Some Apples, and to Be Pet
September 5-10, 2023
We’ve been in Europe long enough now that when an opportunity arises to return to a place we’ve previously enjoyed, we’re happy to go back. So when Mazz’s line of work brought her back to Lyon, France, there wasn’t any hesitation before deciding to turn it into a little trip. Mazz would go early and attend to her business, then Kirb would join for a quick taste of French bars and restaurants before taking off for some adventure in the mountains. Kirb loves it when Mazz goes to cool places for work, especially France. France is Kirb’s favorite place to eat.
This year, there was an added bonus to the timing of the work trip: Our friend Jesus was going to be passing through France on his way back home to Spain after a 10,000 kilometer summer road trip across Europe. He’d outfitted a little sedan with a fold-up bed in the back and had been sleeping in parking lots. He was thrilled to have a pull-out couch to call his own in our tiny Airbnb.
Of all the countries we’ve visited over the years, we’ve had the least luck with the quality of our Airbnbs in France for some reason. On first sight, we laughed at how small our place in Lyon was, and it wasn’t particularly clean, but it served our purposes well enough. It was still much nicer than French rentals we’d had in the past. We soon learned that our apartment was infinitely better than those of some of Mazz’s co-workers: One rental had no bed, only a pull-out couch, and when you deployed that bed it made it so you couldn’t open the bathroom door. Our apartment was fine. But it was very hot, and quite difficult - if impossible - to cool down at night. Kirb left a lot of sweat DNA behind in that bed.
The apartment was located in a quiet neighborhood that was nicely situated for Mazz’s business dealings, but we learned quickly that there wasn’t much going on in this part of town in the evenings. There were plenty of restaurants around, just not the kind we wanted to go to on a French vacation. In the daytime, it was easy to walk to farmers markets and to the giant, fancy Paul Bocuse market that we also visited during our first visit to Lyon. We spent our first morning together amassing a stockpile of cheeses, breads, produce, and wines and then tucked in back at the apartment for a feast. Kirb in particular loves the hunt of procuring fine French products for a snack lunch, and was excited to share this experience with Jesus, who is Spanish and almost unilaterally believes that Spanish stuff is the best stuff. Kirb was miffed to find that most of the goods we had bought were just…fine. They weren't even better than the curated French groceries we’ve learned how to procure in Berlin. Jesus was a good sport, but this snack lunch clearly wasn’t going to inspire any French epiphanies.
Kirb was happy to have a friend around while Mazz was indisposed, especially since Jesus had more ideas for exploring the city than just visiting a wide variety of cheesemongers. Jesus suggested a free walking tour, and while Kirb never wants to visibly stand out as a tourist, it did seem like a good way to see parts of the city that we would have otherwise never visited. This indeed turned out to be the case, as the tour went into the actually cool part of Lyon’s old town we had completely missed during our first trip to the city, and likely would have missed this time as well without the pointed advice from a local guide.
The mural on the side of this building depicts all of the most influential residents of Lyon throughout time, with the most recent at the bottom. Paul Bocuse is manning the butcher shop on the ground floor
The restaurant we went to in that part of town for dinner, Brasserie Sathonay, was this trip’s first taste of real French excellence, which we’d somehow whiffed on buying cheeses and produce all week. The thing that France does better than just about anyone else is taking something that seems mundane and then making it extraordinary, like butter. At this restaurant, they served the single best Caesar salad Kirb had ever tasted. You need exceptional quality of ingredients and attention to detail to make something as simple as a salad sing. Imagine being *so impressed* by a salad. France does that, somehow.
This neighborhood was also home to lots of good wine bars, and we found an amazing one called Satriale that had a wide variety of €10-20 French natural wine bottles with only a €6 corkage fee. This price and value for money is really unbeatable. The three of us happily sat and split a bottle of Gamay at the counter, only moving on to another spot because Satriale was closing. The next bar was also a club that sold pizza and apparently bao buns, so it was really all over the place, but they had good wine too (for about three times the price). This was a popular place, and there was a young guy sitting next to us on the patio who was having a really good time on some pretty strong drugs. We took the subway back to our apartment and that neighborhood was dead, dead, dead. If we ever go back to Lyon a third time, now we know where we should stay.
The next morning Jesus dropped us off at the airport rent-a-car and we said our fond farewells as he took off back to Spain. We give particularly low marks for the usually-reliable Europcar at the Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport, which made us wait for nearly an hour before giving us a car missing a noticeable amount of fuel and then expected us to be cool with that (and bring it back full). Jesus had griped that his short time driving in France had already racked up €40 in tolls, and we felt his pain when a 30-minute ride on the freeway cost us €13. We decided to set google maps to “avoid tolls” after that.
