Category: Europe and Africa Spring 2023

Uzerche to Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise

Today we drove further east in France towards Switzerland. We are staying in a lovely small mountain village, Besse-et-Saint-Anastasia’s, in a small Chambres d’hôtes.

Chambres d’hôtes Villa Chantebise where we are staying.

Our room has a wood chip dry toilet. I’ve never seen or used one before. After using it you just add some wood chips. There is no smell! I assume the bag gets replaced every day.

Our dry toilet
Wood chips

When we stay in small towns in the off season, we usually ask our host or hostess to make us a dinner reservation because often there aren’t many restaurants open. Tonight our hostess made us s reservation at a fondue restaurant that was about a five minute walk away. It was a delicious meal.

Restaurant Les Fondues du Sancy
Our Fondue

Domme to Uzerche

We had a wonderful breakfast this morning in the kitchen at Le Relais de Galais. Duncan and his wife Jane built the house and grounds. Duncan was away while we were there but Jane showed some of his amazing wood work.

Duncan built the table we ate breakfast on.
He used the lathe that is now part of the counter to help build the house.
Duncan used the lathe to make the bowl that Rick is holding.

After breakfast we went for a walk along the trail above the Dordogne.

This is the trail we took.
This was the view on our walk.
Before we left Jane took a nice picture of the four of us.

Our drive to Uzerche was relatively short so we made several stops along the way.

Our road went under the toll road.

We had a lovely picnic lunch at road site rest area that was built as a memorial to four village men who were shot by the Nazis here.

Our picnic lunch spot.
We are staying at Hotel Joyet de Malbec in Uzerche.

After resting a bit we walked down to the river that we can see from our windows.

This gate used to be a part of the town wall.
This is the river we can see from the windows of our rooms.

On the way back from our walk we stopped for beers.

Having beers after our walk.

We ate dinner in the hotel. Everything is home made and locally sourced.

Foie gras
Sweet breads
Sorbet and lemon cake.

Bordeaux to Domme

This morning we took a taxi to the Bordeaux Airport and picked up a rental car.

This is Bordeaux airport where we picked up our rental car.

From Bordeaux we drove east on back roads through beautiful country.

This is one of many beautiful vistas we drove by today.

Tonight we are staying at the fabulous Le Relais des Galet overlooking the Dordogne River where we canoed in October of 2021.

Le Relais des Galet
The view from Le Relais des Galet

For dinner we drove down to a beautiful golf resort right on the River, Domaine de Rochbois and ate at their bistro. We had a wonderful meal.

My Sea Bream
The chefs special desert
Our table overlooking the putting green

Donastia San Sebastián, Spain to Bordeaux, France

We planned to catch the 9:45 local train this morning to take us across the border into France. We walked the short distance to the train station and caught the train with no problem.

Here we are waiting for our train.

In Hendaye France we changed to the French TGV train which took us to Bordeaux. Tomorrow there will be a train strike in France. I’m not sure why, but somehow that contributed to our train being an hour late arriving in Bordeaux. Before we had even arrived at our hotel Duke had received an email saying we could apply for a partial refund because our train was late.

This is our train from Hendaye to Bordeaux. Those are Duke, Rick and Elaine’s heads you can see on the left. It filled up before we got to Bordeaux.

When we arrived in Bordeaux it was raining quite hard. We took a taxi to the hotel.

Bordeaux Place de la Bourse from our taxi.

After a bit of a rest we went out for a walk. But it was still raining so we found a cafe and ordered mulled wine.

Drinking mulled wine on a rainy day in Bordeaux.

We had dinner at a wonderful little restaurant near our hotel, Les Drôles.

This is the inside of Les Drôles. There was more seating downstairs but it was tiny.
I started with the baked cheese:
This is the Patmentier, it’s kind of like shepherd’s pie
The cheesecake for desert was light and tasty.

When we walked back to the hotel the rain had stopped and the streets were sparkling.

Walking back to the hotel.

Cervera de Pisuerga to Donastia San Sebastián

We woke up to a temperature of 0 Celsius and a beautiful sunrise that we could see from our window. The primary objective today was to get to Donastia San Sebastián by 2 pm to return our rental car.

Here you can see the frost on the grass and the beautiful sunrise this morning.

We got a fairly early start and made stops along our route when we saw something interesting.

I thought the bridges in the town of Pisuerga were pretty.

We headed north through the mountains to the Spanish north coast.

On our way to Donastia San Sebastián
When we got to the coast we stopped to take pictures.

In Donastia San Sebastián we dropped Rick and Elaine and our bags at the hotel and then Duke and I returned the rental car. From the rental car office we walked back to the hotel.

Walking back to the hotel.

We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Donastia San Sebastián.

On the beach