Santa Fe with Friends and a Family Wedding

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August 13-21--A bit late posting this trip, but we had no longer finished this one than we were heading off North for another and then got a Covid scare.  So enjoy nevertheless.

We had promised to visit our friends Hannah and David, neighbors for many years, in their new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and decided to couple that trip with the wedding with the grandson of Ben’s late cousin as a chance to catch up with the family.  The wedding was in Carlsbad, California, on the California coast about an hour’s drive north of San Diego. 

Hannah and David picked a beautiful city in which to retire—although neither of them will fully retire.  She continues to teach and David is deciding on what to do next.  Not easy when you have a view in the front of the house to see the light and sky change all day long.  In the meantime they have joined the world of Santa Fe, with its arts and music community.

  

 

On arrival we joined them for the "Apprentice Scenes" which is up-and-coming artists’ night at the Santa Fe Opera, where you listen to a variety of scenes from operas which are being performed in full that season or in past seasons and with a view toward future seasons.  With the view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the background and beautiful music it is  quite idyllic.   A fitting welcome to the New Mexico capital’s art and music scene.  

We returned to the opera later in the week for a full performance of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”, which we preceded by a talk from a University of Utah opera professor.  That helped make sense of what is a fairly complicated piece of music.  

Sitting outside with the roof shaped like an awning is really a great way to attend the performance.

 

Santa Fe has turned its old Railroad District into a market and art gallery center.  The market offers handiworks from local pueblos as well as locally grown foodstuffs, with lots of varieties of peppers, a several types of chili peppers, and an old truck as with a huge antenna and imaginary flying saucer as homage to the aliens supposedly arrived in Roswell in the south of the state. Of course the Railroad District has a commuter station for the trains to Albuquerque a 90 minute trip to the South, about 65 miles.  The train is known as the Road Runner, after the cartoon character.

We had the real pleasure of exploring the way New Mexico encourages its artistic community with a visit to the New Mexico Charter High School of Arts.  There the students take a full high school curriculum in the morning and in the afternoon study their artistic specialty which can range from sculpture, to painting, to music (instrumental and composition), to creative writing.  It was the first day of school as we walked through the building in the old Railroad District of the city, one of the oldest in the country, with the head of the school and a member of the board.  

   

Having seen the movie “Oppenheimer” just a couple of weeks before our departure we thought a visit to Los Alamos would be a good thing.  The town is actually visible from David and Hannah’s home, but it’s about an hour away by car.  Most of it is a government research center, not open to the public, but the museum is very interesting and the movie describing the development of the atomic bomb worth seeing. Many New Mexicans say that they were the site of the world’s first atomic bomb, not Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and call themselves “Downwinders.”  We had an excellent lunch at the Blue Window Bistro.

We later visited the New Mexico Museum of History hill, with some huge outdoor statues.  See if you can find Ben and John in these two pictures: 

 

While all this doesn’t describe our full visit to Santa Fe, it was a very complete five days, finishing up with dinner at an Indian (country, not tribe) Paper Dosa restaurant. 

  

From there it was off to California to a big wedding full of family and old friends, which we enjoyed immensely.   

Finishing our Voyage with Grand Sights and Good Friends.

Friday, July 7, 2023--Aboard the Renaissance just past Gustave Eiffel's Pont Canal. Built to carry barges over the Loire about 125 years ago, the bridge, sometimes called an aqueduct, is only wide enough for one barge at a time.

We are coming to the end of five full days of eating, wining, sleeping, exploring and enjoying Western Burgundy in central France with our friends.  Tomorrow, we head home.  Since our last post we have explored a royal palace,  Fontainebleau, and its Equestrian Center where the French army trains its horses, walled towns like Moret-sur-Loing, a Sancerre vineyard and winery La Perrière, and a chateau La Bussière, known as the Fisherman's Castle because it was overloaded with every collectible fish tchotchke ever--until it was turned into a museum, and another rural chateau, Ratilly, turned into an arts and music center.  We moved up and down locks, reaching a height of 500 feet above sea level among the ponds and reservoirs that feed the canal from the Seine to the Loire.

