Greetings From Toulouse:
It’s late Friday evening and no secret that we arrived here in Toulouse last night. Great weather for yesterday’s journey and a beautiful blue sky day today in Toulouse.
Yesterday we lunched in Hondarribia, the city with an ancient hill portion and a portion at water level, which is key as the city is located on a bay that exits into the Atlantic. We had a tip to go to a renowned pintxos restaurant and you can see a photo of the inside with Keaka at the table and a photo of folks eating outside of the restaurant. We had some fabulous breaded shrimp. Shrimp has been great, as it should be when you are seaside. Marz had foie gras for the first time and the rest of us declined. She liked it. It is everywhere in France. She had a little hot roll sandwich with chicken, bacon and mushrooms. And, we had some delicious cheese balls. It was our last pintxos experience and a good one at that.
We exited Hondarriba, getting back on the autoroute, going across the Spain-France border to the seaside city of St-Jean-de-Luz. It’s not a big city at all, but it has a magnificent setting on the ocean. You can see three photos of the area. Lots and lots of great single family homes --- like nowhere else. The area looked somewhat like the Cape Cod area and in many ways like the great areas of southern California.
At Bayonne the highway turned inland and we were on the way to Toulouse. The countryside on the north side of the Pyrenees was very different from the south side in Spain. Generally, it was green rolling hills and villages and cities near the highway with many brick single family homes. Near Pau, France (you can look it up) we got close to the Pyrenees and caught a shot of the mountains. The photo does no justice to the majesty of these mountains. There are a number of ski resorts (ski stations as the French call them) along the way. They looked a lot like the Swiss Alps and actually, much of the architecture in Basque country and along the route to Toulouse had a bit of a Swiss feel. There were many times from our approach to San Sebastian to getting close to Toulouse where we commented on how much we were reminded of Switzerland.
Our arrival in Toulouse was relatively uneventful. Finding our place of residence in these towns is always an adventure and going into a larger city like Toulouse had its challenges, but we made it. We wanted to eat lightly last night and Marlene said let’s just go get pizza. So, the report was that Bambino Pizza was the place to go and it looked like it was just blocks from our hotel. Well, we got there only to find out they were closed for their annual one-week vacation. So, we were walking the streets. We had a note that L’Entrecote was a famous Toulouse restaurant. It was only a few blocks away, so we walked over to find a huge restaurant with a second floor. Way too many tables to count. There was a waiting line out the front door of 25 people. We eventually got in and sat down at our table. It was a happening place with lots of noise and movement. The waitress came up and asked in French what we wanted to drink and how we wanted it cooked. It turned out the “it” was the steak. Oh! It seems as though for 19 euros (about $27) you got a salad, sirloin steak and French fries. That is the entire menu. We were taken aback. Oh, we can’t even try any more French beef. Sophia was out of the picture, having turned into a vegetarian over the last few days. We were about to walk out, but the prospect of finding somewhere else to eat was defeated by the chance of the meal being tasty. As it turned out, the French fries were very good and the meat came on a group hot platter, sliced into strips and sitting in a juicy pesto-like sauce. The sauce was key (very good over the fries), but the steak was actually good, though, as Marlene said “still not like U.S. beef”. Believe me, I’d go back. Sometimes you get lucky. It’s hard to imagine we had very good steak two nights in a row in two different countries.
This morning (very late in the morning), Marlene and I went walking to find coffee for her. I took a photo of a bank building as we were walking to the Place du Capitole, the central square of Toulouse. See the photo of part of the square.
More of Toulouse coming up next.
The Wilsons
