Beyond Paris: Loire Chateaux, Mont St Michel, and Julia Child's Table

France  |  Loire Valley + Mont St Michel + Normandy 

Getting the rental car out of Paris on day six of the 2013 trip involved Matt pulling up from the train station and announcing, "That was fun. I already pissed off a motorcycle and I have no idea why." I was immediately assigned one job: do not make any reactions. This is how we drive out of Paris together.

Once we were on the highway toward the Loire Valley it was fine. France has lovely toll roads that cost a completely unlovely amount. Fourteen euros for one hour on one freeway. We accepted this as the price of seeing Chenonceau.

The Loire Valley is not what you imagine when you imagine the Loire Valley, meaning the chateaux are not clustered together like a fairy tale theme park. They're spread out by hours of driving, everything closes at five, and you can realistically only see two in a day. We saw Chambord first because it's the one everyone says is best. The exterior is breathtaking, genuinely breathtaking: 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces, 84 staircases, construction started in 1519. Inside it's almost completely empty, cavernous and freezing because it would take an entire forest of wood to heat the place, which explains why no one actually lived there for very long.

Lunch at the Chambord cafe was the worst meal we had in France. Possibly one of the worst meals of our lives. The coq au vin I ordered was fine. Matt ordered something with ham and white sauce and mushrooms and received what appeared to be a burnt frozen pizza baguette with meatballs. We left as fast as politely possible.

Chenonceau was everything Chambord promised to be. Original furnishings still inside, the most incredible flower arrangements and tablescapes throughout for Easter, the kitchen intact and full of atmosphere, the gallery stretching across the water. Built in the 1400s. Beautiful in a way that felt lived-in rather than staged.

This is also when I got sick. As I do, apparently, on vacations. A fever that hit hard by the time we reached our hotel in Amboise. I went directly to sleep. No dinner. Matt walked around town alone. I felt terrible about the whole evening and also just plain felt terrible. I had the best intentions of soldiering through.

Mont St Michel helped. We drove three and a half hours the next morning with me mostly sleeping and feeling like someone was banging on the inside of my skull. Mont St Michel has been there since 460 AD and seeing it appear in the distance as we approached was worth every foggy minute of the drive. It stands out there all by itself looking simultaneously ancient and impossible. Cars are not allowed anywhere near it. You park far away and take a bus to the base, then walk.

Everything at Mont St Michel is uphill and stairs. We made it to the abbey at the top, which is much larger than expected and genuinely impressive. The views out from the top are real. We came back down through the souvenir shops, looked at our watches, and realized we had seen the entire island in under three hours. I then slept for most of the afternoon, which my body needed more than any abbey.

Dinner at the hotel was a fixed menu that had lobster bisque as a starter, which sounds lovely and arrived with scallops in it, which I did not want and which didn't help my already uncertain stomach. The entrees were not worth describing. Dessert was sorbet and a crepe, which were fine. The beds, however, were extremely comfortable.

The Normandy section of this trip was Matt's territory. He had done his research thoroughly. We started at the Dead Man's Corner Museum in Carentan, which had some excellent Band of Brothers-related displays. Then north to a German Bunker Museum at the Sword Beach area where we toured all four floors of a fortified bunker, command center, communications room, and all. The Germans occupied France for four years before D-Day and what they built along that coastline during those four years is genuinely staggering: power, plumbing, air circulation systems, thick concrete everywhere. We stopped for food at the only available option, which was a French McDonalds, which operates on kiosks and serves specialty burgers with Camembert and goat cheese toppings that you will never see in America.

Our little apartment La Maison Matelot was darling. Matt had found it while researching the area. Three units in one building, all charming, all uniquely decorated. We picked the ground floor one specifically because it had a claw foot bathtub and we were not wrong about that decision. The apartment manager gave us dinner recommendations and we headed out to see a German cemetery and a calvados producer before the dreaded 5pm closing. The German cemetery was actually quite beautiful, sun on the grass, rows of dark crosses, very different in tone from the American cemetery we'd see the next day.

And then a bird pooped directly on my head. I had been finally feeling better, out in the Normandy sunshine, and a bird made its announcement from above. Matt cleaned it off while laughing the entire time. This is marriage.

