Saturday, July 23

Beaune, France. It’s Sunday morning, and the church bells are ringing, but this post is about Saturday.

We arrived in Zurich, Switzerland, in the morning after an all-night flight from Boston. There was a shrieking baby, and my legs were too long for the seat.

The drive from Zurich to Beaune took about four hours. I was expecting more mountains. The Switzerland I saw had lots of pine trees and monochromatic neighborhoods, but no steep mountainsides. There were some killer tunnels, however. The roads go straight into the sides of hills and don’t emerge on the other side until you start to wonder about all that weight overhead.

Before long the land was flattening out, and the fields started to fill up with sunflowers. Acres and acres of sunflowers. And cows.

There was no formal crossing into France. We didn’t even know we were in France until we stopped to ask how long it would take for us to get there and received some puzzled looks. The kids remarked that the border crossings in the United States make us look a prison state. Perhaps that’s what we are.

Beaune is an ancient village/town in the Burgandy region of France. You can see the outlying farms from our windows, and you can smell the soil. The roofing tile has moss growing all over, and the pigeons come to pick at something that must live in the moss.

Last night, in our exhaustion, we went to a bistro for a bite before bed. Esmé and Henry ordered hot dogs, which came stuffed inside of french bread rather than on hot dog buns. Amy ordered poached eggs in red wine sauce (yuck!), Finley ordered snails just to make Esmé mad (don’t knock ’em until you’ve tried them), and I got a ham and cheese sandwich, which in France means buttered bread (no mayo) and pickles also.

Wine is everywhere in this town. More on that later.