Oui Oui!

Pronounced slightly different than the sound that Ned Betty made in that famous scene from Deliverance, we mean "yes, yes" to France. Beth and I took a long awaited road trip to Provence and the Rhone valley last week. While the weather didn't exactly cooperate with that expected famous southern sun, the country did not disappoint.


Dutch like us. We hadn't realized how ingrained in the Dutch culture Beth and I have become until we took a look around at this rest stop somewhere in Belgium. Upon closer examination of the cars in the packed parking lot, we noticed that all of the people who brought their own lunch with them instead of eating in the restaurant were travelling under Dutch plates. Would you like some Pinderkaas with that broodje?

Our first night in the beautiful city of Nancy in Northwest France was a complete bust. After 6 hours of driving we were happy to get out of the car and walk through the city center. But as we approached the main square we started hearing the now all-to-familiar chanting of drunken soccer fans. In this case it was the Scots who had apparently just whooped France's ass in a local match and were celebrating in a drunken, glass-strewn ruckus. Needless to say, there was not a hotel to be found and our first night in France was spent scrambling for some obscure highway hotel where we just crashed early with our books.

But things quickly turned for the better when we called for our next reservation in the beautiful Cotes du Rhone region. It was an unqualified recommendation from someone who had heard something from a friend who knew someone who had fixed up a place in the area and was now renting out rooms. A Dutch person of course, so my learning the language over here is beginning to seem less and less of a useless endeavor...the Dutch are everywhere!

See the villa in the middle of those vineyards? That's where we stayed....fantastic! This place was recently featured on the cover of EnFrance magazine and is just what you would expect from an architectural digest kind of place.

The upper terrace with the old well was a great place to catch the evening sunset....

...after it came off the pool of course.

The stonework in the kitchen was incredible. The counter top slab weighed 2 tons! And the sleeping dog added a great little touch.


Who can have a villa in France without at least 1 resident cat?

I couldn't recommend this place enough. Robert (the owner) was a great host and walked us through the vineyard in search of old roman tiles...which we found about 1/2 dozen of. Apparently his house was built on the ruins of an old roman villa...very cool. If you want to see more pictures, or go for a visit yourself, check them out at Mascavard and/or at EnFrance (that's him and his wife-and dogs on the cover).


In addition to the great setting, Mascavard is situated close to a lot of great local sites....like Uzes, which just happened to have a market on the day that we visited.

The famous Uzes skyline.

The old roman city of Nimes is also a short drive away. In Nimes, you get to play on the ruins!

Nimes also had a festival when we were there. It centered around a bullfight (bloodless) in the old roman arena, but we found more interesting sights out in the streets. This guys spring action leg extensions were really cool. He could run like a centaur and jump 1.5 meters into the air. Whoa!

Pont du gard is also in the neighborhood....more amazing Roman engineering.

And one last stop before we headed across the Rhone into the Luberon...the ancient bories.

In the Luberon, we did a lot of hiking...



...and a lot of hilltop village exploring...





...before crossing one more valley into the real mountains...the Alps. These roads were so twisty and tunneled that our TomTom couldn't handle it. It kept putting us over the cliff...."Turn Right when possible."

If there is no room for a road...no problem! Cut, hack, blast your way to some level surface where white-knuckled tourists can enjoy a scenic drive. And don't be fooled by my focus on the road in this photo...rest asured that there is a 1000 foot drop just beyond that skimpy guardrail. This hack is literally IN the side of the cliff.

They apparently did the same thing with their religious monuments back in the middle ages. We climbed so many mountains, past so many commandments, to see so many religious monuments that we can not NOT go to heaven.



The gorges of Verdon are amazing.



We even did a little canyoning in one of the Verdon tributaries. (stock photo...we didn't take a camera, although we did several "slides" like this one.) Canyoning is a mad scramble down and back up river canyons. It took everything that we had to do some of the 5 meter jumps and 30 meter rappels. Damn! It sucks getting old. But there is nothing like crawling around a deep water canyon on a beautiful day in Provence...now THAT is a religious experience.




We also always like to try ethnic food in different countries. So for example, trying Chinese food in Germany. Well, in a little town called Apt, we stumbled across a Vietnamese restaurant. Ex-colony of France, right? Ok, we'll give it a try. Well, when I saw Sweet and Sour Frog legs on the menu, I knew that I had to try it. That's Fusion cooking for ya!


