Skip to main content

Friday April 25. Grand champ. 17.4 km.

Today started out nicely with a good breakfast laid out for me at the farm. Both Monsieur and Madame joined me for a coffee and some more conversation. Monsieur goes hunting every fall and comes home with 25 or so hunters who get set up at a long table and fed supper (of game) by Madame. Today she is making boar pâté for the family. Note the four kinds of homemade jam on the table.


An amazing number of benches today on my somewhat short walk, so I did a lot of sitting and thinking about nothing.  I suppose a more sophisticated way of putting it would be “living in the moment”. On this bench, kindly put out by a farmer and signed for pilgrims, I watched barn swallows, almost as small and fast as hummingbirds.


A well laid-out “potager” or vegetable garden.


As noted before, devilish deeds have taken place here.


And these twisty, grasping trees sometimes send shivers up my spine. I think they may be black poplars.


At the small but upscale chambres d’hôtes place tonight I am joined by two Swiss brothers walking to Calais for sport; they aim for 40 kms a day.  Our host made us a lovely dinner of nettle soup, pork in a cream sauce with apples (done in butter and calvados), cheese tray 
and pineapples in ginger syrup.  


And in the garden, a friendly gang of hens with a very fancy chicken house for nighttime.





Comments

  1. Baguette, butter and homemade jams, my favorite continental breakfast. And your host looks like a chef!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks like you have first class accommodations!! A spread of jams, pineapple chutney etc. now I see why France appeals to you! Hoping that Switzerland provides their own version of nice vittles!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hiking is no longer a thankless trek! Creamed pork for dinner!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sat Oct 4. London.

19 days walking on pilgrimage paths for a total of 395 km or 245 miles on foot (not that arduous - an average of 20.7 km per day, and lots of ‘rest days’ staying put in one place).  All of that undone in 1.5 hours on a Eurostar train.  I’m not entirely sure what conclusion I’m drawing from that comparison, but I’m back where I started, in London.   On my way to my lodgings (I’m staying in a Buddhist retreat centre) I decided to visit the first visitable place to cross my path, which turned out to be the Foundling Museum.  Horrified by the sight of infants being abandoned on 18th c London streets, a prosperous seaman, Thomas Coram, spent 17 years raising awareness and funds, as well as obtaining royal permission to build London’s first children’s charity. Opened in 1739, the Foundling Hospital continued its work until the 1950s, and actually is still active as a non-institutional resource, under a different name. Here is a photo of it in 1935. So many similarities to ...

September 5

 I landed at Heathrow this morning at 6 am, a very inconvenient time to get a room and rest! But my student residence accommodation includes a common room with handy couches for a short snooze. The neighbourhood abuts on Regent’s Park, complete with gorgeous flowerbeds.   The Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park. My neighbourhood wandering took me to the Wallace House which used to be one of the homes of the marquesses of Hertford.  The Hertfords were fabulously rich, mainly from extensive land holdings, and in the 18th and 19th centuries avid art collectors.  They obviously had Trumpian home decorating tastes. Here are two of their many clocks, all of which need frequent ‘fine tuning’, it appears. I particularly liked two 18th c British paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in their collection: Mrs Carnac and the hauntingly strange Strawberry Girl.

Fri Oct 3. Lille.

 I had a lovely day in Lille. In fact, all my days on this trip have been lovely! In the morning I went to the very large Palais des Beaux-Arts.  This museum holds the largest collection of works of art of any French institution outside Paris. The collection started at the time of the French Revolution as the works of art of the nobility and of the church were confiscated, and continued on apace due to various enthusiastic municipal governments. By 1892 the collection was so large and important that the Palais, its current house, was constructed in the centre of town. The first fun aspect was the recent work of the Swiss artist Felice Varini who used the museum’s interior as his canvas. The oldest works of art are in the ‘basement’, beautifully displayed. Look at the marvellous three dimensionality of this (flat) marble plaque sculpted by Donatello (c 1435) showing Salomé dancing for the head of John the Baptist. And modern technology brings statues alive by giving them back t...