Aix again

Seder meal

On thursday night we went over to the Anderson's for a seder dinner. Holy cow, or lamb, was it nice. She used a table cloth that had been in the family for generations, silver silverware and the china from their wedding. It was quite amazing. Beyond all those, the message from the dinner was fascinating.

This pitcher was pretty cool. It had a separate area that you could put ice to keep your beverage cool, without watering it down.
Oh and Dom and I got to build a fire... just like the old days of D&D!
I believ Wendy is eating Matza here.
Daisy did great at the table most of the night...
Here
Here are the elements of the seder dinner. The bitter arugala, horseradish, an apple concotion that has a jewish name that i cannot recall, spell, recite, or likely even identify in a lineup...and some pine nuts.
The matza...
Here is a couple pages of the script that we followed and read...
Hi daddy! I'm being such a good girl...at the moment...
The apple concoction... I'm getting tired and not going into much detail anymore...
The dripping of wine, ten drips, one for each plague onto our plate.

Daisy, still being good... for another moment...
Then the feast began! April made some excellent lamb and potatoes.
The lamb...
oh... and fondue for dinner, with some amazingly wonderful dark chocolate and fruits that we had picked up fresh from the market earlier in the day...

Sanaray and wine tasting

After our picnic, we walked around the marina taking pictures of some of the boats and enjoying the quaint little town. We of course, stopped in a cafe for some drinks...
Although it had gotten quite warm, especially sitting in the sun as we were, hot chocolate was our drink of choice, since we have given up coffee for lent...and beyond!


Daisy didn't have hot chocolate, she had artichoke... and still doesn't like it as much as bananas and peaches
We then went wine tasting in Bandol and met this woman at Domaine de la Noblesse. (That means the noblemen's home). Apparently years ago an a nobleman lived there. This woman was amazingly friendly, even though she didn't speak very much english. Typical winery/home, we showed up and she was just working around the house and stopped what she was doing to give us a tour and tasting.

Here is the cave... Some of the barrels in teh cave are over 200 years old... Interestingly enough, she owns the whole home, but only a portion of the cave that is beneath her home. Years ago there were three brothers that had some sort of falling out and they divided everything up. So some of the barrels go completely unused since there isn't any practical way of bringing wine from outside this vineyard and into the barrels.

They had a large crop of olives the previous year, so they decided to make olive oil. I thought that was pretty cool, so I bought a bottle. Wendy and I love olive oil and getting some fresh olive oil sounded like fun. Maybe we are just american tourists, but it sounded good to us. We are looking forward to trying it when we return home! Here are the olive trees and part of the vines.

Commentary coming soon

We've been using our iphones on the free wi-fi here at Dom & Hil's place to upload all our pics from our journey. (Yay for airplane mode that lets us use the wi-fi without the risk of getting charged for incoming phone calls, etc.!) But it takes a while to type long posts on the iphone. Therefore, we are borrowing Dom's laptop when he's not using it to type our commentary.

France time, it's about 11:24 pm right now and we have an early morning ahead of us, so I need to hit the sack. Especially since Daisy will likely wake up to feed soon and several times during the night. Her internal clock is all messed up these days!

So check back in the next few days for the commentary (and maybe some addition pics) from our journey to Italy and the coast of France. :)

Thursday - Picnic on the coast

We had the rental car one last day, so we decided to do a short day trip to another nearby region of France. We went to the market in the morning and bought a few items, including a rotisserie chicken and rabbit (along with potatoes cooked in the drippings) for a picnic at our destination. We then drove to Sanary and hand our picnic on the beach (it was rather cold and windy, but it was sunny!) We drove into the town and drank hot chocolate in a cafe, and finished up the day out by touring a winery in Bandol (more pics of that in a later post).

The méditerranéen...


The rotisserie chicken that I pulled apart for us to eat on our picnic

and the rabbit and potatoes that we tried. The rabbit was good, very tender, and it of course, tasted like chicken...

Daisy ate at the picnic, too!

This place was pretty much like paradise...according to the flower