We stopped for supplies in Grenoble, picking up groceries for the weekend and some camping gas that we couldn’t bring along on the plane. We didn’t see any of Grenoble’s city center, but the outskirts had a strangely American vibe, in that there were a preponderance of big-box stores and a vibe that felt strangely “methy.” Grenoble is surrounded by sharp, intimidating mountain peaks, and as soon as we finished our shopping chores and began to venture further east we found ourselves in a dramatic and all-encompassing alpine environment.
The town of La Bérarde, situated at the end of Vénéon Valley, didn’t seem particularly far from Grenoble but still took an hour and a half to reach. At least half of this drive is done in second gear, carefully following the narrowest lanes as they snake along jutting, exposed stone and sheer drops. If you stop paying attention for a moment you might drive off the side of a cliff. We picked up a young couple that were hitchhiking outside a small town and carted them further down the road to enjoy a chill day on the river. They were locals who, strangely enough, had just visited Berlin the week before. The guy’s parents used to run one of the mountain huts, so he had grown up in this valley.
What a place to grow up! There aren’t too many times we’ve arrived at a campsite and immediately hi-fived each other because of where we’d found ourselves, but that’s exactly what we did at Camping municipal de la Bérarde. The grounds were next to a turquoise-blue river surrounded on all sides by steeply-extending peaks. The whole valley felt completely enclosed, like you were in the center of a perfect circle of mountains. It wasn’t quite as hot here as it had been in Lyon, but it was still sweltering in the sun, so we found a spot with afternoon shade and set up camp.
It’s about a ten minute walk from the campsite into town, where there is one little store to get supplies and a few other bars and restaurants. The shop was full of treasure and the goods were adequately priced for being the only option for a very long way down the valley. We bought an adorable “Les Alpes” tote bag with a mountain goat on it and some sparkling water to mix with the Spanish vermut we’d picked up at Satriale. We cooked pesto pasta and sipped drinks as the sun dipped behind the mountains and made pink light. It was all very lovely.
A lot of cars showed up once we retired to our tent and we woke to find that a French toddler convention had moved in next door. They took up four spaces surrounding us, and as the dim light in the valley brightened, dozens of small bodies began to rise and scream. They were screaming in French, which made it a little bit cuter, and we looked out on the gorgeous mountains that surrounded us and drank our coffee and were still plenty happy to be where we were.
We chose this place because one of our most trusted hiking books, 100 Hut Hikes in the Alps, had two hikes leading out of Le Bérarde. The town is situated where the Vénéon valley splits like a Y, giving hikers lots of options for routes. We chose the longer hike to the Châtelleret hut first, which climbed steeply from the edge of town up to a saddle that was still covered in morning shade. A large group of donkeys refused to move from the trail despite a woman frantically waving her arms at them.
This hike through the Etançon valley and the Oisans massif was one of the most beautiful walks we have ever taken. Like the Devil’s Staircase hike we did in Scotland earlier in the summer, we figured this hike was squarely in our top 10 of all time. Getting two of those in a single summer is pretty good! This hike was four straight hours of some of the most beautiful stuff nature has to offer, which is exactly what the hiking guide had promised. The book also added this fun tidbit:
The hut sits at the head of the charming Etançons glen beneath the huge face of La Meije, and gazes downstream at a landscape almost Himalayan in appearance. Wherever one looks, impressive peaks jostle for attention, mountaineers’ mountains on which some of the great names of the Victorian age played out their adventures. Interesting to note that when Whymper descended into this glen in 1864 he was singularly unimpressed, describing it as “a howling wilderness, the abomination of desolation…suggestive of chaos, but of little else.
We don’t know what that guy was on, but he must have been having an otherwise pretty bad day. On our way down, we ran into the donkeys again and decided to give them our leftover apple cores. The donkeys that didn’t get any treats started following us intently and Kirb was worried that he had made a terrible alpine mistake, but these donkeys were nice. They just wanted some apples, and to be pet. Isn’t that what we all want?
We decided to take a different path back down into the village and found it much steeper, causing Mazz to descend yet another alp on her bottom. She showed up in La Bérarde with a real dusty butt and put her French language skills to work with the woman who owned the adorable shop, which unsurprisingly doubled as a bar. We sat on that patio for several hours drinking Picon beers and white wine and sampling the local Genepy liqueur. We’d come across this mountain flower flavor on the Swiss/Italian border as well and it is delicious stuff. We decided we would very much like to own and operate a shop like this in a tiny alpine town when we grow up.
