French wine skills for travelers who would rather have a Pepsi

I worry that if I tell you all we are leaving for France in the coming weeks, that things will disintegrate into further chaos and I will have misinformed you all.

So I think we are leaving for France and I am preparing accordingly. We have a month-long trip sketched out, which Ron still maintains is too long for him. I have tried to placate him with conversations about our next trip – March 2022 – wherein I am asking for an even longer route involving Morocco, Portugal and then London so that he will feel grateful for the limited 26-day journey he’s about to take but he is an obstinate man.

We’re returning to Paris for a few days before we head to the Loire Valley to see chateaux. It has long been a dream of mine to go into the Paris Sewer Museum and ponder the archeological channels of waste, but I have been thwarted on previous trips – once I got so dislocated trying to find the entrance that the place was closed by the time I got there. This time, the Sewers were closed for remodeling (??) in 2018 and have not yet reopened and so I am once again shut out. But a quick look at the “museum” should make it clear why it’s been a priority of mine:

Ever-flexible, I have focused on other sites. We are lucky enough to be in Paris when the Arc de Triomphe is being wrapped in silvery-blue fabric in an homage to the artist Christos. We have a dinner planned with some other Rick Steves’ helpline posters who happen to be in Paris with us. Ron has been out-voted and we are returning to the magnificent stained glass in Saint-Chappelle for a 4th visit. (Contrast with my decision to skip the Louvre as I have already spent my 45 minutes in there on a previous trip.) In addition, I have purchased entry tickets for the Louis Vuitton Foundation museum:

In a city full of gorgeous Haussmann architecture, this place really grabbed my attention. If you feel like visiting next time you’re in Paris, learn from my hard-earned wisdom. To purchase tickets for the 25th of a month, you need to actually purchase tickets for 24th due to some glitch in their computer system. We are in currently in possession of two sets of these tickets. I have used my Google translate skills, coupled with my DuoLingo training, to ask for a refund for one set of tickets and will report back.

Which reminds me to tell you that we are also in possession of TWO sets of train tickets for our Paris to Amboise run, due to my misunderstanding of just how early we need to be at a train station for the budget/no frills version of a French SNCF train. (Hint: longer than the 15 minutes that typically suffices).

For the rest of our travels, I have limited myself to just purchasing single sets of tickets as it’s more cost effective.

There’s so much packed into this trip that it’s sure to overwhelm but here are the highlights:

• A light art exhibit in Paris, along with the Museum of the Liberation of Paris
• Loire Valley to see many, many chateaux (everyone says two chateaux are enough but I have disregarded and booked us into five)
• A Road Scholar tour of Bordeaux, Rocamadour, Sarlat and Toulouse, focusing on prehistoric cave art and small villages
• A trip (finally) to Oradour sur Glane – a memorial village, decimated after D-Day, and left destroyed and untouched as a commentary about WWII. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/oradour-sur-glane
• A week in Antibes on the French Riviera, where we planned to relax and do very little, until I located Ingrid of Best French Riviera Tours, at which point I hired her to drive us around for two days, taking in French villages like Eze, St. Paul de Vence and then even heading across the border into Italy to see Dolceaqua, famous for having its own doughnut called a michetta, which should offer some comfort to Ron on Day 23 of transiting France with me. Here’s a few michette below, posted not really for you, but for Ron.

Dolceaqua is also famous for having underground alleyways that really caught my interest and were my initial reason for hauling us across the border into Italy. The doughnuts are just a cover.

When I tell you that we are taking a Road Scholar tour that focuses on prehistoric cave art, I am taking some fairly significant liberties with the “theme” of the tour. If you were to look at the Road Scholar site, you would notice that this is billed as a Wine Tour and I have just omitted that detail due to my total lack of interest in wine.

In any situation, if you offer me a glass of wine or the palate-cleansing cracker, I will take the cracker. Likewise, if you try to instruct me about the grapes, the barrels, or the aging process, I will use that time to (hopefully) poke around the grand chateaux that house the wineries in the Bordeaux region. At the very least, I’ll be a big surprise to all the oenophiles on the Road Scholar tour and perhaps they can learn a little from me about the chocolate-undertone bouquet of the various candy bars and croissants I’ll be acquiring at the rest stops and storing on the bus. I’ll hope to pair them with some of that grapefruit diet soda I discovered in Israel but can resort to a Pepsi in a pinch.

In case I am not wowing the Francophile crowds enough, I have been spending a fair amount of time on DuoLingo, trying to get some basic phrases down. My failure is the direct fault of DuoLingo, which could have taught me helpful things like how much does this cost and how many hours ago did that Sewer Museum close. Instead, the DuoLingo app has spent hours teaching me the words horse – cheval and cat – chat. I can also use my French to claim to be a student in New York, Berlin or Paris.

It should provide great comfort to my tour mates to know that – should we see a horse farm or a stray cat on our wine tour – I am happy to be linguistically in charge. My French skills, coupled with my plan to give away all of my wine samples, should make me a pretty popular tour companion.

I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks.