First Post From France -2017

I never know whether I should post about the things that happened the past few days or jump to today. But if I start posting about the past, then I never seem to catch up.
Traveling here was exhausting. I took melatonin on the plane but never managed to fall asleep, instead just dozing a few times. Maybe I'm getting too old to fly overseas and skip a night's sleep. Someday, I hope to relay the entire story -- two planes, two trains and one automobile, which the rental people seemed very reluctant to give us. "It is a new car," the woman said.
"Look, we aren't planning to wreck it," I wanted to say
But things improved rapidly after we got to the BnB, I took a shower and we went out to dinner.
The town where we are staying is fairly small. It has a boulangerie, a small market that sells everything, a pharmacie and a couple of wine makers. But it doesn't have a legitimate restaurant. Instead, it has a restaurant rapide, pizza place.
The woman in the market said it had good food, so we walked there.
We started with a glass of moscat, which is made locally.

It is very sweet and tasted delicious.
The menu offered goat cheese pizza with black olives, so that is what I ordered., along with a $14 bottle of red wine and a salad. About halfway through that bottle of wine, things started to feel much better.

By 9:30, we returned to the room and I fell asleep by 10.
I started my morning with a run. It's strange to run in a place that is unfamiliar. I needed to make sure I didn't get lost. So I ran through town and turned right. That took me out into the country a bit. I heard a rooster crowing and in the distance a ridge of mountain jutted up.

That distant spire is the church in the town where we stayed. 

 In Ohio, it's very flat so I'm not used to real mountains, only fake ones in the clouds that look like mountains.
I only went about three miles so we could go off on our daily jaunt. Our goal is to visit cities with markets in hopes of choosing an area we want to move. Not many cities have markets on Friday mornings, but Séte, a city on the Mediterranean said it had a small market, so we headed there. It's just half an hour by car, and although I nearly got us killed when we first started driving there, I got the hang of it and didn't put a scratch on the new rental car.
The market at Place de Stalingrad took up nearly two blocks.

It had every kind of fruit or vegetable we would want to buy. The cherries seemed quite popular. And it had lots of prepared foods too, like this paella. The man had several giant pans of food.

We enjoyed the sunshine and walked toward the Mediterranean. The town is quite industrial with a lot of fishing boats and other industries along the waterfront. The canals seemed to be the places that people enjoyed the water.
Some of the architecture reminded me of Nice,

while others reminded me of typical French style.

The restaurant where we ate lunch had mediocre food, which is always a surprise in France, but we have made up for it in other ways, with lots of other foods.

Thanks for visiting. I'll try to get a post written tomorrow before we run over to Aix en Provence to visit our friend Delana.

Dreaming of France -- The Other South of France

Thank you for joining this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
There's something exhilarating about the purchase of the airline tickets to France and the confirmation of hotel reservations.
It puts a zip in my step as I imagine that day in May when I'll be learning abut the southwestern region of France, the area where I hope to move during 2017.
The area we are thinking about stretches along the Mediterranean, from Marseille over to the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain. It has been called Languedoc- Roussillon, but the new name of the region is l'Occitanie.

Sete is a town along the Mediterranean that really is just a spit of land between the Mediterranean and another large body of water. Love these colorful boats.

 Here's a photo of the fortifications at Beziers, another city near the Mediterranean. It looks so similar to Avignon with the pale stone fortress.

The Canal du Midi also runs through region, passing near Carcassone. I couldn't find a good photo of Carcasson, so I'll just have to take one myself when we're over there.

And who knows, we might end up buying a house that has a view of the Pyrenees. It may be hard to choose between the sea and the mountains.
Hopefully, we'll love this region as much as we enjoy Provence, because the prices for houses in this area are much less expensive than in Provence.
The photos included here come from Pixabay, which shares pictures free.