Escargot – Day 29, 13th

Riding into town for baguettes

Some context.  It has been a long day – a great day, but a long day – many locks, steely grey sky, chilly-cold, intermittent storm clouds and rain.   We pulled into Tonnerre at, maybe, 4:30pm and booked a restaurant.   For us, in France, this is not so much as a guarantee of dinner as the start of another adventure – did we actually ask for dinner or for a hysterectomy and did they answer yes (disconcerting if the latter) or ‘we’re calling the police’ – one is never really sure.  They love to talk and don’t like to answer too directly (yes/no), so it’s always a long winded, beautifully melodic, prolifically gesticulated response that leaves us a little bewildered.

With time to kill until the potential dinner reservation we pedalled into down.  It started to rain – a steady, cold drizzle that in an hour or so’s wandering soaked us through.  The walk up to the church (the bastards are always on the top of a hill?) was steep (but rewarding) and we trudged, cold, wet and hopeful (desperate) back down the hill towards the restaurant at half past six, a  half an hour before our fate would be sealed; restaurant or cold meat in the boat.

Coming down through the town every store was closed. An old man laughed “restaurant?  No it is Sunday?” The evening drew colder, darker, wetter.  As we reached the bottom of the hill, a warm, welcoming glow pierced the twilight gloom,  our hearts lifted as the light revealed first a restaurant and second, people moving inside!

I don’t think I’ve every cried before because a meal was so good, but, well, this was so good.  Stewart and I ordered the escargot for entre. It came in a nice sized ceramic crucible and contained the most heavenly cheese sauce every created, I’d say, in the universe.  Indeed, one day aliens will land on our planet and acknowledge the superiority of our civilisation purely on the basis of this dish.

The sauce contained; cream, parsley, garlic, Epoisses cheese, salt, pepper, and snails, simple, but sensational (Epoisses is a mild, nutty, smoky soft cheese).  The snails were almost secondary to be honest – it was the sauce!  It was so good, I had a second one for dessert.  The maitre’d / owner said he had never seen this before and brought the chef out to meet us as we left.

All the meals and the local chardonnay, chablis (we’re right near Chablis currently) and red were superb.  Di had the duck which was excellent and a potato and cheese dish for entre and I had a traditional offal sausage and mustard sauce for main (beautiful).

The catalyst for desert was a banana split the size of a sea slug served to the gentleman sitting next to us, and a wagon load of hot chocolate-sauce coated profiteroles soon came our way.

Turns out banana split man was walking 1800km to raise funds for cancer, averaging about 20km per day – the “split” hardly hit the sides.

Our once chilled & exhausted bodies were warmed, revittled and somewhat sozzled when we wobbled out some hours later.  If anyone else was silly enough to have been out that night, they may have seen six wicker basket boasting bikes zig-zagging wildly across the park and diapering into the mist (with a few woo-hoos sounding into the night).

Poppies

But that’s how the day ended.  It started with a ride into town across the fields of wheat (and poppies) for pastries, then off through our first lock – one of many for the day.  The rain was intermittent and there were long periods of calm grey that we all really enjoyed after the sun and heat – but it was cold and we found ourselves layering up to keep warm.  Down in the cabin the heater was on, it was toasty warm and we took turns ducking down there.

A search for a restaurant for lunch in Flogny-la-Chapelle proved unfruitful but we found a patisserie with fresh home made quiches, so we pulled up to a bank for a feed.   Had we been so inclined, the town did have a tatoo parlour.  The “Chateau” on the map (mentioned yesterday) was more of a house so we didn’t bother checking it out (tomorrow there’s a big one).

After lunch we pushed on for Tonnerre, the place that you now understand, serves the best escargot cheese sauce in the universe.  We re-filled with water there and checked out the town.  In the shadow of the chathedral there is “Fosse Dione”, an old washing place.  It has a stone wall where they bashed the clothes, fire pits and chimneys where they boiled water and a spring that provide a channel for washing.  The spring has been explored to some 300m long / deep and the end never found.  It’s a limestone cave pool that plummets into crystal clear blue-green bottomless depths.

Di calling home

Washer women pool Fosse Dione –  Tonnerre

Cactus – time for bed.