After a luxurious night in a queen bed, surrounded by draperies, drawings, and a real wooden bureau, we arose after nearly ten hours of sleep to find plates of cheese and charcuterie, bowls of jams (quince, lemon ginger, blackberry, honey), and two settings with fresh pineapple and blueberries.
Shockingly, this wasn't even the best part of my day yet. Even with the tea, croissant, soft boiled egg and toast, today was just so spectacular that our marvelous breakfast might not have broken the top five moments.
I'm not sure I could list the top five moments. Maybe it was because it was such a counterpoint to yesterday's lack of shower, sleep, and timing.
Today's timing was spot on, starting with our first stop, the Hospices de Beune. Hôtel-Dieu des Hospices were commissioned by Nicholas Rolin, chancellor of Burgundy to tend to the poor - a hospital centered around a church and staffed by nuns.
For being a place of despair (most people came here to die), he romantically put his and his wife's initials entwined all over.
The "N" (for Nicholas) and G for Guigone are surrounded by "seule" and a star - she was his only star.
The beds in the first long chamber face the chapel, where services were held twice a day. There were clever exterior hallways on the beds that the nuns would use when they actually needed to tend to the patients. It hid what was happening, but I'm sure the sounds traveled just fine through the cloths around the beds.
Through the chapel were the fancy rooms for the patients that paid. (It got you heating and some privacy.) The surgery room, now full of scary implements, bordered the kitchen. While the tools the doctors and barber-surgeons were using weren't the most sophisticated, the kitchen had both a wind-up robot that turned a spit for 45 minutes and a sink with a built-in stove that dispensed hot water out of the beaks of swan sculptures.
The pharmacy reminded both Mark and me of the Radio Lab episode where they found a treatment for staph infection in a medieval medicine book (recommended - you should look it up if you don't regularly listen). Some of the medicines still seem plausible. Some (lead? sodium nitrate?) don't.
The room with the 15th century painting by Rogier van der Weyden was being restored (or perhaps the painting was - it was difficult to tell), but a final room held some other art pieces from the altars and tapestries.
We had gotten to the hospital at 10:30, and we were still poking around at 11:30 when it closed for the afternoon French siesta. Thankfully, we were able to finish up our audio-guide-led tour a little later than that.
With a few hours before the Abbey at Fountenay opened, we took a wander around the square where the hospital was. All the little wine towns we went through yesterday had cool old buildings that came right up to the road - all of them faced inward to a personal central square, so the walls along the cobbled streets were high and bland.
Not so in Beaune. Shops had windows with their wares of antiques and wines. Restaurants and hotels had awnings with their names and stoops by their doors. The streets were just as cobbled and narrow, but there were sidewalks with pedestrians and even an accordion-playing gentleman.
I said there was a town with a recommended creperie and medieval castle views waiting for us for lunch, and Mark walked back to the car so fast he nearly ate it on some slight marble. (There was a slight drizzle on and off this morning.)
The car handled the small roads toward Châteauneuf much better than Mark handled the sidewalk. The rain continued, and Mark tested out the automatically shifting windshield wipers (cool stuff, right?) This car has some great features (side mirrors come in automatically when you park, the windshield is very tall) and some less great ones (incredibly touchy brakes when you're in first gear, hard shifts between gears, a tendency to turn off the engine when you stop, and a gearshift just above the wipers that doesn't have good feedback when changing).
Did I mention it's like the biggest one on the road? Thankfully, low season means there aren't a lot of people on the road period!
You know what is out this time of hunters? I was peering off to the right down a hill and through the woods when two orange coats caught my eye. One was even running! No sooner had I started voicing my discovery when Mark, looking off to the left and up the hill, saw two running animals. We drove through their path before they ran over the road and behind the car - a beagle corralling a black wild boar (complete with tusks!) back toward the hunters!
Two days in France, and we've already seen three guns! Our host at the second winery today said he loved the wilderness of Burgundy - I guess this is as wild as it gets!
We took our mini-minivan through another set of windy roads up a hill to a castle we recognized - Mark had actually pointed it out from the Autoroute yesterday! The château of Châteauneuf-en-Auxois it a bonafide stone castle used for guarding the militarily important hill. The great news? The views are amazing.
First, though, was our date with crepes. The signboard outside the restaurant made it look open, and the incredibly homey and adorable interior was as delicious as the food. An open fireplace guarded the middle, and, while we started at a different table, we ended up by the fire.
A salad and a crepe to share, but we each had our own glasses of wine and desserts. It was so cozy, and the bits of chats we had with our English host (this is where she "had to grow up" after crushing on the northern rivers of France) made this a competitive runner in the race for the best meal of the day.
We walked off the yum by first heading away from the castle for the panoramas further up the hill. The half blue-half storm cloud sky made for a few dichotomous pictures today.
As we walked back toward the castle, my high school French was good enough to understand "gratuite" - free! We wouldn't have spent the 5€ to go in, but we took an abbreviated tour of the inside of the castle.
I'd live in it.
Mostly for the views.
It was approaching 3, and, with another hour to get to the abbey, and it closing at 5, we pulled ourselves away from the quaint magic to drive to Fountenay.
The Abbey of Fountenay has been around since the late 1100s. A Cistercian monastery, it was founded on simplicity..
