Porto Vecchio, and Baguettes

We are now in Porto Vecchio.  We left Ajaccio after visiting the market, and the Fesch Museum.  The Fesch Museum is mostly an art gallery with a lot of important Italian paintings, including a lovely Madonna and child piece by Boticelli.  Here is a poster advertising the museum, with a portion of that painting included

Corsica is a mountainous area - from some of the exhibits we saw it appears that the range of mountains was somehow part of the Alps.  so you can imagine that driving from one part of corsica to the other is driving on the sides of very steep mountains, with a sharp drop off on one side and an unforgiving solid rock on the other.  and still they manage to establish towns along the way.  nice view for the passengers, but Clark could not take his eyes off the road for a moment - the road is two lane, and narrower than we are used to, and we were travelling on the main highway.

Our accommodations in Porto Vecchio are in a resort, but aside from a few feral cats we are the only inhabitants.  It has lovely grounds, with palm trees swimming pool, and tennis court, but it is not really the right weather for either the pool or the tennis court - a little chilly, and quite windy.  we do have a good view of the ocean, and the town, and are close to a gas station, the grocery store, and a very famous beach.  As in Ajaccio we have kitchen, washer, dishwasher, and crib etc for Juniper.

Yesterday we drove in to the mountains to an archeological site, and visited a small but lovely museum in Levie.  it showed the remains found in these hills of the Dame de Bonifacio - a 10,000 year old skeleton , and several other ancient artifacts unearthed in these parts.  The walk to the archaeological site was through gnarly woods, periodically coming upon rocks which had been eroded in strange ways .

Today we went to the beach at Palombaggio  - the one they show the pictures of in the tourist brochures. We were not the only people on the beach, but we were the only ones that got our feet wet.  The water was warm enough for swimming, but the wind was a little cold, even for us.

Now about the food here.  We do not often eat in restaurants, because they are either closed for the season, or only open at hours that are inconvenient for us with a little one.  We will try one of the local eateries tonite.  But in the meantime we have been having our fill of baguettes, and croissants, and lovely produce, and chicken.  The fish here is very pretty to look at , but quite expensive.  I have not seen anything that is what we would consider reasonably priced.  but you have to love a country that although its fish is expensive, its chocolate and patisseries are not.