit and coconut custard shaped into a ball.

Fish with sauce twirls

It was a ridiculously filling meal. To the point that we couldn't finish some of the later dishes. Especially the wine. We didn't roll out of there until 1am, 4 hours after we arrived.

For our second day in San Sebastian, we slept off our food coma and then went to the San Telmo museum. It's a museum of Basque culture and history. It was a well done museum with good use of interactives. It talked a lot about how the Basques are the industrial engines of Spain from the ship building era where they were the primary ship builders and sailors, to more modern times where there is a lot of heavy industry and manufacturing. The church attached to the museum was painted with a sequence of modern impressionist murals that was very different than churches I'm used to seeing.

A small pintxo spread

For the rest of the day, we wandered around the old town going into shops and trying pintxos. We also did pintxos for dinner, but closer to the apartment where we were staying. One highlight was a squid covered with a black chestnut, ink sauce. Another was a desert made of three cheeses that were sweetened and put in a dish for spreading. We finished with some 3 euro glasses of PX sherry, which shouldn't have been that cheap: it was over 20 years old.

On our last day in San Sebastian, we did a cooking class at Mimo. It's a tourist cooking school in the basement of the Maria Cristina Hotel. As a class, we made a 5 course meal and also had an opportunity to get a couple of tutorials. Our teacher was very good and focused on highlighting the ingredients while at the same time, explaining what is going on, how we are manipulating the temperatures, liquids, etc. From an overall standpoint, there were two interesting recurring themes: first, use lots of olive oil and second, only add salt at the end unless it's in a cooking liquid and will get absorbed. Otherwise, you're going to change how the dish cooks. For instance, when sous videing meat, if you add salt, then it will extract moisture from the meat as it cooks, which you don't want.

Mural inside the church in the San Telmo museum

The tutorials he gave were about octopus and dealing with fresh fish. They received some gorgeous Hake that not only had crystal clear eyes, but if you run you hand along the flesh, it is firm, not mushy. It was line caught and handled well. If the fish is caught in a net, or handled harshly, it can get bruised, which makes it not flake properly. You can tell if it's bruised by running your hand down the fish once it has been descaled. The octopus tutorial was really interesting. When you think about well cooked octopus, most people think of it being soft, but he argued that it needs some tooth to it and should have collagen around the main muscle. The collagen is usually cooked away. To get the collagen, but still breaking down the tough muscle, you first freeze the octopus. As the ice crystals form, they break down the muscles just like whapping it on a rock did in the old days. However, this forces liquid out and you need to add it back in. So, you do a sequence of quick dunks of the raw octopus in a flavourful liquid. It will suck the liquid right up and the collagen will blossom. Then, you cook the octopus at a simmer until it's done. Too long and the collagen will melt away. To hot and the muscle will turn rubbery. It was the best description I've seen on how to cook octopus.

As for the actual dishes we made, it started with sauteed chantrelles and a sous vide egg. He showed us cleaning the chantrelles with a damp towel, which worked really well. Then, they were cooked in a dry pan at very high heat where you throw in olive oil at the end to finish the cooking. This carmelizes them, cooks them through, but doesn't release all the water.

The next dish was a fois gras and apple puree with a coffee, chocolate dust. We processed raw fois, which was a first for me. There's just so much fois everywhere in this city. It's nuts! It needed to be deveined, rolled into a cylinder, frozen, then sliced into rounds, deep fried and finished in the oven. It's the process from Mugaritz. The apple sauce was super simple. Just roast whole apples in the oven with butter in their core and take the resulting drippings & apples and blend.

After that, we had a dish of bean soup with clams. They were fresh, local beans with a texture similar to canelli beans, but smaller. The new thing for us was how to cook the clams. He showed us that people usually overcook clams & mussels. To avoid overcooking, use a shallow pan and heat up a small amount of fish stock. Put the clams in. Do not put on a lid, because that will steam them, which you don't want. When they go in, they will close tight and try to survive, but as they warm up, they will start to open. As soon as a clam starts to open, pop it out of the pan. It's done and will be perfectly tender.

The Miramar Palace. A traditional
stop on the Camino.

The mean meat of the meal was lamb, first cooked via sous vide and then broiled in the oven hot. It was served with some melted onions (made with lots of butter) and a fresh rosemary/thyme/mint sauce. It's a combo we need to use more often, especially since it's in our garden year round.

For desert, everybody but Catherine had a custard creme pie. The shell was a shortbread shell pressed into the pan, while the custard was a standard egg yolk custard, thickened with corn starch and steeped with cinnamon and lime. Apparently, cinnamon is the only spice that the Basque use when flavouring deserts and they use a cinnamon that's closer to the Mexican canella than the Vietnamese cinnamon.

