Cat is obviously the funny in our relationship. Anyone reading this knows that. She’s also a better writer, which is why I’ve let my blogging ambitions be waylaid and have contented myself with doing all the driving to the interesting places Cat then blogs about. And that has been a lot of driving.

Recently, though, Cat has decided to learn to drive a stick. I know, right? I told her that probably something like half of cars in the US are sticks, so she argued in the way I taught her: she Googled it. It turns out it was something like 6% of cars sold last year. I’m sure those numbers were different in 1984, the year my trusty Volvo and I came into this world together, but I digress…

Well, we’re in France now, where automatic cars are still only something like 10% of the market, and we (I) didn’t want to pay the American tourist tax on an already expensive rental to get an automatic transmission. Plus, what better way for her to learn than on the clutch of a rental car?

So, yesterday, with nary 10 minutes of instruction on a back road, she was ready to give the open road a try. So she drove for an hour straight, up and down hills on windy roads, in and out of towns, around roundabouts… I was honestly impressed.

Which brings me to her willpower. She has proven time and again that she can and will do anything she puts her mind to. A week ago we visited Mont St. Michel, and I was trying my best to get a panorama picture of her, the monastery, and a rainbow that had fortuitously sprouted up as we were walking toward the monastery. Everything lined up perfectly, except for one thing.

She had made a terrible face for a picture with ample warning to make a decent one. She immediately defended herself when I brought it up, “I can’t help it! I always make terrible faces in pictures!”

“BULLSHIT!” I said, with more force than I would have been able to muster before meeting Cat. Back in those sad days before we had met, I thought quiet confidence was the best way to convey an idea. That was, of course, until Cat proved that she wouldn’t listen to a single thing I said unless it was said with vehemence.

Since I have learned well, I went on a brief yet passionate diatribe about how she could most definitely make reasonable faces, that she really had no reason not to, and that I was tired of her ruining pictures.

So in every picture since then, she has made very cute and reasonable faces. When I mentioned it a few days later, she laughed. “You really just have to show that you care about the thing more than I do, and I’m happy to do it.” Now I just have to figure out how to apply that to getting her playing video games with me.

Mont Saint-Michel is beautiful, and also overrun with tourists like ourselves. Still more than worth the visit, though. If you do go, eat a crepe at the Sirene restaurant, tucked in above a souvenir shop, with awesome cider and reasonable prices compared to the rest of the place.

– N

Cat has officially taken her longest vacation in over half a decade. Yes, it’s only been a week. Her work ethic is the kind of thing Europeans furrow brows and shake heads at. You can tell she was nearing burnout by this picture I snapped of her during a work videoconference just before our break:

Business up top, party down below.

In an effort to help recharge her batteries, I’ve been a most gentlemanly traveling companion. I’ve been doing all the ordering, asking, talking, paying. I mean, I speak French. She doesn’t. She’s been making up for that by repeating that she speaks some Spanish from the SEVEN YEARS she studied it.

I’ve even been mostly carrying all the heavy shit. With ice cream as fuel, of course.

So we arrived in España after a beautiful few days in Collioure, maybe my favorite town in the world. We had a couple hour layover until the next train left. That’s when I realized that in her seven years of Spanish, she learned how to conjugate dozens of irregular verbs, but not how to ask for the bill at a bar. We ended up with an extra round of beers, which in hindsight wasn’t such a bad thing.

It reminds me of the month I spent traveling around Mexico with my dear friend, Matt Acosta. Matt is mustachioed and half-Mexican, but never learned a lick of Spanish. Every single person we met would go off on tirades of Spanish toward my unsuspecting comrade, after which he would awkwardly point to me and somehow nonverbally communicate that my Franco-American ass was their best chance at getting a few words across.

It goes to show that a bit of conversational spanish followed by practice can be a lot more helpful than years of rote learning and testing. I found this reddit AMA from last year about learning languages fascinating. Alas, I digress. We made it to the Teatro-Museo Dalì in Figueras, where we saw some wonderful art.

Fairly tame, but a bit weird.

Getting weirder…

As we walked through the museum, as the weirdness reached a mind boggling crescendo, Cat stopped and asked me seriously, “Do you get it?”

“I don’t think I ever ‘get’ art, but I like it.” I replied. This turned out to be the best joke I’d ever told, as Cat actually laughed out loud. The best I’d ever gotten before was slightly a stronger exhale through her nose. I can’t express how gratifying that was.

Weirdest. Seriously. What the fuck.

Thankfully, after a couple days here in Spain, Cat’s Spanish has been coming back, and mine is even improving a bit. People actually smile at our efforts before immediately reverting to English!

Get it?

I’m glad I asked. The potato originated in the New World, just like me and Cat. Once discovered, it quickly traveled across the globe, expanding the culinary experience of those it encountered. Such is our hope for duckandpotato.com

When the potato was having trouble gaining popularity in 18th century France, Louis XVI planted a plot of potatoes and set his most elite guard to watch over it. The local peasants, thinking their king must be keeping something good from them, stole some of the plants and started to grow them themselves. I actually employed a similar strategy when Cat and I first met. Anyway, from that point forward, the potato spread across the French countryside like wildfire.

This might be Louis XVI receiving a potato.

“In the course of human history, the potato has been a much greater treasure than gold.”

– Michael Pollan

“How many potatoes does it take to kill an irishman?” I asked Cat as we discussed the name of our blog.

“None,” she quipped, “and I already know that joke. You already told it to me. Why can’t you be funnier?” she asked rhetorically for the hundredth time.

So be it. If my sense of humor isn’t going to pull my weight on our shared blog, then I’ll have to make up for it elsewhere. Technology skills. A computer brain that can remember everything except where I left that damn coffee mug. The ability to speak French in a land where people really don’t speak anything else. And if those don’t cut it at some point in the future, the ability and willingness learn new stuff.

The duck, a migratory water bird, has always been my favorite animal. The word duck comes from the old english duce, which means to dive. Ducks can dive underwater, fly long distances, float happily, and even waddle from place to place. Some ducks are nomadic, seeking out rain. I happen to enjoy all of those things.

Also, maybe even foremost, ducks are delicious. If there is but one passion I have found in this life, it’s cooking and sharing food. And if there’s anywhere in this world that knows how to cook duck, it’s the the sud-ouest of France.

So it seems appropriate for us to kick off this site with a month long trip to this duck adoring region of the world. One week to go, and more to come, so please keep checking back!