I was awakened by a kiss on the cheek from Steve, who had already showered and made the acquaintance of Katherine, the lady who owns the boulangerie 4 doors down.  He came back with les croissants au chocolat! and a baguette, of course.  Breakfast was yummy.

Today we spent in the car, following 2 fabulous recommended routes – le Circuit touristique Nord (a drive through wine villages north of Beaune), and le Circuit touristique Sud (a drive through many, many more villages south of Beaune).  The country is beautiful, the villages are so quaint and attractive, and the roads are an adventure.  Something that looks like a driveway, with walls of buildings right up against the street, is actually the main road through the village.  I swear if a resident opened their shutters at the same time a car went by, it would be bye-bye shutters.  There are no sidewalks in any of the small villages, so motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians all have to share and get along – and somehow they do.  (Torontonians could learn something from these folks – just saying…)

    

And the roads outside the villages – the ones that are barely 2 car widths wide and don’t have any shoulders at all, and that rise and fall and snake around blind corners – have a speed limit of 90km!!!  It’s hard to enjoy the scenery when you’re trying to keep up and holding on for dear life.  So we took our time, found places to stop to take pictures and let others go by us (not that there’s lots of others on these teeny roads), and had a more enjoyable day.  It started to rain mid-afternoon, but not enough to dampen our spirits.

   

   

Somewhere north of Santenay, when we lost the wine route road for a bit, we did come across a little bar/restaurant where we stopped for un plat du fromage, un plat du charcuterie, and un pichet de vin rouge (local, of course) to wait out the rain that had just started.  There were also local Beaune magazines at the tables, so we snacked and read about the area.  Great snack, good rest stop – it’s never a bad thing to get lost on holiday.

It’s always the little things that mess you up in another country, the grocery experience of yesterday notwithstanding.  It was a bit challenging to get a home-cooked dinner coordinated as I figured out which stovetop burners worked faster than others, and if I turned all the right knobs to get the oven to work.  Thank goodness for the internet, as I was also able to determine what Celsius temperature to set the oven at.  It wasn’t the best-timed dinner, but we had a pretty good meal, with more local wine.  Then we turned on the dishwasher to clean up our breakfast and dinner dishes.  Even on the Eco setting, it ran for 2 HOURS!  It was probably some high-efficiency unit but, as we weren’t familiar with it, it left us feeling like we were energy suckers so we decided to wash up by hand moving forward.