At the end of the class, we ate all the food, with a pairing of wine along the way. Then, we hopped in a cab to the car rental place to rent a car and drove down to Rioja for the next stage of the trip. 

Down the Bay of Biscay

Today was a travel day. We had to get from Nantes near the mouth of the Loire river in France, down to San Sebastian, Spain just across the border. We could have taken the train, but that would have been a 9 hour journey, while it's only a 6 hour drive. Driving would also let us make some stops along the way as we drove down the coast, so we decided to rent a car. With gas and tolls, it ended up being more than we were expecting, but it was worth doing once.

We got moving a little later than we would have preferred so we decided that we could realistically only make two stops, one of which had to be for lunch. We ended up having lunch in Pons at a local restaurant with a very weird menu. Catherine had a random plate of three dishes: tomato & mozzarella salad, thai curry rice and strawberries & creme desert. I had a very good blood sausage with masted potatoes and an apple sauce.

After lunch, we decided to stop to do a tasting in Cognac. It's a little north of Bordeaux but the timing was better. It was a little bit of a different tasting. They had both Pineaux and Cognac to taste. Pineaux is a fortified wine (fortified with Cognac) that comes from the Cognac region. The ones we tasted were aged either 5 or 10 years and they did both a white and a red blend. Cognac is a brandy made with different grapes and then distilled. For the tasting, they pointed to the mantle on the fireplace and asked which ones we would like to try. There was everything from a 7 year bottle all the way to a 70 year bottle. We ended up trying the 12 year and one from 1980. We just couldn't bring ourselves to try to super old one when we wouldn't be buying a bottle of it. Both were excellent, but, unsurprisingly, the 1980 one was special, albeit still out of our price range as it turned out. We ended up leaving with a Pineaux and a bottle of the 12 year.

After the tasting, we headed south. We did a flyby of Bordeaux and made our way towards the border. As we got past Bordeaux, the scenery changed. The deciduous trees disappeared and were replaced by what was obviously plantations of pine trees. They were everywhere. Apparently it's the largest managed forest in Europe and the wood is used for all sorts of typical things (plywood, paper, etc). Our drive ended at the Biarritz airport. It's super expensive to take a car across the border, but we could drop it off at the airport in Biarritz and then take a bus directly to San Sebastian, which was only supposed to take 40min. It sounded perfect on paper, but the bus turned out to take twice as long and was pretty hard on the stomach as it made many stops along the way that meant going through a number of small roundabouts.

When we arrived in San Sebastian, we walked to the Airbnb to get our room and drop off our stuff. Lodging in San Sebastian is super expensive, so we ended up using Airbnb to get a room. The other rooms were being rented out separately to some Argentineans and some Germans.  There was a shared kitchen and bathroom.

For dinner, our host recommended dinner at Topa as it was a lower priced restaurant done by one of the guys with the famous Michelin star restaurants. It felt like it would fit right in with the San Francisco hipster scene. Loud music, lots of reclaimed wood, edgy art and good food. It was a Basque-Mexican fusion cuisine (for lack of a better description) that included mostly smaller plates. We enjoyed some fish tacos, grilled peppers and fresh basque cider among other things. A great start to our time in Spain!

Skipping Down the Loire

Catherine got her purse back!

When we woke up in the morning, we remembered the Android features to find my phone. Since it was in Catherine's purse, we realized that we might be able to use it to see where the purse was. Also, you can cause a message to appear on the phone to help somebody return it to you. In this case, we saw it move in the morning from a house on the outskirts of Angers into downtown and then stop near the city hall right beside a building that Google Maps labeled lost objects. It was the first time since right after losing it that we had hope that we would be able to get it back and not have to make a trip to Paris to get a new passport!

We went down for breakfast and lo and behold, our host had just received a phone call saying that the purse was returned to the lost and found in downtown Angers. Hurray! Feeling much relieved, we had breakfast with the other family staying at the gite. They were from Reunion Island and were visiting family in the area. The father was in the military and when he retried, they decided that they wanted to live on Reunion. It's a tropical island off the coast of Madasgascar that's a departement of France.