The calvados producer was interesting but the product itself wasn't quite to our taste. We did find Pommeau, which is half cider and half calvados and served chilled, and that was lovely. We bought a bottle and it became one of the better decisions of the trip.

Dinner that night at L'Angle Saint Laurent in Bayeux was one of the best meals of the entire France trip. The apartment manager's recommendation. We were there when they opened at seven, ordered the 35-euro tasting menu, and let the kitchen run. Matt had foie gras, then beef tenderloin with foie gras on top with gnocchi, then goat cheese with fig compote, then a crepe filled with chantilly cream and flaming Grand Marnier. I had cauliflower soup with foie gras mousse and bacon, then sea bass with saffron cream and vegetables, then two local Normandy cheeses, then the same crepe. The amuse-bouche was a turnip and egg cream broth that Matt licked from the cup. We had a bottle of Pouilly-Fume from the Loire. Memories were made.

The full D-Day tour the next day was eight hours covering 120 miles and most of the significant sites. It was thirty degrees with a strong wind making it feel colder than that. We had gone to a store the day before and I bought an extra fleece and a hat, which was the right call. Our group of twenty loaded onto a minibus.

The German gun batteries at Longues-Sur-Mer were our first stop, four massive naval guns behind control bunkers, the last two in pristine condition. Matt was already in heaven and the camera was basically an extension of his hand at this point.

Omaha Beach. Four miles of it. High tide when we visited, so the beach itself wasn't visible, which meant you stood at the top and looked out at the water and tried to reconstruct from what you know. When you hear what the plan was for D-Day and then hear what actually happened, the fact that it worked at all is astonishing.

The American Cemetery is 172 acres and contains 9,387 servicemen. That number is the kind of thing that stops you mid-breath. The rows of white crosses seem to go on past what the eye should be able to follow. It is an extraordinarily moving place and I think it always will be, no matter how many times people visit.

Pointe du Hoc was my personal favorite, partly because of what happened there and partly because standing out on that cliff in thirty-degree wind felt appropriately severe for the history. This is where Army Rangers scaled a 100-foot cliff to try to knock out German guns that could fire on both Utah and Omaha beaches. The land is still cratered from the bombing. You walk among the craters and the blasted-out bunkers and it feels like the ground itself remembers.

Sainte-Mere-Eglise is the town with the church that has a fake paratrooper hanging permanently from the steeple, because an actual 101st Airborne soldier landed there on D-Day, got caught on the steeple, played dead for two hours, and eventually escaped. Fifty percent of the paratroopers who jumped that night were killed. That detail has stayed with me.

We went back to L'Angle for dinner again because why deviate from something excellent. Different menu, equally wonderful.

Our final day started with Gordon Ramsay's scrambled eggs at the apartment while we found new music on the CD collection there, then back to Sainte-Mere-Eglise where Matt found what he'd been looking for in the US and couldn't find: a large old German shell casing for his WWII gun room. Then an antique shop produced an old German helmet, complete with bullet holes, at a fraction of what it would cost at home. He was very happy.

The final stop of the entire France trip was in Rouen, and it was mine. Julia Child. The whole trip had been in her orbit in some way: the cooking classes, the kitchen shop where she bought her equipment, standing outside the apartment she shared with Paul on Rue de l'Universite. But this was the real pilgrimage.

La Couronne in Rouen claims to be the oldest inn in France, established in 1345. Julia Child ate there for the first time in November 1948, on her way to Paris with Paul, stopping for lunch from their Buick. She described it as the most exciting meal of her life. The moment that changed everything. If you saw Julie and Julia you know the scene with Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci going absolutely still over that sole. That was here. That was this table.

I ordered the sole meuniere, naturally. The waiter brought it whole on a presentation platter, perfectly browned, butter sauce still sputtering, then wheeled it to a side table and filleted it in under a minute. Four perfect fillets on my plate. Bon appetit.

I closed my eyes. Then I took a bite and chewed slowly. The butter. The mild salty fish. Julia called it a morsel of perfection. I understand completely. I can see exactly how one lunch in 1948 became the beginning of a life.

We drove to the airport full and happy and a little sad the way you always are at the end of something that was genuinely good. Au Revoir, France. You keep outdoing yourself.