From time to time we share a random video clip to fuel your travel dreams. Join us today at Clos-Lucé, the French mansion where Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years.
(Watch the complete episode of “France’s Loire: Château Country” online for free.)
I’m done traveling for the year, but other members of my staff are still in the field. While I regroup from 100 days in Europe, I invited my frequent collaborator Cameron Hewitt to share some posts from his blog. Cameron has traveled about as much as me this year, updating our guidebooks in Italy and France, and turning our already strong material in Scotland into a stand-alone Rick Steves Scotland guidebook (due next spring). While Cameron and I are in perfect sync in terms of travel styles and priorities, he gives voice to the next generation of Rick Steves travelers. If you like Cameron’s insights, you can read much more on his travel blog, and you can also follow Cameron on Facebook. — Rick
by Cameron Hewitt
Twice a week, the normally traffic-free lanes of Sarlat are clogged with a human traffic jam of shoppers. Wednesday and Saturday are the town’s market days. And in all my travels, I’ve rarely seen a market better than Sarlat’s.
As the day dawns, Sarlat’s sun-baked streets are jammed with tables, each one a cornucopia overflowing with Dordogne Valley products. Strolling the cobbles, I survey the array. Produce is delicately arranged on a rickety wooden table — little more than a rough plank resting on sawhorses, piled high with lettuce, artichokes, leeks, potatoes, garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and radishes.
Plunging deeper, I’m immersed in a vibrant world of sights, smells, and sounds. Baskets neatly filled with oddly shaped sausages. Mountains of olives. Carefully sealed bags of dried mushrooms. Loaves of rustic breads. Refrigerated trucks displaying meats, fish, and tiny wheels and pyramids of goat cheese. A vivid festival of flowers. Tree stump-sized wheels of mountain cheese. Kitchen tools, from newfangled walnut crackers to a huckster demonstrating the sharpness of his kitchen knives. Snail shells already pre-filled with garlicky-green butter, ready for escargot. Mammoth hunks of nougat the size of car tires. Tidy rows of jams, jellies, preserves, and walnut oil. A young, dreadlocked farmer selling more different types of onions than I realized even existed. Bowls of colorful, intensely flavored tapenades. Giant slabs of fruitcakes — nut, orange, fig — waiting to be sliced up and sold by the weight. A rainbow of colorful little beanies used to cover your fruit or bread basket. And, of course, cans of artisanal foie gras and other duck and goose products.
The longest line is at the strawberry stand — a good sign. You smell the strawberries before you see them. I try to stake my claim in the queue, but quickly learn that no-nonsense French grannies are shameless about butting in line. Elbows up! I trudge patiently to the front and am given a choice: charlotte or gariguette? I splurge on the pricier, rounder, more pungent charlotte style, at €3.50 a basket, instead of the cheaper, torpedo-shaped gariguette style, at €2.50.
It’s a good thing I got my shopping in early. Shortly after the noon bell tolls, everyone starts packing up. Shoppers disperse — instantly filling up the town’s many al fresco café tables — while merchants crate up unsold goods for tomorrow’s market in Domme. They’ll all be back in Sarlat on Saturday — just like they have been, twice a week, for decades. By then, I’ll be in Normandy, halfway across the country. But I’ll still be tasting those strawberries.
I’m done traveling for the year, but other members of my staff are still in the field. While I regroup from 100 days in Europe, I invited my frequent collaborator Cameron Hewitt to share some posts from his blog. Cameron has traveled about as much as me this year, updating our guidebooks in Italy and France, and turning our already strong material in Scotland into a stand-alone Rick Steves Scotland guidebook (due next spring). While Cameron and I are in perfect sync in terms of travel styles and priorities, he gives voice to the next generation of Rick Steves travelers. If you like Cameron’s insights, you can read much more on his travel blog, and you can also follow Cameron on Facebook. — Rick
by Cameron Hewitt
I specialize in Eastern Europe, but for a change of pace this year, I’m swapping research chores with the co-author of our Rick Steves’ France guidebook, Steve Smith. (Rick was recently singing Steve’s praises on his blog…and deservedly so. Steve’s France book is the best in print, hands down.) Steve is picking up a couple of weeks updating Croatia for me, and I’m covering some of his territory in France: Languedoc-Roussillon, the Dordogne, and Normandy. It’s a fun switcheroo.
To begin my France swing, I had to get from Milan to Collioure, on France’s Mediterranean coast. Planning my itinerary a few months back, I came up with what now seems like a foolishly Rube Goldberg route between two points: Wake up early in Milan. Subway to the train station. Train to the airport. Fly to Barcelona. Commuter train to the main train station. High-speed TGV to the first French town over the border, Perpignan. Taxi to yet another airport to pick up my rental car. And finally, drive that last 40 minutes to my hotel. Amazingly, everything came off just right. Phew!
At the end of that long day, my reward is the postcard-perfect town of Collioure. After so many years of traveling around Europe, I start to think that I’ve seen it all. But then I pop into a place like Collioure and realize that there’s much more of Europe that I haven’t seen than what I have.
Collioure is a largely undiscovered gem of a resort town just a 45-minute drive from the Spanish border. (From there, it’s just another couple of hours — past trippy Salvador Dalí sights and world-famous Costa Brava restaurants — to Barcelona.) Collioure is the perfect size for being on holiday. It has five beaches, each with its own distinct personality (from party/pebbly to sandy/serene). And its town center, with atmospheric restaurant-lined pedestrian lanes, is an utter delight. It’s settled: I need to come back here on vacation.
