Roquecave photos

The house at the farm. I sleep in the building to the right. Ingo, Carole and Camille working to get the donkeys inside. Typical breakfast.




You can see the Pyrenees from here! And even though this is a regional park, the land is still used for tree plantations where you can see the abrupt change from pine to something else. On my hike today, I often had to open and close pasture gates so donkeys or sheep didn't escape.



This marker was by the side of a tiny mountain road.



Molding fresh cheeses. Washed-rind cheeses aging. More cheese.

From whence the cheese comes.

The church in Olonzac (one market where Ingo sells), retains its Revolutionary spirit. (The French government took over all of the churches during the Revolution and made them property of the State.)

Miette, the house kitten who is sleeping on my lap as I type.

Toulouse photos

That would be the hall window outside my hotel room.






Inside and outside of Toulouse's impressive city hall.



At the Musée des Augustins.



Super brick architecture. Street signs in French and Occitan, the regional language. I have also seen ones like this in Provençal and Breton.



The French trains have a system whereby you can stick your unaccompanied kid on the train under their supervision. It's great, I think, but not everyone likes to wear the brightly-colord baseball caps that are required.

Bayeux photos

The Bayeux cathedral and a hard to see fresco that was in the crypt. The columns were all painted with angels playing music, even including one with a snare drum (here) and one with a triangle!



A Liberty Tree outside the cathedral that still remains from its planting during the Revolution.



Who says Tim is the only one dealing with adverse toilet situations on his trip?

Massive photo dump

So it's kind of a pain to place photos into blog entries after they're posted, and they end up looking like that last one with squnched text that's hard to read. Thus, here's a bunch of photos that correspond to the last entries that have none. I've handily inserted breaks where the entries change and commentary where it's needed. Hopefully future entries will be more in the regular blog style.

View over the marsh from my room. The chateau.

My sweet room, and the church in Monfréville.

Those are bags of seaweed in the trunk.

David in the kitchen, and a plate of quail.

So pregnant. Few day old lamb.

avril 5: Omaha Beach

(Going back in time here since I forgot the entry before)

While at Chateau Monfréville, I took a day trip to visit Omaha beach where my dad's dad landed on D-Day. Its one of two beaches where American troops landed on the Normandy coast and is the one where they faced a much stiffer challenge from the Germans. Standing on the beach today, it's a bit tough to imagine thousands of men spilling out of boats and scrambling over the dunes, then up steep cliffs. There aren't a lot of traces left from the war here, save some bits of rusted metal that stick up from the sand now and then.

I walked down to the beach after making my way through the small museum that opened last year at the American war cemetery. It's very well done with images, video and some objects from the invasion, including the bag and contents that a medic like my grandfather would have carried.

The cemetery itself is stark with about 9000 white stone crosses, and a few stars of David, marking the graves. Many American dead were repatriated as they are today, so the cemetery could have been even bigger.

Earlier in my time there, I visited the German war cemetery which holds 21,000 dead. It's equally stark and a bit more sombre with rough-hewn, dark stone crosses and flat grave markers in the grass.

There are reminders often in this area of the invasion whether it's gaudy museums of weapons run by locals or panels in churches memorializing Allied sacrifices. All over France that I've seen, in fact, the world wars are so present in the form of memorials even in towns of just a few hundred people. Since this is the ground where they were fought, the memories are still fresh.

avril 12-16: La Ferme de Roquecave

I was met at the Béziers train station by my next host, Ingo, who was on his way home from the Saturday market there. He carpools with Philippe, a beekeeper from just up the road. The hour-long drive back to the farm was through some stunning scenery. The Minervois plain is named after the town of Minerve and rests between the foothills of the Pyrenees and the mountains of the Haut Languedoc. It’s full of vineyards, with small villages dotting the plain and tree-lined roads connecting them.

Roquecave is located in the regional park of the Haut Languedoc at about 680m altitude. As we climbed, the countryside changed from vines and olive trees to scrubby pines and meadows with wildflowers. Finally, the area near the farm is filled with chestnuts and other deciduous trees, interspersed with plantations of pines and bare hilltop meadows. It’s easily the most dramatic scenery I’ve had so far.

Ingo and Carole have lived her for 25 years. The house is about 200 years old and the outbuildings a bit younger. I sleep in a small house just across from the main one that they rent out during the summer. There’s also a studio for rent, a barn with large hayloft and space where the animal food is stored, the attached milking parlor, and the bergerie for the 35 goats which is a high tunnel construction in plastic with large pens inside. The 46 chickens live here at night, too, though they roam free during the day.

