Making Mom Proud

          This entry is dedicated to my mother, Linda Mocilnikar and to Lynn Gallandt, Karen Day, Scotty Morgan, and really all of the ‘Dillo women:

Today my girlfriends and I went on a (literal) day trip to Bayonne.  I call it a literal day trip because we left at 7:30 in the morning, before sunrise, and came back at around 7:30 just after sunset.  Bayonne is about a two-hour train ride south-east from Bordeaux and is in the Basque region of France meaning that there is a lot of Spanish and French influence. Bayonne is known for it’s jambon (ham), chocolate, and walking sticks.  We got to Bayonne at around 9:30, but the tourism office didn’t open until 10 so we went to a little café and were immediately introduced to the hospitality of Bayonne.  In Bordeaux, people are friendly, but they get flustered with strangers easily and are welcoming to friends of friends, but not as much to strangers—this is not the way in Bayonne, they are very inviting and warm to everyone.  Once the tourism office opened we looked up places to go and wound up walking all the way around the city.  We saw churches and a castle, found a marché, and all of it was so nice and quaint.  We went to a little café again to try some chocolatines and gateaux basques and realized why Bayonne is known for their chocolate, we knew that we were going to a chocolate factory later though so we tried not to over-indulge.  For lunch we decided to get tapas because we knew of the heavy Spanish and French influence there so we walked up and down the river and finally found this little café where we ate tapas (including the well known jambon) and some delicious sangria.  We were definitely being obvious tourists to the region, but the waitress and servers were all so nice and were fully accepting of our silly behavior.  After lunch we decided to go to the chocolate factory and take a tour (including a degoustation (tasting)).  The factory itself was pretty neat and we learned a lot of information about from where they import their cacao.  It cost 5 euros for the tour but really the degoustation is where we got our money's worth.  We tried so many different types of chocolate from all over the world, then we tried truffles, and finally we tried all of the different kinds of sheet chocolate that they had.  We could barely walk out of the factory because we ate SO much chocolate!!  After that we went back to the train station, picked up our tickets and got on the train (after having yet another petite café at the train station brasserie).  I would highly recommend Bayonne for anyone who is traveling in the Basque region: the food is rich, the sangria is cool, the chocolate is plentiful, and the people are friendly as ever.  

Today it happened to be between –2 to 4 degrees Celsius but fortunately there was not much moisture, only a few very frozen girlies and flowers...