L'ile de re

Our last adventure took us to the west coast and the Atlantic ocean. We spent a weekend at the Ile de re. It is connected to the mainland via France's longest bridge. We spent Saturday exploring the island.


L'ile de re has 10 communities on it and they each had their own personality. I really liked Saint Martin De Re. There was a 12 century ruins of an abbey that was interesting. Our dog, Lady, tried to get acquainted with several chickens there, but they weren't interested in meeting her. It was pretty funny watching her try to catch up with them though.


Larry climbed to the top of this church in St. Martin De Re and got some pretty amazing photos. Dogs weren't allowed, so Lady and I stayed on the ground and avoided the 170+ very narrow steps. Near the top, the stairs got so narrow that there was only one way traffic. The picture below is of the stop light directing traffic inside the stairwell.

Some of the interesting things about this island are the salt fields and the donkeys. Donkeys apparently are the island's basic mode of transportation for every day work activities. They even have them wear pantalons (pants) to protect them while they are working in the fields. Since it was the weekend, we didn't see any donkeys dressed and working, but they certainly were well represented in the gift shops. I have to wonder how long it takes for each of those salt fields to experience enough evaporation to accumulate the salt.

On the more protected side of the island, we watched kiteboarders and para-sailors. The weather was a bit cool, so there weren't too many people on the plages (beaches) but it was fun to see the sailboards catch air.

This is the light house on the far end of the island. Larry also climbed the many stairs of this for another amazing photo opportunity.

On Sunday we went to the port city of La Rochelle at the other end of the bridge. Watch for its own blog entry soon.

St.-Emilion wine

When we went to the Bordeaux area, Nick advised us that his favorite Bordeaux wines came from St.-Emilion. Thus, our stay there rather than Bordeaux. As it turned out, it was an interesting medieval city as well.


I was struck with how vast the fields of vines were. It reminded me of the never ending fields of corn in Iowa. It was only about 3 weeks to harvest so the grapes were gorgeous hanging on the vines.

St.-Emilion has 4 distinctions of wine. The lowest (or common wine) just carries the name St.-Emilion on the label. The next level up is called, grand cru (which means vintage) the next higher level is grand cru classe. The highest distinction is premier grand cru with an A and B subcategory. There are over 900 vineyards that carry the label St.-Emilion and only 2 labels are Premier grand cru A, and 13 with Premier grand cru B. Just to give you an idea of how important these labels are, Nick said he saw a bottle of a Premier grand cru A at Haskell's and it was over $600 for the bottle.

Anyway, we took a tour of a grand cru classe vineyard which was very interesting and we sampled several different wines. It should surprise no one that we even shipped some home for the future (though sadly, not premier wines). The 2007 vintage is newly bottled and the 2008's are in barrels for 12-18 months in the limestone caves. They are saying that if the weather holds through havest, 2009 could be an excellent vintage.

Camping near St.-Emilion

This past weekend we traveled to one of the most storied wine regions in the world, Bordeaux. The Bordeaux wine area is divided into two regions, separated by the Garonne river with the towns of Bordeaux on one side of the river and St.-Emilion on the other. St.-Emilion is the smaller of the two towns with an interesting medieval monolithic church. Monolithic means carved out of one rock. This area has limestone as its base, and there are many natural caves (similar to St. Paul). This church was hand carved out of the rock and is supposedly one of the best preserved in Europe. Like most medieval villages, St.-Emilion is built on a hill and the streets were steep traveling indeed.


I found this campground when I was google searching for accommodations. They offered Caribbean Beach cabana tents, 3 room tents with two bedrooms, refrigerator, gas stove and cooking utensils. One of Larry's French coworkers called it luxury camping. It was literally surrounded by vineyards.


Being the RV'er that we are, we find the European versions of RV's very interesting. They are small and they must be extremely light as they are pulled by the afore mentioned "go-karts." One morning, Larry heard what he thought was a golf cart, but when he looked, it was a man hitching up his trailer. He had a remote control and literally "walked" the trailer out of the site, around and up to the car to hitch.

There is much more to tell about wine, but I'll put that in a separate entry. A bientôt!