It's hard to put in the blog the variety of cheeses we had for the cheese courses every lunch and dinner, but it was generally five or six different cheeses per day, ranging from ash-covered goat (chèvre) cheeses to two-year old brie to delightful cow's milk blues.  The wines, at four per day, ranged from Alsatian whites, Burgundian whites and reds, Rhone valley reds, Bordeaux Margaux, with a goodly number of Loire valley whites and some reds to fill in the "imaginary" blank spaces, although there never were any blank spaces.  Ben and Inma, our bartenders, managed to fill those blank spaces with adventurous cocktails after hard days of being tourists.

Hannah, the English chef, did fabulous lunches, ranging from gazpacho, charcuterie to grand dinners. The penultimate was maigret of duck, and the night before was veal roulade wrapped around spinach.  Desserts have included mille feuille with fresh strawberries, red currants and red raspberries, and a delicious rhubarb concoction.

Those frits we picked at the the fish chateau.  The gardens include a large section of vegetables and fruit. Jane  and John picked a basket of currants, Ben and the others got a nice selection of red raspberries.  The gardeners gave us the nice selection of rhubarb stems.

  Several activities were quite unique, like a visit to the home of artist Rosa Bonheur, a 19th century artist who was famous for animal portraits, influenced environmental art and herself had been influenced by Buffalo Bill!

Another was a visit to a winery in a limestone cave near the town of Sancerre. 

Compared to our trip in 2010, the canals  are very well maintained, even though they have minimal commercial traffic: often they only have four boats per day passing through the locks.  For the first few days we seldom saw boat traffic but as we moved south we passed occasional marinas and even an occasional work boat.  

Jane, who had opened locks on a previous voyage managed to do the same on this canal, which is mostly mechanized.

Because the side trips from the barge can vary at the captain's discretion, one trip that was new to the Renaissance was a visit to the French Army's Equestrian Training Center, used to train horses for use both in crowd control when necessary but also for French participation in horse events like the Olympics.  At Fontainebleau, the Army maintains stables for some 140 horses , training them and working with the soldiers who will use them and train others from the civilian population.  

We also stopped to see the town, Moret-sur-Loing,  where impressionist painter Alfred Sisley spent much of his life, a truly beautiful site.  The cobbled streets and the walls with their tight entrances were straight from the Middle Ages.  The town provides a copy of his painting at the site where he painted it so you get a view of reality.  

Another chateau, the Chateau de Ratilly, a small one, was a medieval castle that has turned into a potter's paradise, due to the excellent clay in the region's soil.  The owners of the chateau also arrange master classes in painting and regular art exhibitions and major music events every summer.  We watched with interest as one of the descendants gave us an exhibition of her pottery skills.

We completed our week with a jazz trio performing on deck. 

Our last meal was drawn in great part from the fish, meat, vegetable and cheese counters of the local market in Briare which we visited Friday morning with Hannah, the chef.

July 8, 2023--Saturday morning we departed the Canal by car, saying good bye and sadly heading to Charles de Gaulle Airport for the long eight hour journey home.  It had been a very full three week trip, much enjoyed.  Thanks for the week go to the staff of the Renaissance, Hadrian, Oscar, Inma, Hannah and Ben, and for the company to Jane, Peter, Valerie, Andy and David.  We look forward to our next encounters.

 

Aboard the Rennaissance, Western Burgundy

 July 3, 2023--Western Burgundy, France--We are aboard the Renaissance, a large luxurious barge for a week of wine tasting and excellent food as we navigate the canals of western Burgundy.  This is our third barge trip in France, all described in blogs from 2010 and 2018,. This barge is by far the most luxurious.  We have a king-size bed and a huge bathroom. There is an enormous salon-dining room, as well as a hot tub on the outside deck.  We will call this home till we leave France and return to Washington.

We met up with friends Jane and Peter, David and Andy, and new friend Valerie at the Hotel Westminster on Saturday afternoon, it now being Monday.  We had arranged to have dinner at a restaurant recommended by previous hosts John and Eric, L'Agrume, near the Sorbonne.  So we bundled into taxis to the Left Bank to find the place closed--perhaps because of the rioting after the police--killing of the 17 year old boy Nahel in his car in Nanterre, a Paris suburb.   After some walking in the neighborhood we found an excellent restaurant, with a Chinese chef married to a caucasian French owner, the Mortensen on Blvd. St. Marc.  It turned out to have five stars from many reviewers.  They managed a table for seven with alacrity.