After breakfast, we loaded up our bikes and headed back to Savennières for most wine tasting. Our first stop was Coulee de Serrant, which was annoying to get to. Our first directions dead ended at some stairs, which I couldn't take the luggage up, so we had to go around and up a large hill. When we got there, they were labeling some bottles so the owner turned off the machine to do a tasting. Their wines are some of the most unique whites I've ever had. They are very minerally with a fair bit of acidity at first, however, the interesting part is that they are designed to age for at least 5 years and then, once you open a bottle, you want to decant it for 24 hours at least.  This allows the wine to evolve. It's the first time I've seen a dry, acidic white that's meant to be aged. Normally the whites you want to age are the sweeter ones like a Sauternes where the sweetness intensifies, the wine turns a golden color and the flavour deepens. The Savennières also starts to get golden and the acidic calms down, while the flavour seems to go on an interesting path that's richer and almost hay-like. The wines were fairly expensive, but also very interesting.

Along the bike path back to Angers

Our next stop right before lunch was to taste at Château d'Épiré. It's a 5th generation winery that's at a lower price point that the Coulee de Serrant but still making excellent wines that, interestingly are also supposed to age a bit. We had an opportunity to talk with the young winemaker (5th generation) since his English was quite good. Though they can make excellent wine, their pricing strategy had us scratching our heads. Their older wines were cheaper than their younger ones. They said that there were running out of room in their cellar and so were trying to get rid of some of the older stuff. We happily obliged.

The decor a the Cigale

For lunch, we stopped for a picnic beside the river between Épiré and Angers. It was Monday, so the tourists restaurants on the bike path were closed but there was a patisserie & grocery store open where we could get some bread and cheese for a perfectly cromulent meal.

After lunch, we arrived in Angers and started by picking up Catherine's purse. Everything was inside except for her Euro cash. Oh well, you can't have everything. Next, we found a tea house for Catherine to sit at while I went searching for a cheap piece of luggage. We needed something to put in our of our stuff because we had to get it to Nantes and we were not allowed to bring the luggage trailer on the train. So, we had to return our bikes and trailer to the shop in Angers. It took me a while. I went through 6 stores including a large grocery store that had other things, a sports equipment store that only had tennis and hockey gear (I almost bought a hockey bag), but I finally found a big wheelie duffel for 30 euros at a luggage shop near downtown that had both cheap things and more expensive samsonite ones.

The Opera House in Nantes. Across the street from Cigale.

We then returned our bikes and hopped on the train to Nantes. In Nantes, we dropped everything off in our hotel and went for dinner at the Cigale, which is an institution since 1895. It was a great experience! The decor was incredibly ornamental and you could imagine it as a salon lit by gas lights before electricity arrived. They even had their own tiles with pictures of their mascot, a cricket. They also move people through the restaurant like masters. The wait staff was super attentive and they had no trouble filling things up a couple of times on a Monday with everybody ordering 3 course dinners. Dinner itself was incredibly well executed and reasonably priced. The highlight was a restaurant's special that Catherine ordered. We weren't 100% sure what she would get, but it turned out to be akin to a steak tartare called allez-retour. It was a piece of beef that had been seared very hard so you ended up with almost a rare cook on it. Then, it was cooled down and chopped into nuggets. The pieces were then tossed with vinegar, shallots, oil and herbs and then served as a terrine with french fries and salad on the side. 

Purse Panic in Angers

The Moulin Geant

It was a troublesome first half of the day. The biking from the Cheateaux de Noirieux to Angers was tricky because it ended up being half on a very busy road and half on a trail that was technically labeled as a bike trail, but consisted of a narrow muddy track. Lots of fish tailing ensued, which was fun, but not great for Catherine's shoulder.

When we arrived in downtown Angers, it was a madhouse. There was a big festival going on about the British of all things. Union Jacks were everywhere. The Beatles were blaring from speakers. There were double decker buses floating around. We found out later that every year, there's a big festival in Angers about some foreign place and this year, it was Britain. A little surreal.

It was tricky to find a place to eat because it was Sunday and thus many restaurants were closed, and there were tons of people around for the festival. However, we did find a place right near the train station that had space and we could get some buckwheat gallettes. They weren't nearly as good as the ones near Villandry, but it was a solid meal.

The castle at Angers near
where Catherine lost her purse

After lunch, we headed by the castle and out of town down river. Right after we crossed over the bridge, I heard somebody yelling at me from a passing car. I stopped and a young couple who were drying by were hailing me. They said that Catherine's purse had fallen off her bike at the previous intersection. It had all her money, her phone and her passport. Catherine went back to try and find it, while I talked to them more and they said that a woman on the street had picked it up and said that she was taking it to the gendarmerie. I wish I had gotten a little more details from them, but my first reaction was to go back and try to find it quickly. So we looked around the intersection and the bridge and there was no sign of the purse or somebody trying to get our attention to give it back. So, we tried to go to the police station, but the closest one was closed. Our next try, we figured that there would be officers at the festival so we went back there. We didn't see any officers, but the tourist information center was there and they phoned the two precincts to report that it was lost and left our contact info. We couldn't think of anything else to do, so we continued on towards our hotel.