And almost as a pitiful joke, we also had to try this TexMex restaurant in Chamaunt. I mean, how good can TexMex in France be? Surprisingly, it was excellent. Chili, ribs, and chicken wings. The best that we've had in a long, long time.



Which cheeks are bigger? We found this little bar open for breakfast in Castellane one morning. Castellane (as most of France), is crazy about jeu de boule. Well this bar was apparently supporting the local champions because there were no less than 7 trophies behind the bar. This naked women is not only a picture...no, no, no. Those buttocks are a raised relief that stick out several inches from the wall and are caressed by the local boule players before a match for good luck. Funny, that also works for me!

Ruigoord

Beth and I hit a great show last weekend over in the artist colony of Ruigoord just outside of Amsterdam. If you remember from my Copenhagen post, Ruigoord is the sister village of Christiania. Don't get me wrong...Christiania is the mothership and 100 times larger than Ruigoord. But I was disappointed with the pictures that I took there and thought that I'd post again from Ruigoord to try and better capture that hippie vibe. (the 2008 Dorpsjuweel from Eric van der Munnik under the FOTO link of the Ruigoord site also has some good representative photo's).



Does this remind anyone of a certain house on Philadelphia Street in Indiana, PA way back in 1986?

A good example of a local hand-built house/studio - turf roof and all.

Nice use of colors and 2nd hand building materials.

Great covered patio!

One of the artists was from China, and built her house/studio to feel a bit more like home.

It was great being able to walk through the inside of the houses at this show. This one also looks somewhat familiar, doesn't it Meg?

THAT is one big pipe! (actually an Alpen horn).

The old church is the center of the community. The front field always welcomes anyone willing to pitch a tent and stay a while and the church itself is a bar/cafe/festival hall.

Hanging out at the church cafe.

This psychedelic wagon made for a great play set for the next generation of colonists.

Kielbasa

You might be wondering how someone can write a serious blog entry about a greasy piece of sausage. Well, I'm equally curious how someone can spend (waste) 5 minutes reading such an entry, so I guess that we're even. In all fairness, this weeks blog entry is not for the masses. It's directed at a very specific and special audience....those of you who grew up in Western Pennsylvania and remember these snappy skinned little delicacies as a staple of our youth.

In our house, you always knew what you were getting for dinner based upon what day of the week it was. Didn't matter what month. Only day of the week. Monday - meatloaf. Tuesday - mac-n-cheese. Wednesday - stuffed peppers. You get the idea.

But on those rare nights when my dad would come home early and override the daily menu by offering to cook for my mom, nine chances out of ten, he made kielbasa. Pan fried. With peppers and onions.

It's been four years since I've had kielbasa. You'd have thought that by moving to Europe, the ultimate home of kielbasa (Poland), that we'd have been swimming in the stuff. But it turns out that every country over here has their own version of sausage. Some good. Some not so good. But in every case they seem to be fiercely proud of the unique way that they grind the scraps of leftover meat and stuff it into a spent intestine. It's funny what falls under the category of national pride (aka, freedom fries or lekkere worst van de Hema).

Anyhow, I had almost forgotten about kielbasa because it simply does not exist in the local grocery stores. It wasn't until our trip to Copenhagen last month that I happened to mention it in passing when talking about growing up in PA to one of our friends.

"Polish sausage? There's a Polish store on the Amsterdamsestraat in Haarlem. You should see if they carry it."

Amsterdamsestraat in Haarlem is not in the...well... let's just say "nicest" areas of the city. I had never been there and had never seen the store before. But on our first day back after vacation, I hopped on my bike and raced down there after work.

PAYDIRT!!!! Polish Kielbasa. In connected links. In Polish packaging that I couldn't read. This was the real thing. The lady behind the counter was obscenely rude, but I didn't care. I wanted Kielbasa. I needed kielbasa.

That night, I surprised Beth by firing up the barby and tossing on the sausage, complete with peppers and onions. Some of you might think that this wasn't much of a surprise for Beth. But remember, she's from Western Pennsylvania too.

So we stuffed ourselves full of kielbasa and spent the evening reminiscing about dancing the chicken dance at a fire-hall wedding in some forgotten Appalachian hollow. Ahhh. The days of our youth...

New Wheels

Well, I finally did it. Now that I'm actually contributing to the financial situation of Dan & Beth Inc., I decided to go out and purchase the new bike. And this isn't just any old run-of-the-mill bike that is designed for doing x, y, and z. Nope. This bike is designed purely for x. And x means trekking.