Right now they have friends visiting who are a German couple, a bit younger than me. Ingo is German himself, and they chatter away sometimes which is entertaining and incomprehensible to me. But at least it’s not English. Rebekah and Andrei are really nice and it’s been a jolly crowd around the table at meals. Camille, the youngest daughter at 16, lives here, and the eldest lives not far with her boyfriend, so we’ve been quite a few for seriously yummy dinners. I had nettle soup for the first time last night, made with nettles that Carole harvested here! Yum. Home-made jam, tarts made with garden fruits (frozen mostly), local meats, and lots and lots of cheese. We have toast, jam and cheese for breakfast in fact, and there is always a cheese course at lunch and dinner.

This is, after all, a cheese farm. Ingo takes care of the goats: milking twice a day with a machine, herding them to the path they take to the pasture, giving sick ones medicine (charcoal and baking soda to settle the stomach right now). The milking process is down to a smooth routine. The ladies walk up a ramp from the bergerie to a platform where they stick their heads into a trough to eat. Argus, the shepherd dog, helps get them to move along, and when they’re in place, Ingo rotates the four milking machines through the 12 goats who are there at a time. His movements are deliberate and distinct, clearly honed after 23 years of the same routine. Milk production is very low this year, about half of what it is normally because so many sheep have been sick. Ingo’s not quite sure what it is and is off at the homeopathic vet right now.

Consequently, there’s less cheese stocked up and less cheese to make. But Carole is still at it. She makes cheese about four days a week, all raw milk, eight kinds, though no tomme right now because of the milk shortage. It’s truly amazing that the same milk, bacteria and enzymes can become totally different cheeses depending on their form, length of aging and salting. Once a year, Carole buys starter bacteria that she then keeps going in bottles of milk kept behind, exact same concept as a sourdough starter. Rennet is added to the milk also to catalyze the curding reaction.

My job twice now has been to mold the fresh cheese, spooning the thickened milk into small, round molds with holes in them. These cheeses only rest a day to set up. I have also done the other very typical cheesemaking task which is washing and turning the cheeses. As they age, the cheeses need to keep a consistent texture throughout and have the mold evenly distributed on their surface. Hence you flip the cheese over to expose its other side to the air, and you wash the rind with salt water to distribute the mold. These cheeses hang out in an ambient temperature room that stays relatively cool. Some are also put in the drying room just before being sold, and some are in an un-cooled fridge.

As Carole noted today, cheesemaking is really about one-third dealing with the cheese and two-thirds cleaning. I haven’t done any yet, but there is a lot of washing of molds, racks and basins, plus tables, floors and jugs.

Since there’s not much work to do, I’ve had free time to go for runs and walks in the gorgeous forest scenery. We all went for a slow mountain promenade on Sunday when the weather was warm and clear. And I walked with Ingo and Camille down to town with two of their donkeys that were being loaned out to a friend. Yes, there are normally four donkeys and three horses that live in the high pasture, too, that are used for carrying baggage or people on walks. The menagerie also includes another dog and four cats, one of whom is a ridiculously cute kitten and one of whom is pregnant.

avril 11: Toulouse

I took an overnight train from Paris that left around 11pm and arrived at about 7am. The journey was pretty comfortable, though I did wake up a lot owing to being a bit hot, the train stopping, and my two snoring compartment-mates.

Toulouse is known as « La Ville Rose » for its overwhelmingly brick construction, but when I arrived it was more grey than anything else. I had a wet walk in the rain to my hotel to drop off my backpack, but alas the door was locked and there was no bell, even though I was told it would be fine to arrive around 7am to leave the bag. Sign number 1. It was then that I discovered that my cell phone was out of minutes, so I searched out a pay phone, called, got an apologetic person at the desk and returned to find again a locked door. Sign number 2. Fortunately, a guy was leaving just then, so I met the nice young woman at the desk, put my bag in a locked room and chatted with the girl a bit. During our chat, a hotel patron came downstairs with his little dog who promptly peed on the floor, thankfully out of range of my feet, but only barely. Sign number 3.

Suffice to say, Hotel Anatole France was not the wisest choice. That delicious musty smell was somehow present in my room even without an en suite bathroom. There was a broken window in the hall covered with a plastic bag. One of my towels looked older than me and not well cared-for. And the windows were most certainly not double-glazed. Lonely Planet will be hearing from me.

