After my long flight, Sacramento to Seattle to Amsterdam to Toulouse, with no sleep this trip, I picked up my tiny little stick shift car and fueled strictly by caffeine and that little hit of adrenaline I always get when I launch myself into traffic in a strange car in a strange place, I went looking for our house in in the Gers department of Gascony, 90 minutes more or less from the airport.
After just enough wrong turns to make it interesting, I found the house and had time to just settle in before Pauline and Steve arrived. The view in the photo at the top is from our terrace.
I fully intended to blog every day, but somehow our week just slipped by too quickly. Plus one morning I opened the blog before I had my coffee and did something clumsy to make things disappear. Fortunately Pauline was here and we got it working again, although I haven’t repaired my “look.” That will have to wait until I’m home.
I LOVE Gascony! It is absolutely gorgeous with rolling hills, vineyards, fields of sunflowers a little beyond their prime, and winding little roads leading from one beautiful village to another. This is the land of bastides, so many towns and villages have a square (or place, or plaza, or piazza or whatever you want to call it) at the center. Some have open air market halls in the center, some have parks. One tiny village called Fourcès has a round “square” filled with beautifully pruned plane trees.
One thing Gascony appears not to have is a lot of tourists. Every village or town of any size at all was lively, but only once did we see a tour bus, and tacky gift shops were almost nonexistent. The people we encountered at restaurants and cafes seemed genuinely friendly and helpful.
Since none of us had been here before, we weren’t really sure how convenient the location of our house would be. It turned out to be fine. Our favorite town, Condom, is the closest, and the places we’ve visited this week have all been within 45 minutes of the house.
Pauline and Steve are really into archaeology sites these days, and although I might not have been inclined to seek them out on my own, the mosaics at Séviac and the incredible museum housing a stash of Roman treasure found in Eauze were genuine highlights for me.
As were simple lunches everywhere we went. The food was good, the wine was good, the prices were good, and the people were incredibly nice. Sometimes my faith that the best meals are to be found in places that have never been mentioned in Chowhound goes astray, but it didn’t here.
The week went by quickly, and much too soon, I drove to Collioure for a brief two-night stay before driving to Provence. (More about that later…)