Savennières

Before getting to the hotel, we went through Savennières and stopped at Chateaux de Veaux for a tasting. The hostess spoke excellent English, so we were about to learn a lot more about the super small AOC. It's one of the few wine regions on the north side of the Loire because the aspect isn't as good. However, the soild is excellent for minerally white wines. Some of the micro spots are on old lava flows and those are the best wines. They are allowed to make both a dry and sweet style whites, but these days, are mostly known for the dry whites. We ended up tasting a number of the wines and bought a bottle.

From the tasting, we went to the gite (the Moulin Geant), which is an old wind mill at the top of the hill just outside Rocherfort-sur-Loire. Our hostess helped us phone the police in Angers again, but Catherine's purse hadn't turned up. So, we had a quick shower and took a taxi through the rain (which we had missed again!!!) to a small, cozy restaurant in Behouard, an island in the Loire that floods easily. It was a great meal that started with some escargot in their shells. We had to use these special spring loaded shell holders to hold the shells and pick out the snails with a long fork. Then we had steak and fries where the steak was deglazed using vinegar. It's not something we think of doing usually, but we really should do it more often! It's delicious. Desert for me was a chocolate lava cake with an orange sorbet that was probably the best I've ever had. It was intensely orange and even filled with small pieces of orange rind.

After dinner, we rolled out of the restaurant and back to the hotel to hit the sack. 

Changing Chateauxs

One of the tapestries and the
Chateux de Villeveque

Most of the day was earmarked for biking to Chateaux Noiriex so that we could get in early and enjoy the hotel itself. For X-mas, Catherine wanted a night at a chateaux and so I found one outside of Angers that also had a Michelin star restaurant. Surprisingly there aren't that many Michelin star restaurants in the Loire, but this was one of them with a single star.

The bike ride itself was a little annoying. It started out nice as we had to make our way back over the river, but on the other side, we had to shortly get off the main Velo de Loire route and head north. This meant trying to piece together streets on Google Maps, which was only semi successful since the grades were inconsistent. One grade could either be a nice quiet paved road with hardly any traffic, or it could be a tractor path through a field. Another is either a busy a road with no shoulder or one that's much calmer and better for a bike.

We also ran into a little trouble with lunch. In France, restaurants are only open for lunch from noon to 2pm and really, they don't want you sitting down much after 1pm. So, we tried to find a restaurant around noon in one of the towns we went through. Using Google Maps, we kept striking out because either the restaurants were closed for the weekend, or just didn't exist. Mostly, these towns were crappy, small suburban towns with no character that apparently nobody stays in for anything commercial. Eventually, approaching 2pm, we made it to Villeveque and found a restaurant that was willing to sit us for a quick meal. It was a really cute place actually as it was inside an old water mill. Also, Catherine was very happy because she was able to get some duck confit and french fries to stave off the hangriness.

After lunch, we backtracked across the bridge to the Chateaux de Villeveque, which is actually just a small art/history museum containing the collection of somebody who died about 20 years ago. It is just a couple of rooms, but the highlight was the tapestries, which are in amazing condition compared to what we had seen before.

From the museum, we hopped on the bike for a quick 10 min ride to our hotel. We got hit by a flash of rain, but really, not a big deal. We'd been super lucky avoiding almost all the rain throughout the week that was swirling around us. It seemed that every morning it was sunny, but by afternoon, the clouds would roll in an threaten.

The hotel is definitely in the fancy category with a lot of staff, old school french decor and a terrace with a view of the valley that picks up the light both at dawn and dusk. Dinner itself was an experience. It's traditional white table cloth in the French style. Very different than the one stars in SF which are way more casual. However, the service was comical. It seemed like they really didn't have their shit together. They regularly forgot us throughout the dinner even though there were only about 15 tables and 10 servers, didn't give us the wine menu, but the piece the resistance was the desert course where they brought out a desert with candle and placed it in front of another couple, only to realize that they had served it to the wrong table. The whole dining room cracked up.