We weren’t sad to pack up our gear the next morning amid the full-blown toddler party popping off all around us. We parked the rental car in the lot in town and made an earlyish-start through the upper Vénéon valley. Though the lot was mostly full, it wasn’t hard to separate ourselves from other hikers and enjoy the sun rising over the hills in solitude. This rocky path follows the river upstream, surrounded by fields of juniper with occasional wild raspberries and alpenrose. It only takes an hour or so to reach the Refuge du Carrelet, but if you want, you can continue further up the valley. We only went as far as the hut, where we got coffees and a pear and chocolate tart while we solemnly admired the steadily-melting Pilatte glacier in the distance.
On the way down, we passed a line of college kids on the trail that stretched for well over a minute from front to back. We tried to figure out why so many of them were on the hike together and decided the answer was probably just “church.” With plenty of daylight ahead of us, we took the car a few kilometers down the main road to a different trailhead. When we arrived at the next trail marker, we realized that we had forgotten the hiking poles in the car, and this trail went directly uphill. It was really hot out. We didn’t want to backtrack, and we didn’t particularly want to walk up a really big hill in the heat, so we walked back in the car and decided to find a nice mountain lake instead. That seemed like a much more pleasant afternoon activity.
The road to the parking lot for Lac du Buclet took us on some real bumpy, rural dirt roads, but it still surprisingly deposited us in a proper parking field full of beach-goers. We made our way to the lake and got in at the first spot we found to swim. The sun was already going down behind the mountains here and as soon as we got in the water the two toddlers that had already claimed this part of the lake began to violently punch and scream at each other. We packed up our belongings and walked around to the shore on the other side, where the sun still shone and the children did not scream, then luxuriated in a final summer dip.
The toddlers, they scream
After Lac du Buclet, the next 24 hours or so turned out to be a real comedy of errors. Somehow, finding a place to get dinner between Les Écrins and Lyon was impossible on a Sunday evening. Almost every single restaurant on google maps was closed, and the ones that claimed to be open were all shuttered when we arrived. After multiple out-of-the-way letdowns, we inexplicably found ourselves next to a Ninkasi brewery and restaurant that happened to be open, and considered it good fortune. Somehow, the Oregon-based beer brand has gotten huge in France, and though it wasn’t exactly the final, luxurious French meal we had been searching for, beers and burgers and big salads were a fine consolation after so many failed attempts to simply find anything to eat. In true American fashion, we watched the kickoff of the NFL season on one of our phones as we ate our bar fare.
The Lyon airport is pretty far out of town, so we stayed in the outskirts to make things easier in the morning. The cheap hotel we picked out was indeed inexpensive and close to the airport and had cool features like a soap dispenser that broke off the wall immediately when you tried to use it to wash the lake off your feet, covering the shorts you were planning to wear the next day in a sticky gel. Kirb somehow also managed to spill wine on, like, everything, in that hotel. Maybe it was karmic retribution, because it certainly wasn’t intentional.
Lufthansa always asks on short flights that passengers voluntarily check their carry-on bags, and this time Mazz obliged, sending her backpack down the conveyor belt with the duffel bag containing all of our high-end camping gear. Our first flight was delayed; we had to be rushed across Frankfurt airport in a van to make our connection to Berlin. That flight ended up being significantly delayed as well, but not enough for our bags to make the trip along with us in the hold. We got back to Berlin on a Monday. Mazz didn’t get her voluntarily-checked backpack containing all her clothes, laptop charger, and house keys until Saturday. Kirb, whose laptop had just died and believes awful things happen in groups, stressed himself out thoroughly worrying that we were never going to see our bag full of all of the most expensive (and favorite) things we own ever again. The airline will pay you €400 if you arrive at your destination a few hours late. They compensate you €0 for holding all your underpants and camping gear hostage for nearly a week.
We’re always discovering new, great stuff when we go to France and this trip was no exception. We may not have found any particularly mind-blowing dairy and produce this time around, but we eventually discovered the part of Lyon we should have been hanging out in all along. Écrins National Park was as beautiful as any Alps we’ve ever seen; every bit as stunning as our favorite locales in Switzerland. Just like Lyon, we won’t hesitate to return and explore these majestic mountains again in the future.