Settling In – Wednesday, October 3rd

We sleep surprisingly well at what is our home for the next month. 

But, sleeping well does not make the jetlag go away.  It lingers for the next several days.

A stop in Cahuzac-sur-Vere, which is a smaller town than Gaillac, but the nearest to our hamlet of Broze.  The market has maybe 4 stalls.  Off season.  And not a highly touristic village.  There’s a food store on the outside of town that looks interesting and we stop in – and plan to come back later in the month for what looks like great prepared food.  We drive past one of the two Michelin 1-starred restaurants in the area – one of the 2 places we’d been considering for our anniversary dinner.  It looks sterile and we decide that we’ll go to the other place.

We take a trip to Gaillac to check out the big city.  It’s actually a village of 13,000 but is by far the largest place anywhere nearby.  It is also the center point to, and gives name to, the local wine region.  There are signs on various roads in the area, including, to our delight, the one leading up to our house, saying that this is the Vin Du Gaillac vignoble route.  It’s a named wine region of France.

We find parking right on the square.  But, the sign makes us think that there are rules governing parking that we don’t understand.  We ask the guy getting into the car next to us, and vaguely, very vaguely understand his answer as being that we need to get a parking wheel, which is just a piece of blue cardboard where you dial in your arrival time,  from the Tabac across the road.  It costs 1.5E so not a big purchase.  And (again we only partially understand), the guy at the Tabac tells us that this is a one-time purchase and allows us to park throughout France.  We have no idea if that’s what he said, but we want to believe it, so we go with it!

Then after a quick stop at the ATM (editorial comment here...  In Paris six years ago we tried to use WAMU ATM cards for our 3 bank accounts at 6 different French banks and they wouldn't work.  SO, subsequently we've been using Schwab ATM/credit cards and they've worked without issue around the world!), we want to get some lunch – it’s around 2:30 and lunch ends at 2 pm (it's a bit difficult for us to get used to but all times are quoted on a 24 hour clock -- especially bad for Tom with his math skills).  But in France rules are rules and the several nice cafes on the square are no longer serving food.  So, we go without until Leclerc.

We want to stock up on groceries so we try to find E. Leclerc, the regional supermarket.  Unfortunately, when I looked it up online before we left LA, their address was only “Route de Toulouse, Gaillac, France”.  (I go back several days later to check the store’s website again – that is all they give for the address.  AND, Leclerc is one of the largest grocery chains in France!)  The GPS wasn’t much help with that semi-address.  We ended up asking 3 or 4 people as we wind our way through Gaillac and eventually find it, a HUGE supermarket.

Punch drunk (told you the jet lag hangs with me for days), we spend over 1 ½ hours in the grocery store wandering  the aisles.  While we enjoy wandering grocery store aisles in new places, this is difficult, especially with the language/vocabulary issues.  We recognize that some things that we just assume MUST exist, don’t – we’d gotten a validation on that in London when we couldn’t find powdered water mixes (e.g. Crystal Light).  I found some guys stocking the shelves who worked for Coke and one confirmed that that type of product wasn’t typically sold in the UK.  So, here in France we don’t try to second guess what we might not be able to find, versus what doesn’t exist in France.  We stock up and head back to Broze.

Unfortunately…  As we’re unpacking the car we notice that one of the rear tires is half flat.  Things that are so easy in one’s home environment are just a hurdle in a foreign land.  At the first gas station (and they’re not a stone’s throw away as they are in LA), the air hose handle is cut off.  We find an Esso station and fill both the ½ flat tire as well as the spare which is also pretty short of air.  Home.  Dinner, then another early night to recover.