March Break



Swan shaped towels in the guestroom

After three weeks of school, the girls started their first two week school break on March 1st.  (There was a similar break in the fall, one at Christmas, and there will be another at the beginning of May.)  The first week was pretty quiet with some meandering in the local market, a couple of trips to the beach and some time spent preparing for guests.

The Mediterranean patio welcome

At the end of the first week, my brother, Rich, his wife, Barb, and their son, Ben (aged 12) arrived from Kanata via Air Canada and the TGV to Montpellier.  Tom rented a van for the week so we would have the ability to explore far and wide.

  

Crazy Canadian kids in the Mediterranean on March 8

For the first couple of days we stayed close to home, letting them work out their jet lag and getting a sense of their surroundings.  We introduced Ben to the beach (and like any good Canadian he felt the need to get in the freezing cold ocean).   We've been to the beach four or five times since we've been back and only once has it been busy.  Usually, it's almost as unpopulated as Big Sandy Bay, but easier to get to and a little warmer.

Pretty market food photo

We wandered the market at Marseillan-Plage where Ben considered spending 5 euros on a carved stone chess set but declined when the price went up to 40 euros.  This particular market has a modest number of food stalls and a tremendous number of "garage sale" stalls.  Since Emily has been diagnosed celiac and can no longer eat the Baklava, we've decided we'll seek our markets elsewhere from now on.

 

 

Having not found anything that everyone could eat at the market, we drove to the town of Sete for an extremely slow French lunch.  Emily and I adventurously ordered the mussels done in the local style, which turned out to involve stuffing them with sausage meat.  Surprising, but very good. 

After lunch we drove up the hill at Sete and enjoyed the views of the Etang de Thau on one side (our village is down the other end) and the Mediterranean on the other.
 

On Monday, we loaded ourselves in the van and headed toward Spain.  Once again, we were suitably impressed by the view of the Pyrenees as we headed south. 

In Barcelona, we rented an apartment for two nights, allowing us a full day in the city to make use of the hop on hop off bus tour.  We started at the Park Guell where most of us appreciated the funky Dr. Seuss-ish architecture of Antonio Gaudi, though one of our party wondered repeatedly and aloud how such CRAP could ever get built. 

We wandered La Rambla, Barcelona's tourist shopping avenue, where I invested in some colourful artwork.  We also meandered through the Poble Espanyol (the Spanish Village), a collection of building facades chosen to represent architecture from all over the country and filled with shops, restaurants and a few working artisans.  Tom wandered the port a bit and spent some quality time on his own going through the maritime museum.

For the record, I have to say that it was much easier and more pleasant to feed ourselves on a diabetic gluten free diet in big city Spain than in small town France.  For lunch a few of us wandered a covered market where we found an excellent crustless spinach quiche, rice with vegetables, chick pea salad and ratatouille.  For dinner we found Turkish food that included kebabs and an extremely excellent stuffed eggplant. 

 

When we departed Barcelona we were assured by our master planner that a) it would be very valuable to visit the solar furnace at Font-Romeu and that b) the country of Andorra was on the way.  This would save us from returning to Marseillan the same way we came (to be avoided at all costs) and would only take an extra hour or two.

This turned out to be somewhat true.  The country of Andorra is on the way to the solar furnace and allowed for several hours of spectacular mountain scenery viewing.  Andorra, however, is somewhat limited in the personality department, having developed itself primarily for the purposes of low tax shopping.  

The solar furnace, when we reached it after what seemed like several more hours of mountain scenery, was very interesting.  The sun's rays hit  an array of 64 reflective panels that rotate with the sun.  They reflect the sun back to the concave array of mirrors on the building that you see in the photo below.  These all send the rays back to a single focal point that can reach as much as 3400 degrees celcius.  They say they use this to do research, but really it's just a bunch of guys who like to set stuff on fire.  In the demonstration we watched the guy was able to set a stick on fire in just a couple of seconds using just one set of mirrors.  (Check the link at  The Solar Furnace at Odeillo   if you want a more complete explanation.)  

At about five we had to head away from the solar furnace because we foresaw switchbacks in our immediate future and wanted to get the heck off the mountain.  This turned out to be a good idea as the switchbacks were pretty dodgy, and although some people continued to enjoy the vistas, the individual with the pathological fear of heights had some difficulty coping. 

 

Eventually we made it off the blessed mountain having stopped only for a few minutes for the requisite people-wearing-t-shirts-holding-snowballs photo opportunity.