It’s overcast today — the Friday afternoon of a long holiday weekend — so the cafés are full and the beaches are empty. But people are in high spirits, enjoying being on a mini-vacation, perfectly content to lick ice-cream cones and socialize rather than sunbathe and swim. They’ve read tomorrow’s perfect weather forecast…and they’re willing to be patient.
Collioure is one of those South of France towns that’s famous for its light, which draws great artists like moths. Shutterbugs love it, too. I pull out my camera and enjoy a photo safari.
Turning a corner, suddenly I’m in an almost fantastical square. Two scrawny but determined plane trees — their leaves still just coming in — yawn and stretch their knobby limbs over inviting café tables. Behind them is a Crayola box of houses, each more vivid than the last. In that instant, I know that, for the rest of my time here, I’ll fabricate excuses to circle back through this square as often as possible.
Continuing past Collioure’s perfect place, I approach its formidable church. The bell tower isn’t a bell tower: It’s a fortified lighthouse, providing direction to passing vessels even as it reminds would-be invaders that this town is no pushover. (The town’s stern and sprawling château — just across the beach — completes this thought.)
Finally I reach the pebbly beach, protected by a long, beefy jetty. I pause at the beach bar, whose owner is very proud of his homemade sangria. I’m intrigued by the daily special — fresh-caught turbot — and wind up returning later for dinner. As I eat my first-ever turbot (a flat, muddy-colored bottom feeder with a crumbly, almost rubbery flesh made flavorful with abundant herbs), the setting sun finally breaks through the clouds and washes the far side of the harbor in a rich, golden light — promising a sunnier day ahead. Strolling back to my hotel, I linger at the illuminated church and at my favorite square.
Sure enough, the next day I awake to brilliant sunshine and bright blue skies. My research chores take me all the way around the harbor, and I’m glad they do, because it forces me to walk past two more fine beaches.
At the biggest beach — whose curve is defined by the stout fortress — chest-deep novices struggle to board their mini-sailboats. Nearby, a topless sunbather catches some rays, while a nubile teenage couple makes out, just steps from where kids build sandcastles. Vive la France!
Stick with me for the next couple of weeks, as I explore France’s Languedoc-Roussillon, Dordogne, and Normandy regions. There’s a lot to see, a lot to experience…and a lot to eat. Allons-y!
Tomorrow I kick off my summer trip series — reporting from Germany. But today you can drop by our Travelers Café for two great travel blogs. Cameron Hewitt is in France and my kids are in Vietnam.
I remember as a guide I’d have tourists forever complaining about the rude French. They’d say how at the post office it took forever, there were no smiles, and no one spoke English. I had to remind my travelers that small-town French postal clerks are just as speedy, cheery, and multilingual as postal clerks are back in the USA. Cameron shares a smart and insightful essay on the American challenges when it comes to enjoying the French — and finishes by noting how he kept thinking, “To not get along with the French, you pretty much have to be a jerk.” He also reports on duck, goose, and foie gras.
My children, Jackie and Andy, are now in Vietnam. Jackie just reported on “Ho Chi Minh’s Waxy Body and The American War.” The line to see Ho’s body is longer than the line at the Louvre. For an American millennial to get a firsthand look at what we call “the Vietnam War,” and learn about it from the other perspective, is a rich and challenging travel experience. She then goes out to discover and drink all the “gross things they soak in firewater.”
On the same blog, Andy shares more of his videos. Check out “A Night Out in Hanoi,” an evening fueled by special snake alcohol and in search of a good, dog spring roll.
“What about your duck pond?” asked Cameron Hewitt while updating the Rick Steves France guidebook. Gérard’s eyes fell as he said, “Sadly, we no longer have ducks in our pond. A hawk moved in and began picking them off, one each day, until they were all gone.”
Cameron spends as much time as I do researching and updating Rick Steves guidebooks. As I pack and finalize plans for my next trip (less than a week now), I’m featuring travel blogs from our Travelers’ Café for a few days. On his latest trip, Cameron has been working on our France guidebook and reporting from the field. In this excerpt, Cameron (who’s clearly recovered from his bout with cassoulet) shows the joy and care we bring to our work, particularly when it comes to making connections with accommodations that have personality:
I had one particularly lengthy, but very enjoyable, interaction at a countryside hotel near the Dordogne River Valley, called Moulin de Fresquet. The owners, Gérard and Claude, have converted an ancient mill into an idyllic retreat. Gérard greeted me in the driveway and proceeded to show me each of their five rooms — all of them different, but all of them equally well cared for. He told me about the ghost who haunts the mill, showed me a copy of the innkeeper’s memoir he wrote and published (unfortunately, so far available only in French), and took me on a guided tour of the lush, parklike grounds. The place is less a hotel than an enchanting fantasyland.
When I was leaving, Gérard asked me, “Excuse me. Do you know what happened to Karen Brown?” It took me a moment to realize who he meant. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Karen Brown wrote a series of guidebooks highlighting romantic, upscale, characteristic inns. (Back then, Rick used to say, “My splurges are Karen Brown’s slums.”) She had a very devoted following, but her niche became one of the casualties when printed guidebooks were eclipsed by online sources.
Genuine affection filled Gérard’s voice as he described how Karen would come personally to visit and update her guidebook each year, and even brought her entire family on holiday once. This wasn’t just a business relationship; it was a friendship. “I wrote a letter to her several months ago and never heard back,” Gérard told me. Since Karen and I are both in the guidebook biz, he figured maybe I knew her. (Karen, if you’re reading this, get in touch with Gérard and Claude! You know, they worry.)
To read the rest of this entry — and lots more from France — be sure to check out Cameron’s blog.