La Rochelle

So… I disappeared for awhile. I wanted to finish talking about my trip with the Sous-Chef, but in the meantime, I was cooking up a storm and saving up pictures to use for posts when I was finished talking about my trip… and yet the talking about the trip never really commenced, and now, here I am, several weeks after the fact, with pictures and stories of La Rochelle to share that I completely forgot to post. So… without further ado… and after a brief hiatus…

La Rochelle.

I first visited this port-side town in 2004, when I spent a summer in Royan studying French and traveling around with friends. It’s strange to think that that was so long ago; there’s no cliché that adequately expresses how short the time between now and then feels, but I was seventeen, and I see via Facebook that several of the girls I traveled with are married or will soon be married now, and that just seems impossible. But it’s possible.

What’s even stranger is that the Sous-Chef is now nearly the age I was when I first visited Royan, which makes it all the more appropriate that we spend a bit of time there.

As had become normal for us, we quickly sought out places to write and stumbled upon a botanical garden of sorts, hidden away in a tiny residential neighborhood.

We wandered for as long as we could, chatting if needed, but mainly examining and taking pictures of the foliage, stopping every so often to jot something in a notebook.

There’s nothing quite as lovely as spending time with someone who is just as much of an introvert as you are. A common misconception of introverts is that we don’t like being around people; far from the truth, what we really like is to be around people who are just as comfortable being alone as we are. It makes for strange afternoons to witness, filled with large, extremely comfortable silences, punctuated with just as comfortable (and often just as long), conversations about everything or nothing at all, as the case may be.

The Sous-Chef and I quickly became experts at this sort of afternoon.

We also became quite good at reading one another’s minds; when we saw a tower standing over the La Rochelle horizon, we both had only one thought on our minds: climb it.

And climb it we did.

From these images, it may seem that we spent our entire time in La Rochelle enjoying sunlight. While we did have some warm days, we were also graced with quite a few rainstorms (most of which we slept through), including one that attacked just as we were finishing a luxuriously long dinner on a terrace in a very small, very typical French restaurant. Which was just fine by me, considering that we were also graced with skies like this.