Ben ordered a Sancerre and a red Burgundy.  Our menu choices were excellent, ranging from pleurottes and artichauts, to smoked haddock, tuna steak, vegetable pasta.  It was a true find considering that our original restaurant choice was closed up. 

We spent a lovely afternoon on Sunday walking through the Tuileries and sitting on the quay on the Seine watching the people go by and boats move up and down the river.  A plus was watching a movie being shot.  Not a big deal but a bit different.  John got to see one of his favorite cars, a late 1930s Citroën Traction Avant.

The Hotel Westminster where we stayed was expensive.  Although the staff was good, the place was overpriced. Our room was small, less than four meters (13 feet+/-) square, with what John considered racially objectionable wallpaper in the hall entryway, and a tatty amount of bashed paint work.  The window looked out to an airshaft and was covered with translucent sticky paper.  But, the bed and wifi were good and staff was helpful.   

As mentioned, many cities in France had been rocked for the two nights previous with riots that did significant damage to smaller town centers and looting in parts of Paris, including the exclusive rue Rivoli, over the death of a youth.  This particular shot shows where a car had been burned in Montargis and store windows covered with plywood.

One effect was that our barge began its voyage not in Montargis as expected, but in a quiet sheltered part of the Canal de Briare away from the town center.  We are now moving down the canal on the way to Fontainebleau, one of the royal chateaus in the region.

Last night we had appertif of chablis (white burgundy) followed by an excellent dinner  prepared by the English chef, Hannah. She is from London and the partner of the French captain, Hadrian.  The starter was a stuffed mushroom in a cream sauce served with a white burgundy followed by a main course of coq au vin, then three cheeses all local, and the dessert an apple crumble topped with vanilla ice cream and a strawberry.

 

Paris and our Very Good Friends

 July 1, 2023, Paris--Travel was quite easy to France last weekend.   The taxi to Catania, the planes to Vienna, then to Paris, and then the taxi again from Charles de Gaulle to our friends John and Eric in the 18th arrondissement were little more than tiring.  After all it is a five hour air trip.  We have been quite busy so that John has not taken up the keyboard to write.

It is always good  to see our friends and to visit the French capital, a city we love.  After the constant walking, up and down, around and about in Taormina, Siracusa, Noto and Palermo, it is good to have the Metro nearby and few hills to deal with.  Although they live near Montmartre we didn't scale it this year.

We've been to Paris many times, so we did not need to  deal with the usual tourist sites.  Instead John had read about a major show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, part of the Louvre complex, that was a must for us.  "Hair" was both humorous and informative, going all the way from classic times to the present including how the monstrous head dresses of the 18th and 19th centuries were constructed.  A movie, with one shot here, showed how it is done.   The intricacies and the additional materials necessary were incredible, including combs, other people's hair, ribbons and other stuff we can't name.  Visiting non-Europeans even got photographed, but to make the shots proper they wore European dress.  Some shots:

The following day, Tuesday, a group of John and Eric's expatriot/binational friends came by for a cocktail dinner party that lasted the whole evening.  The conversation went from the sublime to the ridiculous and poop to nuts because John and Eric had just brought home a new dog, Taylor,, and one of the guests brought her 3-month old poodle named Martini. We had a really fine time.

On Wednesday, June 29, we headed out to Le Perreux, a suburb in the Marne Valley by train.  We have known our host and hostess, Marcel and Colette, who are in their early nineties, for about 30 years, visiting them at their summer home in Brittany, and having them visit us in Washington.  Their grandson, a film maker, who had spent a couple of weeks on our street with neighbors when he was about 15, was also present.  Wonderful courgères (accompanied with champagne), then mushroom salad, lotte (monkfish), cheeses (accompanied with a Sancerre) and pineapple-strawberry tarts with fresh whipped cream (accompanied by a Bordeaux).  A truly lovely time together.  