Though the service was bad, the food was well done, while a decent wine pairing. Probably not worth the price tag, but well done. I had a terrine of fois gras to start, followed by a white fish served over a shrimp paper that was very tasty. Then came the cheese cart, which was a unique experience for us. They come to your table with a large cart full of about 30 cheeses and you pick which ones you want for your cheese course and the waiter cuts off big hunks of each. I had seen a desert cart in Grenada Spain before but Catherine hadn't one before and spent a portion of the meal snooping at other tables to figure out how many cheeses were reasonable to order. She concluded that somewhere between 3 and 5 was right and spent the next half hour relishing her selection of everything from a mild, soft goat, to a funky Camembert style. Desert was a peach sorbet in a verbena syrup, but once again, the peaches in the Loire, just were not very flavorful.  The evening was definitely an experience that finished with stumbling up the stairs to our room.

Rain Creates Mushrooms and a Cozy Evening

We took our time getting out of Saumur. Originally, our plan was go to all the way to Chateau Noirieux for Catherine's X-mas stay in a Chateau and Michelin start dinner, however, that would have meant a 50km day if we went straight there, which was more than we really wanted to push for. So, I phoned the Chateaux and they were able to move our reservation back a day, while we were able to find another place about half way there in a gite. So we had more time.

After crossing the river back to the main bike path, we made our way to the Musee de Champignons. This mushroom museum is cut into the cliffs and had a lot of information & specimens about wild mushrooms in the area, as well as cultivated once. It's also a mushroom farm that produces a number of different kinds of mushrooms from your standard button ones, to ornamental red velvet ones, to the blue edible ones.

After the mushroom museum, we backtracked to town for some wine tasting before they closed for lunch. We found a large sparkling wine house that was still open called Akerman that makes mostly Cremant de Loire and a very reasonable price. The whites and roses were excellent and crisp, while they also had a sparking red that was like putting a fistful of raspberries in your mouth.

Following the wine tasting, we picked up some bread for lunch and continued on our way following the bike path. After a while, we stopped for lunch in a picnic area on a lake just outside of Gennes. It was threatening rain, so we ate under a tree, but fortunately, only got hit with a light sprinkle.

From there, we continued on towards Saint-Rémy-la-Varenne and eventually on towards our hotel, which was an old manor that had been refurbished by the owners as part of their retirement. It sits up the hill from the river and so has a great view. Inside, it is full of a collection of mounted animal heads, and old furniture. It feels exactly like a 19th century hunting lodge, with some modern conveniences (like plumbing). The owners, Catherine & Patrice are a charming couple that live in the house and rent out rooms when they are around and their kids aren't visiting. They are big hunters, mostly using dogs, to hunt rabbit, foxes and sometimes wild boar. Patrice still works at the salt farms on the coast as a manager, but is about to retire to the lodge full time in a few years.

We arrived right before the rain as about a half hour after we got there, it came down like cats and dogs. Unfortunately, one of their cats was hiding from the rain in the garden and one of the dogs got confused and attacked it, killing it.

Since we arrived on bikes, Catherine was willing to make us a dinner at the house instead of having to go into town to a restaurant. Normally, they want people to pre-reserve the dinners, but she was able to throw something together, which turned out delicious. It started with a smoked salmon and dill pocket with salad. Followed by chicken roasted with Provencal herbs, roasted potatoes and zuchinni and finished with an apple crumble for me. All of which had wine.

We fell asleep to the sound of the rain caressing the countryside. 

Sauntering to Saumur

We started today with what was probably the best continental breakfast I've ever had. It included crepes, homemade pot-de-creme, bread and even a flourless chocolate cake that our host made because Catherine can't eat gluten. After stuffing our faces, I mean getting energy for the day, we packed up and headed to the train station.

We decided to hop on a train to Chinon in order to cut out about 15 km from the trip for the day. On the train, which we were only taking two stops, the conductors stopped us. Apparently you can take bikes on the train, but you can't take bike trailers, which we were doing. Also, I apparently didn't know how you had to use tickets. We bought tickets from the machine, but didn't validate them because I didn't realize we had to. So they fined us 40 euros, but said that obviously, based on my accent, we're foreign and so they will write up the situation on the ticket and said that I had to take the ticket to the office in Chinon to get a refund. Of course, he still had to write the ticket in the first place. How very French!

Biking by the Troglodyte Houses

In Chinon, we stumbled across a farmer's market where we bought some snacks for lunch. We found sausage, cheese, bread, pears and a bottle of rose. To get out of town, we first wanted to take a tour around the castle. The map said that there was a bike route around it, so we tried to find it and ended up biking up a very big hill and putzing around for 45 min, trying to get back to the bridge out of town. We found out that there was actually an elevator we were supposed to take. I don't know why I didn't think of that!

