Weekend à Chapelle

So, keeping with my usual schedule... I'm getting to this entry nearly a week late. Last weekend Colin and I went skiing in Chapelle-des-Bois, where his sister and her family and most of his extended family lives.

We drove up (south on the map, but up because the elevation increases the whole way) to Chapelle around 6:30pm on Friday afternoon and arrived just before 8pm. We left later than usual because Friday afternoon traffic meant Colin's commute from work took an hour instead of 15 minutes. When we arrived we had the first of many delicious meals with Colin's sister Agathe and her husband Sébastian: deliciously meaty and creamy lasagna with salad and little lemon cakes for dessert. 

Sébastian is butcher and Agathe works in the local fromagerie, so they're never short of good ingredients in their house. Their house is fairly typical for the area: converted from an old farmhouse which is a large square structure with a slanted roof. When it was a farmhouse, the lower level (first floor in 'American') was the stable for the animals in the winter. Their living space is one half of one of those old farmhouses, plus one half of the stable-now-apartment space below. Eventually they plan to rent out that apartment space as a gîte ("holiday cottage" -- there is a whole system of gîtes in France). I really liked the big, open rooms with high ceilings and lots of windows. 

Saturday morning was pretty lazy: we slept late and hung out around the house and played with Colin's niece and god-daughter Cléo, who just turned 2 in November. Agathe gave birth to little baby Malo (a boy) in early January, so she's had her hands full. We hesitated between heading out to ski immediately or having lunch first and ended up going with the latter. For the entrée (appetizer) we had a morilles (rare and delicious mushrooms, Sébastian's friend likes to hunt for them in the forest but doesn't like to eat them -- to our benefit). Séb prepared them using all things delicious: butter, cognac, shallots, and served the mixture warm over an over-easy egg in cute little bowls. Served with a glass of Alsacian Pinot Gris, a new favorite of mine. And that was just the appetizer, for the main dish we had a ham and leek quiche (the leeks were from their garden last summer) with salad. That was the "light lunch"! It was nearly 2pm before Colin and I headed out on the slopes.

I learned this past weekend that Chapelle is the start of a world-famous cross-country ski race called the Transjurassienne (the Jura is the name of the mountain range). The race actually took place the weekend before we were there and I believe the three courses are 70km, 50km (ski classique) and 25 km. To give you an idea, Colin and I probably did 12 km in 3 hours, but with frequent stops for pictures and going at quite an easy pace. The Transjurassienne is one of the Worldloppet races, a series of the most prestigious corss country skiing races in the world. It's the second-longest (the one in Switzerland is 90km, but apparently much flatter than this one). The male winner this year finished in 3 hours, 25 minutes and the female winner finished in 4:23. We weren't skiing on that course though!

In retrospect I'm sorry we weren't more motivated Saturday morning, because I really enjoyed cross country skiing. I stuck mostly to the classique method (which looks like you're walking with really long strides) because I couldn't quite get down the skating method (which looks like you're ice skating with absurdly long skates and poles). The part that really surprised me was how relaxing it was. I've always thought of cross country skiing as the kind of activity you do  because you live somewhere where 4 months out of the year you can't do anything else... not as the kind of activity people would actively seek out. But after trying it for myself, I can see how people go on vacation to locations just for cross country skiing.

It probably didn't hurt that the weather was absolutely perfect! It was nearly 45 degrees outside and with the exercise we didn't even need a hat or gloves or a sweater (although we had all 3 in our backpack just in case). We headed back just before 6pm, when the ski rental place closed. Check out this Mercedes snow plow... the IH Village should look into investing in a few...

After a coffee and freshening up after skiing, we decided to play a board game. The game they picked was called Burger Quiz. It's based off of a television game show which appeared on Canal+ in the early 2000s. The objective is to earn "miams" ("yums"... they say "miam-miam" in French to express the same eagerness for a culinary delight) by correctly answer trivia questions. Yikes! I remember thinking to myself at the time, this is another whole level of linguistic competence -- playing a trivia board game of questions about another country's culture in another language. I lost pretty spectacularly, but it was amusing! And based on how bad I am at those kinds of games in English, I thought this might actually have been an improvement... In the photo below Colin and I are trying to figure out the settings on my camera. This weekend we actually spent a lot of time looking at my camera (and the book Agathe and Séb had bought for their Canon) and I learned how to do all kinds of cool things.

For dinner on Saturday night we had moules frites (mussels with french fries). We made the french fries in Agathe and Séb's self-contained fryer which looked sort of like an automatic popcorn machine. It only required one tablespoon of oil for the French fries for all four of us! The moules were cooked with leeks and onions and were absolutely heavenly!  I ate way too many, but they kept insisting that we finish them because mussels don't exactly keep in the refrigerator! For dessert, a gooey moulleux au chocolat (melted chocolate cake), which was even gooier than expected because it wasn't quite cooked in the middle, oops! But it was delicious.

Sunday was an equally lazy day. We slept late again (so late we skipped breakfast and just waited for lunch), which was a boite chaud (literally "hot box," but around here it refers to a Mont d'Or cheese served hot in its wodden container as a fondue). With salad of course. Miam miam! In the afternoon Colin and I went for a walk. For the first half we took Cléo in her luge (sled). It was funny how long it took us to get her dressed to go outside. Even though it wasn't very cold, she still wore 3 layers under her snow suit, a hat, and sunglasses. She looked like a little mummy and couldn't really bend her arms! She was so cute though. Afterward we look her back to the house and then walked further. At the end we cut through a field so we could tromp through the snow, which in places was up to my mid-thigh. It was so much fun!

We got back to Besançon around 8pm Sunday evening and I was very sorry that the weekend went so quickly... I wanted to stay for the rest of the week! And it turns out I would be going back very soon... (see next entry for more details)