This bike means business. I've loaded it down with rocks and begun training on all my local routes. It handles like a champ, chugging along with far less effort than the extra weight would lead you to believe possible.

The first trip is planned for this fall when I'll throw the bike onto the train down to Middleburg in South Holland and spend three days biking back up to Haarlem. The big trip will be next spring when I'll tackle the Rhine river route from Noordwijk, NL to Basel, Switzerland. If all goes well, and I find myself some extra time on my hands (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), I'd like to try and continue on and cross the Alps to the Mediterranean. Who knows?

There is only one problem with this baby. Because it is so specialized for trekking, I think that I'll have to go out and buy another bike that is specialized for speed. ( Sue - Does that remind you of anyone? ;-)

Horses grazing in front of castle ruins ... does the scenery from the bike get any better?

Denmark

Typically we avoid all travel in the month of August in Europe. It's just such a hassle with all the traffic and overbooked hotels. This year, we just happened to have a reservation for Sage at the dierenpension for a few days and decided to take a short road trip up to Denmark. The roads were jammed (of course), but we ended up having a great time. Not great enough to ever, ever drive again in August unless absolutely necessary, but all-in-all not so bad.



Our first impulse stop was one of our best. The northern German town of Bremen was very cool. It is a great mix of old and new that had a nice, friendly vibe to it.

Hamburg on the other hand was pretty much a bust. New, brash, and lacking any sense of character, this 2nd largest German city did nothing for us. The only site worth mentioning was this bombed out church, left as it was found after an allied air raid as a reminder of the price of war.

The church must have been massive - this surviving bell tower is still one of the tallest buildings in the inner city - I couldn't capture it on camera.

After Hamburg, we made an early start for Puttgarden where we had a ferry reserved for 13.35. At 13.15 the dark clouds came rolling through and we were still stuck 17 kilometers away in standstill traffic jams. I almost turned the car around to go the land route over to Denmark when the traffic finally dispersed at a local village where there was a large festival underway. We broke out of the crowd and raced for the ferry. We were able to drive right onto the 13.55 boat and found ourselves on the open Baltic 10 minutes later.

Unfortunately, the weather just got worse and the ferry pitched and swayed for the entire 40 minute Baltic Sea crossing. It wasn't quite as bad as the ride over to Catalina Island 10 years ago, but it was pretty bad for such a large boat.

We spent two days on the southern islands of Denmark, hopping around small towns and villages. The western most island of Mon was beautiful. It felt like a trip through The Shire and I kept expecting to see Hobbits crossing the road. Maybe Tolkien got some inspiration here.

But once again, discovering the details was the most interesting part...


...only found in an out-of-the-way corner of an old cobbled street.

On the other hand, the chalk cliffs of Mon were spectacular in their grandeur. The Baltic is a pale blue here because of the influence of the cliffs.


This was a great shot that I had to get out on the edge of the cliff to get. After taking the photo, I looked down at my feet only to see directly through the ground to the sea below! I was on a precipice that was only held together by a tangle of roots. Yikes!


Maybe we'll look into a schooner like this one for our next vacation. I wonder if the scenery in Croatia is this nice?

Then it was on to Copenhagen, where there were classic scenes like this market square...

...and cliche scenes like Nyhavn.

There were a lot of cozy cafe's to sit out the rain and surprisingly, the food actually came close to rivaling Northern Italy.

One of our favorite stops in Copenhagen was the freetown enclave of Christiania. An old hippie colony that operates it's own form of government and has survived more than 30 years of ups and downs. Somehow it still has that feeling that must have permeated the summer of love in Haight-Ashbury. Very cool.

There are some really interesting hand built houses...


...and some houses that were rolled in just to keep out the rain.

The nice thing about Christiana is the fact that they have their own business district. This was one of the little pubs...

...where we sat for a cold beer under the shade of the mascot plant above the door.



Why Denmark now? Because we had a free place to crash at the vacation cottage of our good friends Jan and Marjolein (are we the only ones who do this anymore?). The house was set just off a quite beach north of Assens and had an excellent yard where the guys mopped up at obstacle oriented petenque. A great end to a great (little) holiday. Leuk!


EDITOR'S NOTE: Beth insists that I mention that the guys only mopped up on the first game...the girls did better in games two and three.