But the rest of my time in Toulouse was perfectly nice. After breakfast, I walked around more on its skinny, twisty streets, finally to the Musée des Augustins, a municipal fine arts museum in a former monastery. In addition to the cool architecture, the highlights were in medieval stone sculpture from various churches in and around Toulouse, including these awesome gargoyles that lined one side of the main cloister. I also visited a few churches and walked a bit along the Garonne, the big river that cuts through Toulouse.

More walking put me at the cheapest internet café I’ve found – 1€/hour – where I spent a few hours updating the blog and myself on news. A chat with Tim, a walk along the surprisingly un-scenic Canal du Midi, and a rest at the hotel later, I had a tasty dinner at a small ostensibly wine bar/tapas place. I don’t think duck confit is particularly Spanish, but it was particularly delicious.

The next day I hit up the small market of organic vendors on my way to the train station for portable breakfast. And then it was off on the SNCF again bound for Béziers where I met my next WWOOF host.

avril 8-10: More Monfréville, Bayeux

My last few days at the Chateau continued to be enjoyable. I fed the chickens and took in eggs more times, planted runner bean plants (that were promptly killed by a hard frost -- in April!), planted potatoes, rebuilt a wall of hay bales around potted plants, hung laundry and dusted the impossibly tall ceilings in the hall with theaid of a ladder and long-handled duster. Tha variety kept things interesting.

I also went again with June to the beach in Grandcamp-Maisy, the closest seaside town, to harvest seaweed. I did this on my first day there and a second time with another WWOOFer. Wearing bright red dish-washing gloves and boots, we plopped clumps of multi-colored seaweed into black plastic garbage bags which then sat upright in the trunk. June said she's gotten a few questions from the locals over the years about what her intentions were with the seaweed, but they were all approving when she told them it was for asparagus. Apparently asparagus was originally a seaside plant and it enjoys the fertilizing of seaweed. Seaweed makes a good fertiliwer for anything really, and I seem to remember something about farmers in coastal Massachusttes using it too.

In addition to the work, I also had some fabulous runs around the area. Unlike in Paris or Nice where people look at you funny while you're running, it's the cows and sheep who do the looking. At least the cows look, often every single one of a herd of 40 in a field which is a bit disconcerting, but funny. The sheep on the other hand baa-ed at me frequently, and I enjoyed baa-ing back at them. There is also a chorus of dog barks that arises in the village when you pass one house with a dog and the others decide to join in.

Bayeux is the closest small city to Monfréville, and I visited there two Saturdays in a row to see the market. It's a pretty impressive one and the first where I saw live animals for sale. There was everything from baby ducks of five different kinds to full-grown chickens and rabbits to the odd hamster being sold as a pet. There was also one great section of older folks probably in retirement selling their dozen eggs, three bunches of sage and seed potatoes. I bought one thing there: tuerguole. It's the regional dessert of Normandy I saw at the wood-fired bakery. But this time I bought it from a little old lady who I assume has been making it all her life. Unfortunately, it's really not that good! A slow-cooked rice pudding sounds good enough, especially if the milk ends up like dulce de leche, but it's pretty bland. I improved it with a bit of salt, cinnamon and cubes of apple.

Bayeux is, of course, also home to the famous tapestry of William the Conqueror's invasion of England. It's not actually a tapestry in the sense of a piece of weaving, though, rather, it is embroidery. 70 meters of embroidery! The colors have remained striking over the near-millenium since its making, all blue, green, gold, rusty red and black. While the main middle panel of the tapestry tells the story of William, smaller bands at the top and bottom contain scenes of daily life and lots of animals. The animals were a particularly interesting mix of both real animals from France like pheasants, real animals from elsewhere like camels, and a share of imaginary ones like griffons.

Happily, I visited the tapestry when there were very few other people there. The audio commentary is clearly geared towards summer high season and would shuffle you past at a gallop if you really followed it. Thank goodness for the pause button. It was pretty magical to stand and look at this work of art made so long ago. Somehow it's more affecting than a Roman sculpture that's centuries older, perhaps because it's easier to imagine someone sitting and putting each single sticth into the fabric. (Sadly, but understandably, no photos allowed there...)

avril 6-7: Sheep!

