Category Archives: Things We Did

We spent last week with my whole immediate family, which amounts to only six and a half people, in beautiful Chamonix, high in the French Alps. The occasion for this happy gathering was so that my brother could run the CCC, or Courmayeur Champex Chamonix, one of the races of the famous Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc. It’s 63 miles long, over two full marathons, but with 3.7 MILES of elevation change. In short, it would be an insane hike for a normal person to do in a week. Cat and I did what we do best to help him prepare for this insane endeavor: we cooked lots of good food. Stir fry, Greek salad, pasta with my dad’s famous meat sauce, tartiflette, a local dish of potatoes and ridiculous amounts of melted cheese, and copious amounts of wine to wash it all down. The wine part was less of a race preparation measure and more of a sanity keeping measure in having 3 generations cooped up in a small house for a week.

Rowan, the half person, is my awesome 1 year old nephew. He loved all the attention afforded by lots of family and limited space, and especially loved us making funny faces at him and feeding him things we weren’t supposed to. He obviously pulled these glasses off nanoseconds after this picture was taken.

On the day of the race, we woke up early and drove Chris through the 7 mile long Mont Blanc Tunnel, to Courmayeur, a town on the Italian side of the mountain. We sat in a small café and drank coffee to the amplified sounds of annoying hype men in 3 languages and bad techno music, and cheered Chris on as he attempted to empty his bowels before the race. The race had 1900 participants leaving in 3 waves, Chris being placed in the first wave as he’d been included in the prestigious list of “favorites”. After three national anthems and a warning that the weather might be really shitty, they were off at a faster pace than I run my 2 mile jogs at. We cheered him on and then made our way home to reload the tracking website all day long. While we relaxed, he ran, and ran, and took some cool pictures, and ran some more:

He seems to be taking it well.

A rest stop high in the mountains.

A poor soul had to be rescued by helicopter.

We electronically followed him do the most grueling thing of his life from a couch, eating a nice lunch, relaxing, and taking copious naps. He hovered around 80th place, making headway on the uphills and falling back on the downhills. He told me after the race that “Those fucking euros are fucking crazy on the downhills!” which was funny because I thought everyone participating was fucking crazy regardless of nationality, including my dear brother. In the evening we prepared a picnic and camped out to meet him at two of the later checkpoints that were accessible by road.

Chris was happy to see me, but especially Rowan, who’s on my back at this point.

We met Chris and gave him some snacks, cheered him on, and drove to the next point we could meet him at, when the weather turned horrible. Dark, rainy, and in the clouds, he approached the last few hills.

Beautiful views of the weather going south.

At the last stop, we had our picnic, drank more wine, and milled about with the other supporters waiting for their loved ones. Chris showed up later than planned, and all he had time to tell me was, “I’m so ready to be done with this shit…” as he jogged toward the last mountain. We drove home and did more internet refreshes before heading to the finish line. I drove the car as close as I could get, crossing barriers and going backward down one way streets to avoid my brother taking any extra steps I could once the race was finished. He arrived 15 minutes before we were expecting him, limping slightly and saying “that was the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever done”, finishing the race in 15 hours, 35 minutes, and 47 seconds. He got 63rd place, which is amazing for someone who doesn’t train at altitude and had never run a race that long.

Holy shit, brother, you’re amazing.

The next day, he was understandably more excited about his performance, but said he doesn’t expect to run another race that difficult for a long long time, if ever.

Working title for my next post: I’m Not Funny Enough to Come Up with Anything Good. Cat, HAAAALP

Today we visited a castle built in the 16th century, that was owned by Josephine Baker from 1947-1975. And those were the two least interesting things that happened. Sure, the castle was beautiful. Sure, it was cool to tour the renovated rooms where Josephine and her family lived, entertained and were generally fabulous. And, it was definitely cool to learn about how Josephine helped the French resistance during WWII, and spoke at the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr. I mean, this is a badass lady.

BUT THEN THERE WAS A GOD DAMNED BIRD SHOW.

As in, they keep and breed birds of prey, owls and falcons and such, on the grounds of this castle, and they train the birds to fly around the trainer guy and catch stuff and generally be awesome and jaw-dropping for groups of elderly French and British tourists.

I am not sure how a 16th century chateau, Josephine Baker and TRAINED BIRDS OF PREY fit together, but they do. AND IT IS GOD DAMNED ASTOUNDING.

What’s funny is the lady immediately behind this bird was really scared of birds, and would jump up every time a bird got near her. Maybe skip the BIRD SHOW?

I thought that picture of Carcassonne at night was the raddest picture ever taken, but I was wrong. This is:

Big god damned owl, clearly photobombing Nic’s picture of the castle

AND THEN THIS.

Ok. So they have a lot of owls and birds of prey at this castle. They have snowy owls (many Harry Potter jokes were had, Linda, we took a picture for you), falcons, etc.

THEY ALSO HAVE A FUCKING BALD EAGLE.

THE BALD EAGLE CAN DO TRICKS.

IT FLIES BACK AND FORTH TO THE BIRD GUY.

I find this mind blowing. Apparently bald eagles aren’t endangered anymore, so perhaps America has become fairly lax about letting them out of the country. When I was a kid, we had bake sales to raise money to help the endangered bald eagles, for Christ’s sake. AND NOW, HERE IS ONE IN A BIRD SHOW AT A CASTLE IN FRANCE.

