… wind and more wind, and salt.
We’d spent a pleasant enough Friday night at Camping Mon Calme and Saturday dawned bright. Saturday in Piriac-sur-mer is also market day so guess where we were going? We walked the 1km out of the back of the campsite down to the town where pretty much the first thing we saw were market stalls and boy, were they good.
We had already visited a modest market in the modest village of St. Aubin du Cormier but, pleasant enough though it was, there were a few stalls that we look for missing. Piriac-sur-mer made up for those shortfalls. Here we found not just one “spinning chicken” stall [we call the rotisserie chicken stalls spinning chickens] but three – spoilt for choice. With no local knowledge we selected one based largely on what it looked like, There was also an olive stall with a very pleasant lady offering tastings of her wares.
“Pas nécessaire, ils sont trés bon je suis sûr”, I ventured, and bought 200gr of picholines in garlic.
On our last Australian trip, Francine’s brother and sister-in-law presented us with a boxed seafood eating set, including an oyster shucking knife which was now in Frodo’s batterie de cuisine. Lo, there was a stall selling a whole range of graded oysters. We opted for a dozen #2s, which are quite large. The vendor also had a plastic hand protector which he also threw in for free.
Our plan, such as it was, was to have the spinning chicken for lunch and the oysters for a modest evening meal followed by cheese. Excellent.
Last year, a friendly French man who was our neighbour on the Arçais campsite kindly presented us with 10 oysters from La Rochelle. I was not equipped but managed to shuck those with the foil cutter on our corkscrew. They were smaller, I think, and our dozen #2s proved a tougher proposition even with the correct equipment. Nonetheless, gastronauts that we are, I eventually managed to open the beasts and very good they were, too.
Sunday was apparently the French version of Mothers’ Day over here, the Fête des Mères. It began with some light rain overnight which relented and gave way to overcast. A meteorological disturbance was moving through and quite rapidly, at that. Accompanied by quite strong winds gusting to 40 kph or so, the overcast was replaced by mostly blue skies in the late morning.
Not wishing to waste a blue sky, we braved the wind and tried a bike ride down to Guérande, 6 or 7 kilometres away. Guérande is famous for its salt harvesting and we were keen to have a look. We didn’t have to work much on the way ‘cos we were wind assisted; coming back would be a different matter.
We are familiar with the salt pans at Gruissan down in the south on the Mediterranean coast, where the water tends to show a fabulous pink colour. It may be that were at a different juncture in the salt harvesting process, here, but there were no interesting colours. It is, however, a very extensive area.
Beginning our return the wind, as expected, began to get very irritating. Cycling into a strong headwind certainly needed some electric assistance. It was still a bit unpleasant, though.
Under a continuing blue sky but still in a strong wind, in the evening we tried sitting outside Frodo with a pastis and some of our olives. We braved it for 10 minutes or so but it really wasn’t pleasant enough, so we wimped out and went inside. Happily, the wind is forecast to abate tomorrow.
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