Yesterday we had the first lamb of the season! He was born in the early evening out in the field since David hadn’t taken the sheep in for the night yet. It was incredibly cold here yesterday, or at least incredibly cold for April in Normandy. We had a bit of snow and hail and sleet, so the little lambie was given a heat lamp indoors to warm up. It’s kind of strange to be all excited about this new birth and have David say (since it was a boy), “Oh, well there’s a nice lunch at Chez Roger.” They are being raised for meat, but the immediate connection from birth to death is a bit unsettling. That’s the difference between farm animals and others, I suppose.

That said, he is a cute little thing. He was very wrinkly, I guess not unlike us when we’re babies. But unlike us, they can stand up within minutes of being born which is a good thing since that’s the only way they’re going to get anything to eat.

This morning I helped out David and next-door neighbor farmer Jean giving a few sheep what was essentially a very crude bikini wax. The youngest mommy sheep who’ve never been shorn are a big long in wool, and the crusty, matted (with poo) wool could make delivery difficult. So Jean caught the sheep by the ankle with a crook and flipped then flipped her on her back. While David held her two front feet, me one back, and Jean the other, he proceeded to give them a nice short clipping with scissors around their bums. It was quite a feat to hold them still sometimes, but who would really want to be flipped upside down and subjected to such an indignity? All for the best during their deliveries, though.

Baby number two came midday today, another boy, and he’s got black wool.

It’s especially nice to see the babies now because we had one sheep die since I’ve been here. She had had bronchitis for a month and was pregnant. Even with antibiotics – not normally given during a pregnancy, but necessary here – she didn’t get any better. A few days ago, she started giving birth, but really aborting. The baby was stillborn, and the mother was very sick, so they vet came out and put her down. She’s now waiting to be picked up by the service that all farmers pay in to together.

I’m hoping for even more babies before I leave.

mars 26 - avril 4: Chateau Monfreville start

This WWOOF farm is indeed at a chateau, a building that dates, in part, from the 14th century. Other parts of the house were built after, all the way up to the “new” part containing kitchen and dining room which is only about 200 years old. The house and surrounding land are owned and maintained by a very nice English couple, June and David who are in their 60s. They’ve had the place since 1989, living here full time the last nine years.

The chateau is run as a B&B with rental cottages, too. The cottages are former horse barns, converted into two separate rentals. B&Bers generally stay in the chateau itself where the rest of us sleep. I have a sweet room on the top floor – great view of the barn and sheep field, plus out over the marsh. My bathroom is in the round tower which was apparently rebuilt at some point in the chateau’s history since it originally housed a staircase.

As mentioned, yes, there are sheep. And perhaps more excitingly, they’re all going to have babies sometime within the next few days. Right now they approximate beached whales or walruses with spindly legs. A few morning s ago, I woke up to the sound of one baa-ing loudly. She was stuck on her back after having rolled there, so I went outside and used my leg in her back to roll her to the point where she could stand up. Apparently they get stuck like this sometimes even when not pregnant, but it’s more likely now.

There are also chickens of a few different kinds, most kept for eggs, though five are being fattened for the pot right now, too. June also has lots of fruits and veggies planted, everything from salad greens in a polytunnel to holdover beets outside to kiwi vines to leeks. They use lots of the vegetables here just for eating, but also sell some salad to a restaurant and some produce to people who rent the cottages. We’ve been enjoying homemade jam as well…

David is a very good cook and makes lunch every day. We have a hearty breakfast around 8am – full English breakfast or porridge or cereal and toast. Break for coffee and McVittie’s chocolate biscuits at 11am. Lunch at 3pm, and fend for yourself at dinner if you want anything. It’s a decent schedule, though it wreaks havoc on exercising since running is not the greatest after a large mid-afternoon meal.

Since this is a B&B/rental place, I’ve done a bit of housework here in addition to the more outdoors kinds of tasks. I’ve vacuumed (or Hoovered, according to June), swept, dusted, mopped, polished silver, and changed beds. But more of my time has been outdoors. Planting small bean plants in the ground, planting potatoes, weeding. Not only are there produce plantings, but there are also flower beds all over. Daffodils are up as well as lots of primroses (which are wild here), some tulips, rosemary bushes in flower, and lots of other plants that I don’t know the names of. I’ve also potted up plants into bigger pots and started some seeds. Working in one of the greenhouses is especially nice on chilly days when they heat up rather fast.

We’ve had some beautiful weather days so far, even eating outside last Friday. But we’ve also had cold and wind and rain. It’s like that saying about New England “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” But here it’s really true, and you can see the weather coming across the flat, flat marsh. Marsh and warm weather also mean little bugs which have not been fun when running. But it’s an ok trade-off for the countryside.