DEAR AMERICA, ARE YOU AWARE THAT THE FRENCH HAVE A BALD EAGLE. PLEASE RESPOND SOONEST.

Please excuse me while I go come to terms with the fact that not only can just anyone acquire a bald eagle, but they can also teach it to do tricks.

I challenge anyone who says this isn’t the raddest photo ever taken

Here are some things that happened during our trip to Carcassonne (if you are one of those rare souls who is interested in history and actually clicks the links, you might also be interested in this, this, this and definitely this):

– I ate the best cassoulet of my life and was not at all heartbroken when Nic said “we’re sharing, right?”

– We walked all around the outer wall of the city and I imagined what would have been happening at those spots at various points in history:

“I wonder if anyone will be mad if I make out with my hot boyfriend in a turret”

“Do you think there were little booths here where people sold bread and stuff? OR WHAT ABOUT A BLACKSMITH!!?!”

“Can you imagine being a soldier who had to stand in this little circle all day, firing arrows at the army down below? Do you think they shouted shit at each other during sieges? ‘Hey, asshole! Your momma is so fat they don’t even MAKE wimples in her size!'”

You see, arrows go out, but they do not come in

– We went into the cathedral, the Basilica of St. Nazaire and St. Celse, (which was breathtaking and solemn and I totally get why Catholicism took off, that shit is MAJESTIC) and lit candles which Nic said was to remember someone who’d died but I made a wish instead (I can’t say what the wish was, obvs, or it won’t come true, but I CAN tell you that it was snack-related).

I am artsy

– Nic kept wanting to buy a sword, and I kept telling him it would be so annoying (albeit awesome) to carry around.

– We discovered that Carcassone is where they filmed all of the Nottingham Castle scenes in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Having watched that movie a billion times as a kid, this fact brings me enormous satisfaction. (Also, there’s a part where Christian Slater fires Robin and Morgan Freeman over the castle wall with a catapult and when they make it over the wall, says “f*#k me, he cleared it” that when I was 9, I thought were the funniest words anyone had ever uttered in any language. WE SAW THAT WALL.)

This is where Robin and Azeem go flying over the wall to save Maid Marian, who was a bit of an idiot but she had curly hair so I will give her a pass

– There is a Tower of Inquisition at Carcassonne, making me think, for probably the 2381st time in my life, how much it must have sucked to be a peasant in the middle ages.

Imagine being up in that tower, hanging from the wall from your earlobes or something, because you made some herbs into tea or something equally SACRILEGIOUS

Ok, I made up that thing about the tea but I think we can all agree the Inquisition was, historically, even worse than a Black Friday sale at Walmart

Carcassone is amazing. Go there, if ever you can. And please, order cassoulet.

We’re in Toulouse! It’s hideous and not at all charming but I am trying to give it a chance.

We arrived yesterday afternoon, and in the course of staying up for 28 hours in the interest of skipping lengthy jet lag, (no joke, I think this was the longest I have ever stayed up. Once, in college, I procrastinated writing a paper for so long that I had to stay up “all night” to finish it. I made a pot of coffee and got to writing. At 2am, I gave up and went to bed. I still can’t remember what happened with the paper. Presumably I turned in something and presumably it was acceptable, because I did manage to graduate from college eventually, but I honestly can’t remember) the best we were able to manage upon arrival was going to the grocery store.

And then also Nic made seared duck breast, for which I made a sauce of wine and fresh green plums. Which we enjoyed while sitting on the balcony looking at the boats in the canal as the sun set. Then we had a fresh peach tart for dessert. But that is neither here nor there.

Like I said, France is ugly.

Anyway. The grocery store. Here is a list of weird/amazing things they have:

The French don’t refrigerate their eggs. Not at home, and not at the store. Apparently they don’t wash the eggs when they gather them up (probably from really happy and cultured chickens who roam free around a 300 year old farmhouse) so it makes them never go bad. It’s amazing, and it’s funny to think about how much that would freak people out in America. They have anti-bacterial wipes so you can WIPE DOWN THE HAND GRIP OF YOUR GROCERY CART in the US. I highly doubt unrefrigerated eggs would go over.

This picture is awful because I was trying to limit the idiocy of taking a picture of something in a grocery store by doing it as surreptitiously as possible. But, as you can see, these eggs are on REGULAR, UN-REFRIGERATED SHELVES!

They have like 14 kinds of pate in the deli counter. They are also very casual about it, as though having many kinds of pate is not magical and rare like a unicorn singing karaoke while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Also, pate is like $0.43 per pound. In America, pre-made pate is so expensive that it is stupid not to make it yourself, because somehow pre-made pate is $12.32 per pound, but chicken livers are $1.04 per pound. But here, in this magical fairyland of meat snacks, there are a million kinds of pate for no money at all.

Also there are a 492 kinds of cheese, and they are mostly as cheap as the pate. I don’t know how to say the names of any of them, so Nic orders while I stand there trying to look so French that I can’t be bothered to order cheese myself. It’s not that I CAN’T order cheese, it’s that I choose not to.

Also there are 29391 kinds of wine, and it is also painfully cheap. Painful because I drink wine on occasion (ahem) and here, really good wine is available for not very much money.  Although, I did see a bottle of rose from Provence that I have bought a few (ahem) bottles of at Trader Joe’s, for roughly the same price ($6 or so). POINT YOU, AMERICA.

Tl;dr French grocery stores are awesome.

Working title for next post: Everyone in France is Fashionable and Attractive