More Butter!

What’s better than a birthday gift of a two-night stay at Le Hotel Beaufort facing the sea in Saint Malo? Adding on dinner at the Bistrot Autour du Beurre (the “All About Butter” bistro). No restaurant that starts you off with an eight butter tasting could possibly be bad. The butters are amazing: seaweed, buckwheat, […]

The Sunday Chicken

On Sunday, every open-air market (marché) in France apparently has a chicken rotisserie truck. Our first ever rotisserie chicken in France was several years ago, in Normandy. We still occasionally discuss how awesome it was – moist, juicy, succulent. Even better, we also bought the potatoes that had been roasting in the chicken juices (ok, […]

Ahh, Bretagne

We reached our new rental in Brittany on Sunday. It’s even better than we had hoped. The house looked nice online; it was a very pleasant surprise to find the rooms were larger than they looked in the pictures (when does that ever happen?). J was delighted to find an extremely well-equipped kitchen. (Oddly, it […]

The Planning

We took two years to plan this trip. That was driven by life events, not the amount of work involved, which would probably expand to take as much time as you’re willing to spend. There’s always one more potential rental to look at… and it might be even better than the one you’ve already decided […]

L’Île de Ré

Did we mention that this is J’s favorite place in France? The last week has not changed that one iota. If you like biking, beaches, beautiful countryside, and good food, you really should visit. As we biked along the coast, through vineyards, and past salt marshes and salt pools, we had huge smiles on our […]

Nous Sommes en France!

It’s always good to have a backup plan… We got to the station to take the train to the airport only to see the display change to “More than 1 hour delay”. Uh-oh, time for Plan B. D&D had come with us and we all hopped back in the car and raced (when the traffic […]

The Quick Overview

We will spend two months in each of five regions in France: Brittany, Périgord, Narbonne, the Loire Valley, and Lyon. Plus an initial week on the Ile de Ré, as a “vacation” before the hard work of our French stay begins. Some of these areas we’ve visited before and some will be all new – […]

Here We Go!

We’d been idly talking about spending an extended period in France for a few years. We didn’t really get serious until two years ago, when J decided she would join M in retirement in a year. After a whole lot of planning (we’ll write about that in the future), we’ve decided to spend two months […]