Friday July 3rd

Drive to Pont Au Mousson

After a lazy morning of breakfast, emailing and packing we drive out of Germany and into France. The drive is very beautiful and we are able to scan around the radio stations to find American hits for almost 2 hours.

We arrive at the Abbey and it is beautiful. Huge and stone and very old. We check in and walk past the cloister garden where there is a beautiful exhibition on French perfume (or perfume bottles, I wasn’t sure) among all the gorgeos flowers, sculpted shrubbery, and sculptures. It smelled amazing. We went up to our room on a grand oval staircase to the second floor. I’m guessing our rooms were former cells in the monastery. And though the bathrooms were fabulous, the rooms were plain and to my dismay after searching the walls, had no air conditioning. I guess they didn’t think of that when they built it 700 years ago. We propped open the window and Jon was pleased to find the free wifi—good thing they thought of that 700 years ago. Jon took a nap and I headed out for a snack and to explore the town a little bit.

Most restaurants weren’t serving in the middle of the afternoon, but the bakeries were open. I stopped in one and tried out my French. I haven’t studied French for about 15 years, so I didn’t even bother brushing up before I got here, but I suprized myself by completing the entire transaction in French. By no means was my French accurate or grammatically correct, but the baker and I understood eachother for the most part. (I asked if she had a sandwich. She said no, but pointed out some Quiche. We were in the province of Lorraine, famous for their quiche, so I thought I’d give it a try.) I got a quiche and a coke and headed to a park bench on the water to eat it. I was unhappy to discover there was pork in the quiche (something I’ve unhappily discovered about a lot of food I’ve gotten here) but I picked around it and enjoyed the view. I took the leftovers across the bridge and fed these amazing swans that live in the river.

Then I walked around town searching for some fruit. I’d had the most amazing fruit last time I was in France. I have a distinct memory of eating apricots that I’ve never found anything like in the US. So the first market I found, I bought a bunch of apricots and enjoyed them as I walked back to the abbey.

By the time I finished reading my book—the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society--Jon was up when I got back and we suited up for a run. We ran along the river and into some parks. Seeing lots of cute dogs and swans along the way.

It was pretty warm outside and warm in the room too, so we took some cold showers and headed to the town square for dinner. We went to a restaurant recommended by the abbey and had salad, steak, potatoes, green beans and bread. It was a busy place so we had to sit inside. We thought we’d walk around and get some ice cream like we had in Germany, but to no avail. There was no gelato shops to be found. We settled for a prepackaged Nestle cone at the corner store. It was still better quality than you would find in the states and was fancy—it had a kit kat in the center.