On Thursday we had a good quiet day, shipped gifts home, a sidewalk cafe lunch of wine and salad, whole filet of sole for dinner, cooked on its bone structure, on which Ben very successfully proved his surgical talents and a relatively early night to bed.

Friday, June 30, included one of our reasons to come to Paris, a place which we have never visited.  We took the hour long train trip to Giverny to see Monet's fabulous gardens and his water lily pond that served as inspiration for his magnificent paintings. 

 

Of course there is always an interesting character around, this one happened to be a pet chicken who was clearly well fed at the café in the nearby village.  Today we head off to meet our fellow cruisers and we will board our canal boat tomorrow. 

 

Sicily here we are!

 Taormina, Sicily, June 19, 2023--It seemed like a good place to start an exploration on an island of rich and complex history, and one we had never been to.  With a little planning and lots of discussion among friends we decided we'd use Taormina as the base, explore Syracuse and Mt. Etna and manage a day trip to Palermo, the province's capital.

June 19, Taormina, Sicily.  It's a grand place.  As you can see with Ben's back on Mt. Etna, lightly fuming away, and John's on the Mediterranean, trying not to look at the smalli-ish cruise-ship which seems to have unloaded merely one zodiac of tourists looking for T-shirts. 

But don't be faint of heart when you learn that it is 12 and a half hours of flying time alone to get here.  We stood in line at Dulles for 90 minutes, got stuck in Metro's construction on the Orange/Silver line, then some TSA guy thought he found something explosive on the outside of John's cellphone--requiring  a full body pat-down (nice soft hands), and experts looking over the phone.  We had five minutes to spare before Austrian Airlines closed plane's the doors without us.

At Catania Airport in Italy, we learned John had made a mistake on the pick-up car service so we ended up with a taxi to the hotel, the Hotel Mediterranee, with the fabulous views. but now we are settled and off to see the people at this high level center of commerce (it hosts international meetings), and partake of gelato before finding  a dinner specializing in local fish or seafood. 

June 24, Taormina, Sicily. Saturday, As is obviously visible, John has not had time to sit down and write anything this past few days.  It has been a whirlwind of activity, so much so that we are taking a day of before heading to Paris tomorrow.  We have had to forego a day's visit to Mt. Etna, but we have seen smoking in the distance every day when we get up.

The dinner we found on the 19th, Monday, was in a small trattoria down a side street where we truly enjoyed wonderful traditional Sicilian cuisine.   We sat under arbors with trained orange trees growing. One small orange, about an inch in diameter, landed into Ben's seltzer literally making a splash at dinner.

Trattoria Don Camillo does not have a wine list and provided us with the house white wine, which was better than many of the much pricier vintages we have had around the world. Our primi piattis were linguini with  bottarga and zucchini blossoms.  It was breathtakingly wonderful.  For the second course we split a dorade à la siciliano, cooked with tomato sauce with capers.

On June 20, Tuesday, we ventured around and about Taormina, which despite its resort reputation, is really quite small.   It is loaded with high-end retail, and very very ritzy hotels.  There are a number of interesting buildings like the police station with Stars of David in the walls.  One of the churches is even as old as Harvard or Rhode Island, dating to the 1630s! 

The architecture depending on who ruled when varies from Greek to Roman to Arab Muslim, to Norman to Spanish to French to modern.  And the variations is in physiognomy are equally as varied.  Sicily is as varied as the United States with its continued interaction with Africa, the East and the North  It sits on the African tectonic plate, not the European one.  This causes earthquakes.

We took the gondala down the cliffs to the beach, walked around a bit.  It's very pretty, with lots of chaises longues, not our style, so we took a ride back up.  Quite fun.   

Dinner Tuesday night was at the Granduca.  The starters were absolutely magnificent.  We both had  carpaccio or swordfish served with red pickled onions, avocado, and mangosteen (!!! John loves mjangosteens).  The second course was a total let-down.  John had rolled sardines around bread-crumb stuffing.  The sardines could hardly be tasted.  Ben's involuntini of swordfish, (stuffed rolled swordfish), another let down.  The wine did not meet expectations--an Etna Bianco.

