Day 5: Today we opted for a visit to the market day in Libourne followed by a bicycle ride through the countryside. Libourne’s Market was actually pretty large, there were quite a few stalls. There were a big variety of things on sale - from plants to fruits and veggies, clothing, live chickens, a dead shark(!), and a lot of bread and cheese. It was a bustling place, especially since the market was set up in the square but the entrance and exit for the undergoing parking was also in the square, so you had to keep your wits about you to avoid the cars.
We gathered everyone together for the bike ride, I think there were about 30 or so people. The cruise director said he had never had so many people sign up for the bike ride. The bike company didn’t actually have enough bikes for everyone, so we brought along some of the riverboat’s loaner bikes. Mike and I ended up with two of the ship’s bikes, which would have been okay except the gears kept slipping, so one minute you would be pedaling along and then the next minute you would be pedaling without any progress whatsoever. I managed to fall into a bush during one of those times. It turns our you really can forget how to ride a bike I guess! Anyway, it was a lot of work to try to keep up with everyone, so I turned back but Mike stuck with it. They stopped at a chapel along the way and met a lady who has spent the last ten years renovating it.
After the big bike ride it was time for lunch and a little cruising on the river as we headed back to Bordeaux for our final 2 nights.
We had a nighttime tour of Bordeaux on open-top buses. I think Bordeaux is a really lovely city, especially along the waterfront. The portal gates to the city are lit up at night and are really striking. The Pont Pierre bridge is beautiful day and night. They say the reason it has 17 arches is because there is one arch for every letter in the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. He didn’t like it that the town had no bridge for his army, so he told them to build one! The church steeples are lit up at night as well as the very modern-looking Museum of Wine. My favorite spot at night is the relection surface by the waterfront. When the granite is wet, you get to see a perfect reflection of the grand buildings with all the lights on them.
Day 6: We went on a morning walking tour of Bordeaux with our guide Johanna. She lives in Bordeaux and was looking forward to showing us around her city. First stop was a bakery for what she said was called a “dune”, a pastry that was very much like a super light cream puff. It was so good, I went back later and had two more! :-D We visited a chocolate shoppe that had been owned by the same family for over a hundred years. It was seriously some of the best chocolate I have ever tasted. Yum! We visited St. Andrew’s Cathedral and also walked through the main shopping street of Bordeaux. Once the tour was over, we had some pizza for lunch and went to visit the Museum of Aquitaine. Aquitaine is the region where Bordeaux is located.
The Museum of Aquitaine was pretty interesting but not many of the signs were in English, I don’t think this Museum is high on most tourist’s lists. They have Roman artifacts from the days when the Roman’s settled here and first began to grow grapes for wine. In the section about French settlements, they had the largest collection of model ships I have ever seen. They had a section with artifacts from the 12th -14th century that they keep finding when they do construction projects. They had a rose window (the masonry portion, not the glass) that was about 15 feet in diameter that they found just covered up inside a wall somewhere. It’s phenomenal to us to think about something that old just hidden in a building and nobody even knew.
No comments:
Post a Comment