In Capvern les Bains

Woke early today, bugger. We are in no rush and I still wake up at 7'ish. I lolled until 7.30 then thought I may as well got on with the diary! So I worked on that for an hour or so. After Paul got up we walked into town. There is a lovely path through the forest which we followed for a bit and then used a switchback path to drop down to the Tourist Info office where we checked email for free! We walked up through the town, basically one main street. It is a bit run down, a lot of closed buildings. The town is a thermal town so I would have expected it to be doing better but obviously the thermal business is not so good in France these days. It is Sunday so of course nothing is open :( There was a small shop attached to a bar where we got some food then we went back to a nice chair in the shade that we had seen in the forest where we sat to eat before going back to the hotel to rest.

I worked on the diary most of the day and Paul went outside to read for a while. At lunch we went to a nearby picnic table where we ate baguette and some terrine we bought earlier. Paul attracted a cat and proceeded to get rid of some of our cheese and to earn a new friend. We ate the entire Flute, finished Paul's cheese, along with a tomato and the terrine. A good meal.


Back to the room again for the diary and TV until dinner time. Paul had been quite excited about dinner for some time and we had been debating whether to get a Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1975, a Bordeaux red. It was 190 Euro and we had checked on the internet it was a fair price, especially in a restaurant. In the end we decided against it because we didn't think that they would decant it and also it would really need to be decanted before the meal rather than we when we arrived. A good choice I think. Not to mention the money saved :) Instead we got a Chateau Latour Martillac 1980, also a Bordeaux red. I told Paul he could just drop the Martillac if he wanted to impress people! The waiter came out with the bottle in a special carrier. It generated considerable interest from the other tables. The waiter was actually sweating as he took the cork out, he broke it as he did yesterday but he managed to get it out without getting any cork into the wine. (After all it is 29 years old!) The wine was a lovely brown colour again and what struck me is that the smell reminded me of an aged port. Naturally it had great length. This one was 70 Euro. For the meal we went al a carte and got a duck gizzard salad followed by steak. To be honest I actually think the meal yesterday was better than today's. You just don't know in advance. The wine however was excellent, a fine finish to our rest day!