TravLog 01-09-05

Today I slept in a bit, then packed,er,...crammed my suitcases to head back to Troyes. Tonton Daniel (Marc's Uncle Daniel) gave me 3, yes, THREE bottles of The Best Champagne Ever to take back home with me. He grows the grapes and makes the champagne himself, and it's very very very very good. Better than any other champagne I've ever had. In addition to those bottles, Doc gave me another bottle that she'd kept for me from when they celebrated Matthieu's christening. It's got his picture on the label. So, in all, I've got four bottles of homebrew champagne to take back. I hope at least two of them make it all the way home.
As Doc and I were leaving the house, I hugged Marc and Matthieu goodbye and started to cry. I was very sad to leave, because I know it'll be a couple more years at least until I'll be able to come back to see them. At least I had Doc with me for a few more hours as she drove me back to Vivi's house.
On the way there, she stopped to show me the place she wants to convert to a gite. Talk about your fixer-uppers! I could see the sky through the bedroom ceiling. I could feel the breeze from the walls. But it sounds like she's got a good plan for it. Maybe the next time I come to visit, it'll be finished.

After that, we went on to Joinville, for lunch and a tour of Le Chateau du Grand Jardin. The chateau was closed but we walked around the gardens for a bit. There was an herb garden for flavorful and medicinal herbs, a cutting garden for fragrant and display flowers, a formal garden, a labyrinth/maze (I'd never actually seen one in person), a grove of fruit trees, and a walk surrounded in vines (grapes, I think). We met the most amazing swan in the Romantic garden. It was completely black with a red beak and eyes ( see pic - click for more), and it swam right up to us. I was entranced by it, the serpintine way its neck moves, and the way it glided around on the water with no visible means of propulsion. yes, i know it used its feet. i said visible.
After the gardens, we went to an exhbit of Samurai art at a local museum. I'm an American, in france, viewing an exhibit of Japanese art. What's not to love?
Doc, because she is a cool chica who knows me very well, took me on a meandering route back to Troyes. We were particularly looking for those little roadside attractions signs, and today we hit some really cool stuff at Rosnay l'Hopital. There was a crypte below a church that dated from the 12-16th centuries, but we didn't go in, because we would have had to get the key from the priest who lived somewhere down the road, and we didn't want to disturb any one. At least, I didn't want to disturb anyone. Doc was totally willing to go banging on the door of Father Guillaume just so I could see what a crypte looks like. I love her. As we were exiting the cemetary by the church, we became enamored of a roofline just in the distance, so we got in the car to go take a closer look at it. We drove by a large house with a big fence around it, and circled around the back to try and get a better view. We couldn't get any closer to the house, because the grounds were so big, but what we did find at the back of the garden was pretty doggone neato, if you ask me. It looked like some garden walk that someone had landscaped with these huge boulders making archways and the base of a hill with steps leading up to a round tower. I let out a gasp and grabbed my camera, and doc, knowing exactly what that meant, pulled over so that I could exit the car more safely and go take a closer look.
Something heading toward me made me look to the right to see a large, beautiful dog jogging towards me. Doc knew the breed of the dog (longhaired greyhound? whippet? wolfhound thingy?), and maybe she'll leave a comment and let me know what it was. *hint* So I'm standing there, with this dog nearly as tall as I am heading toward me, and I figure I can play naive and try to make friends with it, or I can squeal like a little girl and jump back into the car. Being the animal-lovin' Sagittarian that I am, I chose to make friends. Thankfully, the dog seeemed receptive to this idea, so we shared a moment through the fence. If I could talk dog, I would have asked her what the story was behind the garden/boulder-archy/tower thing was, but alas, I don't, so I didn't.
The sun was setting as we drove on to Vivi and Steph's house. From the car, I took a few blurry pictures of the bright pink and violet streaks across the sky. When we reached our destination, Doc helped me carry,er,...drag my bags to the door and we said a sad goodbye on the sidewalk. I wish I had more friends like Doc and Vivi back home, but I guess this way I just appreciate them more when I do get to see them.
I didn't get a chance to get too weepy on the sidewalk, because I looked down at my bags to find that I'd dragged one of them through a pile of the ubiquitous dog poo. Twice. And not only that, but I and several other pedestrians had turned that same pile o' poo into a poo mine field right there in front of Vivi's door. So my actual entry into the house was delayed and a bit anticlimactic as I had to sit outside for several minutes to clean my shoes and the wheels of my suitcase.
A quick freshen up, and Vivi, Steph, and I went for dinner at his parents' house. The menu included escargots and rabbit stew. Now, I loves me some escargots, so the biggest challenge there was to not make a pig of myself. ohhh, the butter,.... But when it came to the rabbit stew, it was a different story. First let me say that I'm a big fan of stew. And this stew was tasty, choc' full of not-from-a-can vegetables, and clearly homemade with love. and rabbit. But you know how when we make chicken or beef stew, the meat doesn't really look like the animal it came from? Well, I think I could have reassembled the rabbit from everything there in the stew. Floating. right there. I think perhaps the ears and head were mercifully left out, but the rest,... I'll try my best to avoid any gory details. I scooped out as many chunks of vegetable and ...meat...that I could without getting ...recognizable segments of rabbit anatomy or ... other organs. I guess I can sum up by saying that the stew was a bit too naturel for my taste.
After dinner our attention was diverted by an extended news update on the aid and reconstruction going on in Indonesia following the tsunami. I was interested in the story of course, but I also used it as another opportunity to work on my translation skills. I kept looking back at Vivi or Steph and asking, "did they just say, ...?" But after about an hour or more of the show, Steph's mom decided we'd seen enough. She grabbed the remote and, announcing "trop triste!" (too sad!), changed the channel. Moms - always lookin' out for us. :)