The Geography of Spirits

As I've said before in another post, I love maps. Here's a map that isn't self evident in it's subject matter. What does it inform us about? Is it climate? Yes, in an offhand way it's about climate. Is it about politics? Maybe. Is it about culture? Yes, definitely. Is it about history? Oh, yes. Is it about agriculture or geomorphology? Yes, those too. But more than anything, I guess it's about geography, which encompasses all of the above.



It is a map of who drinks what where. The red areas drink wine, the greenish areas drink beer and the blue areas drink distilled spirits. It's pretty obvious when you think about it. The regions that have the climate to grow grapes drink wine. In areas that are too cold to grow good grapevines, they grow the components of beer; barley and hops. And the colder regions distill spirits from whatever they can grow, say potatoes or rye.



Wine, beer and spirits. But what about Scotch? Scotland is represented as a beer drinking country, and I'm sure that's true. But it's famous for a diststilled spirit aged in barrels. If they drank all they produced, instead of exporting it, I'm sure they would show up as blue. And what is it that Iceland drinks?

But, with some anomalies, I think this map is pretty accurate, at least in my experience. Your thoughts?

I found this map at http://www.strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Buenas Dias, Puerto Vallarta

I haven't been to Mexico since about 1977 but we are going this March. We have traded our house in Leran to a Canadian couple for two weeks. We go to their condo in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and they will spend two weeks at our village house in France. What a deal. We listed our house with an on-line agency. You post some photos of your place and either actively look for places to go, contact the owners and strike a deal, or (and this is what we did) sit back and wait for the offers to roll in.
We have also gotten offers for trades in Holland, Austria, Marseilles, Paris, England, Ireland and places I've forgotten. I am really quite surprised that so many people want to trade for our house, a humble, modest house in a humble and modest village in southern France, but they do. We got an incredible number of offers from Australia, and if we had so desired, we could have made any number to trades and spent an entire season down under. I don't know what the attraction is for Australians, perhaps their dollar is strong right now against the Euro, who knows.

I passed through Puerto Vallarta on a family trip to Manzanillo. We stopped for a few minutes in the central portion of town many years ago. I thought then, and I've heard from others and read that Puerto Vallarta is the most European of Mexican villages. Well, judging by the photo above, it doesn't look like much of a village, more like a city. In any case, it will be good to get out of Dodge for awhile and seek out some warm weather and beach time.

We Get Letters

I got an e-mail from Julian asking about the painting over the mantel in the last post. I can oblige. It's a watercolor by Gary Davis, a former Coloradoan, now living in Mesa, Arizona. We made a trade years ago, when we were all poor as church mice. I traded a camera lens for the painting and I'm sure I got the better part of the deal.

The story behind the painting is this: the old truck sat for many years alongside this old building in Crested Butte, Colorado. It was there when I first visited CB in 1966 and it was gone when I was working construction there in 1972. Gary had gotten a photo of it at some point and had done the painting. The truck sat on the east side of the building, or in the photo below, the right side.

The building is now a museum but it was once a hardware store/gasoline station, a Conoco station. I worked for a brief time at the competitive gas station at the edge of town, a Standard Oil.

In this drawing, you can see where the truck would have been sitting, decomposing and rusting away. And in the photo below, you can see the building when it was a gas station. Crested Butte was a coal mining town before it was a ski area. (It still retains some of the old charm, even though skiing eventually ruins everything it touches, speaking in an environmental and historical sense.) The town was populated by old miners from eastern Europe, with Hungarian, Slovakian, Croatian, Czech, Serbian and Polish names. It was always interesting to observe, in the bars, the mixing of the old population with the new, young skiing crowd. I 'm sure its still be interesting to look at the names in the Crested Butte phonebook.

Anyway, that's the backstory of the painting that sits on our mantel. Sometime this summer, Nancy and I will re-visit Crested Butte. It's about 75 miles away from Montrose. Keep checking in.

On to Plan B (What is Plan B?)

Removing wallpaper and painting walls is about the most exciting thing we've been doing lately. I think the results are really nice but we look forward to spring and summer and working outside in the yard. Above is the newly furnished and painted dinning room, and below is the newly furnished and painted living room. Fergus hangs out near the fireplace, which is not a bad idea.

Look, a heating duct between the studs. I guess it should have been expected. But I was surprised.

We have a master plan which includes totally re-modeling the upstairs bathroom. Before we can do that, we have to add a shower to the downstairs bathroom, so that we have someplace to clean up while the upstairs bath is in transition. We had decided we could tuck a small shower under the staircase, and so we ripped into the wall, only to find a heating duct for the bathroom upstairs. Hmm. What to do? Stick with plan A or move on to Plan B. Move the duct or move the shower? We're waiting for a heating and plumbing professional to come and tell us what our options might be. Either way, it's going to be more complicated than we had originally planned.

Winter in Leran

The Rue du Four with a load of snow looks rather forlorn. Our friend Julian sent us these photos thinking we might be interested to see what Leran looks like under a blanket of snow, and he was right. From my American perspective, I am wondering how a snowplow gets down the street, and the answer is they don't, I guess. Do they have snowplows in southern France? They must. But for the Rue du Four, it must just have to melt off some sunny and warm day. And if a snowplow could get down the street, it would just pile up snow on the doorstep. On the plus side, there is very little sidewalk to shovel. Here, in our new American residence in Montrose, we have, perhaps, around 300 to 400 feet of sidewalk that we are required to shovel after a storm. Fortunately, we haven't had much snow here.

This is Cours St. Jacque and the blue shutters are on the front of l'Impasse du Temple, John and LeeAnn's B&B.

This is the old Mairie, above, and below is the front of our humble residence with what might be a foot of snow sitting on someone's car. It all looks rather cold and gloomy, with the snow and grey, pewter colored sky. All in all, right now, I'm happy to be here in Colorado where the sun shines every day. I know there would be no hope of being toasty warm inside 14 Rue du Four.

The Great Evening of Laura Faroult

If you're in Leran, you already know that Mademoiselle Laura Faroult, formerly of Leran, didn't win the Miss France competition that took place in Martinique in the Caribbean. Laura's parents, Nelly and Thierry, ran the bar in Leran our first summer there. Thierry and Nelly had two daughters, the other being Virginia, and I could never tell them apart. I was always asking "Which one was that?" after one of them greeted us with two or three bissous. Beautiful Laura became Miss Albigeois Midi Pyrenees and had hopes of becoming Miss France and then Miss World. She had my vote, indeed, if I'd had a vote.

Thierry and Nelly live in Lavalanet now and I do believe that Laura is attending college somewhere, perhaps in Montpeiller. If you peruse the archives of North of Andorra from the summer of 2007, you'll find pictures of Laura (or perhaps it's Virginia) before she was famous.

This little article mentions that all of the region of Laroc d'Olmes, and beyond, were totally behind the idea of Laura becoming Miss France. Alan and Eileen Simmons, who sent this article with their Christmas card, wrote on the page, "Sadly, Laura didn't win, but it was good to have a celebrity close to here for a time!"