Dinner at Chez Grayson – Thursday, October 4th

A day trip to Castelnau de Montmiral, one of the area’s Bastide towns.  (The history of the area is covered, admittedly vividly, in Michael Crichton’s book Timeline.)  It’s interesting and we continue to feel lucky that we have the time to visit places that wouldn’t typically be on someone’s first 100 things to see in France.  But, in truth, it’s only worth an hour at most.

Then we head back to Toulouse, to Mondonville actually, for dinner with Bill and his family.  I’d previously put their address into our GPS, so we travel with confidence.  Bill lives just beyond Blagnac Toulouse airport.  We’ve relied on this GPS before to take us to his place so this time we’re not alarmed as we drive almost directly past the airport, along runways, etc.  Last time, for the 15 minutes or so that we were passing the obvious airport facilities, I was terrified that I’d put Bill’s office address in by mistake.

The last ½ mile to Bill’s is fairly undeveloped land.  Large houses.  Open acreage.  Bill has, I believe, 3 acres and a gate to the driveway.  We recognize it and pull in.  We see Emily (my goddaughter) in the distance.  I’m sure she knows we’re coming tonight but she surprises me by heading in to the house rather than to the car when we arrive.  But, I think she’s just gone in to tell her parents.  She greets us as we park.

 

 

 

A lovely dinner.  Salad with goat cheese rounds and gizzards (I don’t know what they are, but during dinner Maxine doesn’t flash me a warning glance so I plunge ahead and eat them).  Duck breast.  Then a selection of 4 cheeses (possibly my favorite thing about France).  We start to head back to Broze around 11 PM.  First time we’ve tried to put on the headlights – the car just seems over engineered with buttons and steering wheel switches that seem to have multiple functions.  We head for our hour drive back to Broze.

I should mention that the past couple days since we’ve re-inflated the tire, my frustration with this car has grown.  The engine is very noisy.  And in a variety of small ways it seems to me that Hertz hadn’t been maintaining it very well.  We’re about 15 minutes past Toulouse and a BMW flashes its lights at us from behind a couple times.  I slow down so he can come along side, thinking he’s going to tell me that the headlights aren’t on, because that’s been my suspicion.  But instead he says something about our rear tire.  And I dread that more than anything!  Nearly 11:30 at night.  A suspect spare tire in the trunk (We’d added air to it when we’d re-inflated the operating tire).  Changing a tire on a roadside…

Boy, did we get lucky though!  Turns out that our friend in the BMW probably had limited vocabulary (we do this all the time) and used the wrong word.  Absolutely nothing wrong with the tire.  BUT, the headlights weren’t on.  We figure them out and complete our journey home.