And making money with its iron foundry. It was the start of the industrial revolution, with its water-driven hammer and bellows - at least, that's what a plaque from ASM International (The Materials Information Society) said.
We were the lone tourists, save a French man in a black tshirt that always seemed to be in the same room as us. We had scurried into the chapel as a rain shower burst above us, but the walk to the altar was so long (and the cloud was so short) that it was sunny when we got to the gardens at the other end.
To be continued during the car ride tomorrow: the sun goes down over Fountenay, then a rainbow over Semur-en-Auxois, then dusk in Semur itself, and a nighttime drive to Beaune for dinner.
But for now, just listen to this: http://youtu.be/VV5oVYVGfNc
Continued - back to Fountenay:
The nave ended, and upstairs to the right was the dormitories. The monks slept all in the same room, all on simple pallets with short privacy screens. The gravel that is covering the floor now didn't look too comfortable, even with a pallet on it.
Below the dorm were three rooms where the monks studied, listened, and scribes. The stained glass windows looked out onto the gardens we had roamed through. The monastery had quite a few great patterns within it, and the inscribed circles in the windows were no different.
First passing by the green and solitary (and beautiful) inner cloister, we next passed through the former boiler room (with just a giant fireplace) to an auxiliary building where the forge was. Fountenay was the center of iron forging in its time - that water-driven hammer that I mentioned.
The sun was just over the horizon when we left at around 5. A colony of ducks was milling around the stream exiting the abbey. We approached them the same time that a family with baguettes (how French!) did. The ducks swarmed, and we headed back to the car to wind our way out of Fountenay.
With the sun close to setting, it was our chance to see one more medieval city before nightfall. Semur-en-Auxois was close, with towers that were lit up at night. There was an overlook to the city that we'd get to in twenty minutes.
Getting to that overlook was the most circles we've done all trip. First, it was off to the left, with no left turns, so we passed it and found a lot at a hotel a block or two up.
As we pulled a U-turn in the lot, we got a view over Semur, and the clouds and rain that had mixed with sun all day climaxed in a rainbow over the city's cathedral.
The rarity and shock of it was breathtaking. I ran across the road to capture it, while Mark stayed with the car (and apparently took a picture of me taking a picture of it).
We pulled out again to drive past the overlook parking lot again, but, coming up on it, we weren't even sure it was a path for cars, it was so narrow. So we passed it yet again, realized that was what we wanted, went all the way around the roundabout, then back to pull a U-ie at the next turn and finally hitting it the third time around.
The rainbow was gone, but the dusk-soaked buildings remained. There were the four towers from the 13th century - all that remained from the original 16 that protected the city. Their Notre Dame cathedral poked up from the mound of stone buildings covering the hill.
We drove across the viaduct and into the old city to find parking near the church and wander a bit. We poked inside the cathedral. It was clearly degrading without enough support to renovate it - nets were hung across the ceiling to catch the falling pieces of plaster and heaters were strung along by the pews to help the congregation in the cold stone building. In the back corner was a side chapel dedicated to the 310th Infantry 78th Division that fell during the "Great War" and are buried in France. A stained glass American flag wasn't what I expected to see in the middle of a medieval city.
We took some cobbled paths and then some stairs down to the water just outside the walls, then crossed the single-car bridge to take in the view. Honestly, we were just waiting for the towers to get lit up.
An older gentleman with an even older looking key crossed the bridge toward us, and I used my very best French to kindly ask him when the "tours" would light up. Which didn't work at all, since I didn't know the word for light. So he struggled to explain in his couple words of English that there are four towers from the thirteenth century (we already knew that, but he was trying to answer the question he thought we were asking). Eventually we did enough hand motions that he got the gist, and he told us the "spots" were being replaced. He asked us where we were from, and, when I answered the US, he pointed out a neighbor from California, a neighbor from America, and a neighbor that is a famous reporter here with a connection to a famous TV reporter in the US.
That's been a common thread. Our hosts in Puligny-Montrachet have two neighbors that made their riches in Silicon Valley and will come out for two weeks each year - otherwise the houses sit empty. Given that you could buy an acre of land with an old but renovated building on it for the price of a condo in DC (you know, half a million or so), I see the allure.
We hiked back up into the old city (with Mark quipping that there's no wonder they were taken over twice with stairs leading through the city walls) and started the drive back to Beaune. We had managed to get over an hour north of the city via smaller country highways, but we took the fast, easy toll road back to Beaune for dinner.
A Sunday night in February isn't exactly the liveliest of nights, so I was happy looking up a place near the train station that seemed like it would be open. And we were one of the half dozen families eating in a modern restaurant without old world character, but with wine, food, and a super yummy poached pear for dessert.
Mark wanted to find the wine bar by our domaine for a nightcap, but after driving up and down half a dozen dark streets in Puligny-Montrachet, we decided we weren't going to find anything open at 9:30 on a Sunday except the sterile hotel bar a block away.
So I blogged, he played some phone games, and we called it a night. We had a tasting at 9:30 the next day, so turning in before midnight wasn't insufferable. In fact, sinking into the plush pillows, it was a wonderful end to an amazing day in France.
No comments:
Post a Comment