The best view of the castle was from across the bridge where you can see it overlooking the town. After admiring the view, we followed a great bike path for about 15 km that went along the Vienne, and about when it got to the Loire, stopped for our picnic lunch. One of the things we noticed along the way is that there are a number of poplar plantations along the path. After some digging online, it turns out that they are planted in the area traditionally when a girl is born. Her father plants the trees, which are harvest when she gets married to pay for the wedding. The wood is used primarily to ship wine.

After lunch, we continued along the bike path on what was probably the most interesting stretch. The path from Conde-Saint-Martin to Saumur goes through a sequence of vineyards and little towns, some of whom are cut into the hillside. At one point, we were taking the scenic route up to the vineyards. Catherine was zooming ahead on her e-bike and I was trailing behind slowly cranking our baggage up the hill. I passed an older couple walking the other way, who looked at me, looked at Catherine, then looked at me again and just smiled.

On that stretch, the bike path does a detour in Turquant that actually goes through some of the old roads carved into the cliff side. They actually go for kilometers and were used to move from house to house, while staying hidden. We also stopped at the pommes tapee museum/factory. These are a specialty of the area that were primarily used back in the day to preserve apples for long sea voyages. The apples are slowly dried over 3 days in a kiln and then smacked flat with a special hammer. The entire operation is done inside the caves. To eat them, you rehydrate them, preferably with something warm and tasty, like mulled wine.

A couple of towns past the museum, we stopped quickly for some coffee and then headed into Saumur in time to go to the maison de vin, which is a tourist tasting room to showcase the wines of the region. It was interesting to get an overview of the Saumur and Anjou wines although our guide wasn't that good.

We then dropped off our stuff a the hotel across the river and went for dinner at a small restaurant right in downtown. I had terrine as an app, while Catherine had some mushrooms roasted with local goat cheese. For mains, we had steak and Catherine got some french fries. Finally, for desert, we had Cointreau creme brulee, which is also a local flare since Cointreau comes from Anger, just down the river.

Green Grottoes to Cozy Caves

Before leaving Tours, we had to deal with our bags. Thanks to the concierge at the hotel we were able to arrange that our two bags would be picked up and boxed by Mail Boxes etc. and then shipped to our hotel in Nantes for less than 30 euros. Way less than the 200 euros that the bike outfit was asking (they wanted to use a taxi).

We set out on the bikes heading down river and by around noon, reached the Villandry. We decided to get some lunch before going into the chateau and picked a small place one street back from the main one. They made a classic gallet de sarrasin or buckwheat crepe, which Catherine was able to eat since it was 100% buckwheat. It turns out that those crepes are specifically a Breton specialty and the Loire is close enough that we saw a significant amount of Breton influence. So we had them, an appetizer, and I got a sweet crepe with some glasses of excellent Breton cider.

After lunch, we visited the Chateau de Villandry, or really, it's gardens. They were rebuilt in the 1800s from the style of the time of the original gardens  and are now maintained year round by 10 gardeners. They are supposed to be the most extensive gardens in the Loire, and it's not hard to see why. There's a hedge maze, a large herb garden, a swan pond, a statue garden and even large vegetable gardens. The vegetable and herb gardens aren't your typical ones though because the vegetables are chosen and arranged for their ornamental value along with crop rotations. So you have things like purple leaved peppers contrasting with golden celery all in a very geometric design. The herbs are also setup geometrically, but are generally more permanent since some of them are perennials. So there were little hedges of things like mint and rosemary.

After the castle, we followed the bike route to our hotel outside of Azay-de-Rideau. the hotel is actually a Trogdolyte hotel carved out of the limestone cliffs. Catherine wanted to stay in a cave hotel, so this is the one I found, however, upon arriving and seeing the room (which even had a little entertainment chamber) realized that caves don't have airflow and are thus musty. So we had to switch to one of the rooms built using stone blocks where they were able to get some air to dry it out.

We were originally going to try and see the chateau or to go up the street to the exhibition trogdolyte village, but upon unpacking, we decided to just relax and sit in the hot tub before dinner. For dinner, we went to a restaurant right besides the castle that the concierge at the hotel recommended. It was a great little spot that was truly bustling. I had a fish & zucchini lasagna, which was a lot like a casserole, while Catherine had a piece of white fish in beurre blanc. For desert, I had a peach tart. It was a great crust, but the peaches were tasteless. I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that peaches in this part of France just suck. Catherine had pears poached in Chinon wine, which was delectable. 

