Today we are in Buxy, a little town (aren't they all?) about an hour south of Dijon. Our hostess is Laurence. She has a beautiful house, in true IKEA style. Very modern, uncluttered and clean, with a big back yard and a couple of apple trees. We were very nervous about staying in someone's home, especially since we were arriving a couple of hours before she got home from work and there would be a key under the mat.
We found the house easily and appreciated the great pictures on airbnb.com that assured us we were in the right place. We decided we should walk to the nearby store and get more meat, cheese and some produce for dinner. Remember our first gasoline experience? Yeah, it went a little like that... turns out, when you buy produce, you weigh it out yourself in the produce section and the scale prints out a label, which you then stick on the bag. We found this out when the clerk, who tried to explain it to us first, had to go back to the produce section to do it herself. She looked a little perturbed. But we ended up with some nice fixings for dinner, and also found that if we stick to the grocery stores, we'll have no trouble staying near our budget. We can't believe how cheap and tasty the food is here.
We got back to the house, cracked a beer and sat on Laurence's back porch until she got home. She's a lovely woman; she's a PE teacher at the middle school down the street. She had just come back from her summer break, 2 months on a sailboat in the Riviera. And a nice house. My god, how much do they pay teachers here? Anyway, she talked to us for a little while and gave us tons of information from the tourist office nearby (and a homemade madeleine), offered us bicycles for the day and suggested that we ride them on La Voie Verte (The Green Way) which is a lovely bicycle and walking/running path between towns through Bourgogne (the Burgundy region). Good call. Then she made herself a little scarce for the rest of the evening while Bryan and I drank far too much of the region's wine. If you read my fb post last night, you'll know the bottles were $6. Just wow.
This morning, we had a nice little breakfast of toast and Laurence's homemade fig and peach jams, and some yogurt and coffee before walking to the store for more meat and cheese (and to watch someone weigh and label their produce) then jumped on the bikes and took La Voie Verte north 6 miles to Givry. We needed the exercise :)
We rode around the town and up into the vineyards a little before finding a small park where we sat and had a baguette with meat and cheese, then stopped at a bar to have a beer. We rode the 6 miles back to Buxy and stopped at another bar where we had another beer :) then rode to the town center and explored a little. Buxy is just charming and I'd recommend this place to anyone wanting to experience small town French life. All the towns that we drive thru have looked similar... small, stone, quaint... but Buxy seems to have a little more class and appears to be more maintained in some way. Maybe there are more flowers in the window boxes or something... anyway, we don't have to head out tomorrow for our last town, Annecy, til the afternoon so we are going to make a stop in a place called Cluny to check out a bar with supposedly almost 200 beers of the world. Tomorrow and Sunday, it's supposed to rain. So we'll end our trip like we began it... cold and snuggly.
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