Treize – Day thirteen

From Facebook but first a correction:

The first picture I referred to was a traffic sign that I’m not certain is really official. It shows an artist painting the bar across a do not enter traffic sign. The message is no artists allowed to paint here. This morning I woke up and realized I had referred to it on Facebook at a no musicians can play here traffic sign. Oops.

Bordeaux day two. We signed up for a tour of wineries this afternoon so here are pics of that excursion. We had a couple hours to kill and I did it in a corner bookstore with the no public music here street sign. Being a book store that made sense because there were a lot of open guitar cases begging for change in the City’s mostly pedestrian streets. The store turned out to be vast rabbit warren of seperate rooms for books. It easily had double the books of a Barnes and Nobel. I bought a couple…..to work on my French.

The picture of a tractor goes back to 1948 if I remember correctly. The father of this small organic vineyard bought it with the help of the Marshall Plan. Sadly, it was far too big to use in grape vineyards but its sale sure was a boon to International Harvester.

At the wine tasting after the tour I noticed a familiar Minnesota insect – box elder bugs.

At a second rather grander Chateau I snapped pics of the Dordogne and Gironde Rivers joining together 75 miles shy of the ocean. A mile wide here they keep killing frosts away. They are tidal rivers and rise and fall 15 feet with the ocean tides. The owner of this vineyard told us her land was where the Roman’s first planted Mediterranean wine grapes 2000 years earlier.

About the author