Cycling to Chateaux de Chenonceaux

Today was our first real day in France. It was also our first trial of biking. We started the day by picking up our bikes from the bike rental place. We had concluded that if it was possible to do day of baggage transfers, that would have made our lives easier because both of our bags would not fit in the one trailer we rented. However, they are only willing to do that if you have it pre-booked and know all your locations along the way. So, we left our bags in the hotel and headed off on a day trip to Chenonceaux.

The official bike trail to get there requires going out of the way to Amboise and then going south, whereas the direct way is straight east of Tours. That would add about 10km to the ride. So, we followed Google Maps and took a more direct route. This started great as it was a bike bath following the river out of town. However, after a while, it turned into a very bumpy tractor route. We were also paralleling a semi-major road, so we gave up on the river path and cut over to the road, only to find a real bike path. The rest of the way alternated between a paved side road and proper bike paths. I wish these things were marked properly either on the tourist maps or in Google Maps as we were really just guessing.

We were hoping to make it to Chenonceaux in time for lunch, but it didn't look like it would happen, so we stopped in Blere for lunch. In France, you have to stop for lunch between 12 and 1:30 since that's the only times that restaurants are open. I had a delicious confit duck sheppards pie while Catherine had some fried ham steaks and a salad. It was a nice stop.

After lunch, we went to the castle, which was really neat. It's listed as THE castle to see if you come to the Loire Valley and for good reason. It is built over the river Cher with the main gallery being a long narrow room that straddles the river itself. Apparently they had balls and other big events in there, which would be interesting because of the space. Great for line dancing, that's for sure. It was also used as an infirmary during WWI and the soldiers would fish out the windows to entertain themselves. The chateaux was primarily built by Catherine de Medici and Diane Poitiers, who was Catherine's husband's mistress. There were three stories of your typical French royal bedrooms and studies. I found the kitchen area most interesting. They still had all the old tools from a well worn butcher's block, to dozens of copper cake pans to a rotisserie device that worked by having a weight out the window over the river. It would slowly lower, keeping the meats turning for hours before needing to be rewound.

After visiting the castle, we hopped on a train back to Tours and went to dinner at a wine & cheese restaurant. I bet you can guess what we ate! A large selection of cheeses and an appetizer of escarcot baked with cream and cheese. For desert, we shared a glass of desert Vouvray from 1989 that was delicious.

F-ups in France

Today was mostly a travel day. We got up early and made our way to the Oslo Airport where we grabbed a flight to Paris. Once in Paris, it was lunch time so we tried looking for a restaurant in the airport. No luck for anything that Catherine could eat. Apparently CDG terminal 1 hasn't gotten with the trend of more & better restaurants in airports.

Getting out of CDG proved a challenge. We had to wait for half an hour to buy a train ticket into town as our train to Tours left from Gare Montparnasse. The machines kept breaking and there were only a couple of them. It was a zoo.

We finally got on a train into the city and connected over to the train station via the metro. For some reason, there are a tone of small staircases in the metro, which was hard for Catherine. I have no idea what disabled people will do.

We arrived at the train station about an hour before our train (even though we had over 3 hours to make the transfer) and found a place where we could at least get something edible even if it wasn't very good. Canned tuna salad Nicoise and a reheated Croque-Monsieu.

The train was a high speed TGV that blasted us to Tours very efficiently. Once in Tours, we checked in to our hotel and walked around the old town of Tours a little bit. It was busy because the university just started so all the students were at the bars, but the town was really beautiful. There were a ton of old houses made of brick and big, exposed, wooden beams.

After exploring, we went for dinner. It was a little unfortunate for Catherine because all of their sauces were thickened with flour so she could only get a basic piece of steak as a main course. She did get a broiled local cheese with maple syrup as an appetizer and a creme brulee for desert, both of which were excellent. I had a piece of duck with chanterelles, which was great, and for desert, some peaches floating in a verbena syrup, which was terrible. The peaches were hard and tasteless. The house wine was great though, especially the red Anjou, which was delicious even though it was made with Cabernet Franc.

Navigating Norway

We arrived in Oslo around 8pm local time after a stopover in London. In our more recent travels, in places like Vietnam & India, it would be a no-brainer to just take a cab from the airport, but Catherine's friend Ryan had recommended we take a train downtown and then a bus to their place. A quick search showed that yep, that's the obvious, best thing to do. The airport is 60km outside of Oslo and so would have cost over $100 and taken over an hour, whereas the train was $20 and took 45min. We haven't been to Europe in a while.