Wednesday, June 21, was a day-long tour down the region's eastern seaboard to Syracuse and Noto, two very different places.   A good part of the Siracusa tour included the archeological site, which is enormous.  The altar is about as big as an Olympic swimming pool, all carverd from one piece of lava stone.  The collapsed garden, which was full of plants brought by colonists about 300 BCE, provided the Siracusi with many varieties of plants and vegetables not available in Europe at the time,  Siracusa had a population approaching a million and is said, at the time, to be the third in the world after Alexandria and Mexico City.  

John remarked that there was so much walking that he had walked back and forth the distance from our house in DC to Eastern Market Station at least five times! 

The medieval part of the city is on an island reached by bridges, and very crowded.   We enjoyed walking around and sitting over sorbetti limone and almold gelato in the cathedral square.  The piazza's atmosphere and architecture enhanced the desserts.

Everybody back on the bus for the short run to Noto, one of two totally baroque cities in Europe and a Unesco site.  Ruined by an earthquake in the late 17th century, it was totally rebuilt in baroque style.  The main street is a forest of curlicues, among which baby angels play.  A good place to discuss American politics with Dutch travelers!

Back in Taormina we were so tired we ate sandwiches the hotel had put up for us that morning because we were leaving so early, drank lemon sodas, and off to bed for yesterday's trip to Palermo.  Due to distance it became a two day affair.  The train was almost like watching a show entitled "This is your life, Sicily".

Sicily has a train network that often is single track.   This means that breakdowns, or huge freight trains can delay passenger trains.  A couple of times we sat for five or ten minutes awaiting a passing freight train. Another time we were delayed 30 minutes because of a wreck on the line. When we saw the wrecked train, John thought that the the front car of a train dating from the 1960s, and clearly used for commuter service.  Our trains though were very up to date, huge windows, unreclinable seats, no pulldown tables from Messina to Palermo, totally electrified.  Spartan compared to Amtrak, but the longest time spent on trains is not more than four hours if they are running to schedules.  Space for bikes and scooters included. 

Wednesday, June 22-Thursday, June 23, Palermo.  We felt we had to go Palermo.  Considering that Sicily is about the same size of Vermont, with 5-million residents.  Its biggest cities are Palermo (660,000), Catania (290,000) and Messina (240,000), compared to Burlington (42,000). Palermo has passed through many cultures and it shows.  Even since 1860, when Italy's different kingdoms were united, Sicily lost its own king (a Bourbon), for the Northern Italian House of Savoy (Victor Emmanuel),which was replaced by the Italian Republic after World War II.  Sicily is supposed to be poorer than the rest of Italy, but that really doesn't show.

When we got to Palermo over two hours late, we had to find a hotel, but couldn't find the I-information service.  We even knocked on the police precinct door, where a good sergeant directed us, but we found a place by asking at a couple of hotels..  One found a BnB owned by the same firm so we ended up with fine accomodation in the historic district,

We attempted to have dinner at a friend's recommended go-to, but it was fully booked so we stopped at local trattoria, Lucchese a tavula è cunzata, where we had an excellent meal, with a Grasse wine.  The meal was two shared appetizers, then we shared octopus with mashed potatoes.  We really binged on octopus.

The following morning, June 23, we assessed our time and realized we had about three hours to visit Palermo--though we had seen a lot by foot at night the previous evening.  We decided to take in the Palatina, associated with the Royal Palace.  it was strongly recommended by an economics professor we talked to on the train, and he was right!

The Palatina is a marvel.  A few pictures will tell it all.  Mosaics, paintings, marble, gold.  Centuries of work.  Of course, one must remove one's hat.  

The train trip home to Taormina was uneventful.  Just a couple of delays for freight trains.

Dinner last night a Adduma, in the center of Taormina was excellent.  John had a pressed mix of raw shrimp that was incredible, while Ben had superb tuna tartar.  John's second course was a rump steak and Ben's was a lovely branzino.  We had conturno of grilled eggplant, zucchini, cabbage abd sweet red pepper as well as a salad.  The rump steak was excellent.  We enjoyed a Filippo Grasse with the meal.