We arrived at Ryan and Bente's place where they had graciously made a dinner for us of cod and mashed sweet potatoes with a chile, ginger, soy sauce. It was some of the best cod I've eaten because it was very tender and not tough the way cod can get. It was also great to see Ryan and Bente again since the last time was in San Francisco when they visited for AGU.

The next morning, we slept in until 9:30 and had a slow breakfast on the deck of the apartment. Their appartment is very close to downtown, but it's right on a little river & path of greenery which was georgeous in the morning sun. You can even hear the waterfall loudly from the apartment, which was great for sleeping, and quite unique in such an uban setting.

After breakfast, we went for a walk slowly downtown following the river. Catherine was having a hard time, so we just took it very slow. Eventually, we got to the central train station and the Opera house, which is a beautiful while marble building made of slopes going back and forth for the roof which you can walk up. At least in the summer. In the winter, apparently a little bit of snow fills in all the divots and turns it into an ice rink. Pretty dangerous, especially for toursits who aren't used to walking on ice & snow.

Downtown is largely under construction. There are a ton of unique, modern, architectural buildings going up to try and give the city some character. Apparently, the city center is traditionally very boring and utilitarian because for the longest time, Oslo wasn't really a major city as Norway was just a poor province of Denmark or Sweden. However, with independence, and with a lot of oil riches, they are now trying to make more of a name for themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the equivlant of Chicago in the 1920's and 1930's.

After seeing downtown, we took a tram up to Vigeland sculpture park to meet Anne Kristine and her daughter Ingrid. The park itself is quite large, with lots of open space where people were just relaxing outside in the great weather (sunny and low 20's), grilling on little portable barbecues, or just seeing the sculptures. Most of the sculptures were done by Gustav Vigeland and were either in bronze or stone. Many of them were just a little crazy, like a guy holding two kids on his shoulders and a third like a hacky-sack on his foot.

We met Anne Kristine and Ingrid while having a coffee and snack at the cafe. Ingrid is a doll. She's only two and speaks a combination of Norweigian and Spanish because her father, Pedro, is from Gran Canaria. She spent the whole time eating, talking up a storm (which of course I couldn't understand) and enjoying herself.

After the sculpture park, we headed back to the apartment to change and then went to dinner at a tapas-like fusion place. It was quite expensive (but so is everything in Norway, except maybe fish), but was interesting and quite good. We had a fixed price menu with a number of entres, like roasted corn with lime & chiles cut in half lengthwise weirdly, some truffle quesedillas, some tuna tacos with a passion fruit vinegrette. The meal was finished off with a strawberry shortcake in a pot where the cream was made of this very tangy goat cheese/milk. After dinner, we went for another drink at an old firehouse, which really just had bottled beer for way too much. It turns out that many American microbrews have taken over Norway so we didn't really see any local craft beer scene. Just the same one we see at home, complete with lots of IPAs (or ee-pa-s as they call them).

The next day, once again we slept in. Jet lag really hadn't hit us much for being 9 hours off but getting lots of sleep was refreshing. After another leisurely breakfast, we hopped on the metro out to the outskirts of town to meet Ola, Hong and their son Ludvig to forage for mushrooms and blueberries. Yes, we took the metro to the forest. People are used to their public transit and so it is super reliable and goes out to places of low density. Well actually, I guess the forest wasn't that low a density when we were there. It was swarming with Norweigians with the white wicker mushrooming baskets looking for chantrelles and porchinis. In the winter, it becomes a cross country ski area with hundreds of km of trails through the woods that people will pop out to at the end of the day for their daily workout. Norweigians definitely love being outside!

The afternoon was a lot of fun, even if we virtually struck out finding edible mushrooms. Some of it was that they were picked out and some of it was just that it had dried up a bit and so it was apparently a little thin. That being said, there were still more mushrooms of a wider variety than I have every seen. Everything from bright purple and white ones to red ones with red spots, to white balls that poof with a spoor cloud when you touch them. Of course, some were definitely poisonous, but both Ryan and Ola knew what to look for.

After getting back from the forest, we ordered some takeout sushi and fried up what mushrooms we did find. Both were delicious. The salmon sushi was, not surprisingly, specacular, while the fresh mushrooms had such a clean flavour. I think I'm going to try one of those mushrooming classes in San Francisco. I know that at the right time of year, you can go into the forest and find a ton of morels, chantrelle's and others.

The next morning, we bad Norway and friends farewell and hopped on a plane to Paris. It was definitely a weekend of nostalgia for Catherine seeing all her friends from Trondheim, while providing a view at a different life if she had decided to stick around (and not meet me of course). It was definitely worth the stopover!