But we got a little off base going from Giverny to Belleme. A certain exit number was indicated on the instructions but not on our Michelin France road map. Instead of following my gut as to where to turn off, I kept looking for it. That sent us pretty far west and we had to come back on backroads to get to the town. We wasted about an hour doing that.
The loss of time was important because our hotel reception closed between 2 and 6, we were hungry and we had laundry to do. We got to Belleme just after the reception closed. I looked for the location of the laundry I found online and didn't find it on the ground. I asked at a couple of places including the tourist information, but they knew of none. Silly me, I thought it was a self-service laundry. As it turned out it was a laundry where they do it for you.
We took our clothes there the next morning when it opened at 9, got them back at noon, considerably wetter than normal European dry, put them in the back of the car and headed for Le Mans. Our trials and tribulations at the track are documented earlier, but we might have avoided them if a.) I had followed my instincts about where to turn off thereby arriving at the hotel before they closed and learning where to take our clothes, or b.) asked about a place to have someone else do the laundry. The place we took it just looked like a dry cleaners to us, so when we walked by, we missed it.
Since we couldn't check into our room until after 6, we drove to the little town north of us, Mortagne on the traffic circle sign below. We found a self-service laundry there, but stupidly didn't stop and do our clothes right then. Part of the reason for that was that we were starving. Maslow's Hierarchy kicked in and food was more important.
If you've kept up with the timing, it is now between 2:30 and 3:00. If you kept up with the location, it's small town France. There is no restaurant open. In Mortagne, right next to the laundry we should have used, was a bakery. They had both savory and sweet things. We got both. The sweet young girl there offered to heat the savories for us, so we got that and went back to the car to have a little picnic. The food was delicious and our attitudes got a little better.
So here's us coming into Belleme.
It looks pretty quiet, eh?
This is the "busy" town center.
The main street went straight to the corner where we turned left to get to our hotel.
I'm not sure what this was, but it looked fancy to me. I did see a family on the bottom floor where the shutters are open. They had grandparents and grandkids and a golden retriever, so they were cool.
We turn on around the corner and see the fountain in the pond across the street.
There was a small corner park right next to the hotel.
And here's the hotel.
We requested a ground floor room. We got one. It was in the building attached to the hotel that looks like a barn.
The room was pretty large with a very large bathroom. It was a good thing because we spent quite a bit of time in it and there was plenty of room to spread out our clothes to dry after we got back from the race track Saturday evening. Trout seems comfy.
This window was on the back side of the room over a back yard. We never closed the dark curtains.
There was no need to. No one was out there.
And the grape arbor grew right up onto the window grates and sill. The grapes were just started to set when we were there.
We ate all our breakfasts and dinners at the hotel. It caters to many Le Mans fans. Lots of them are Brits, so they had this nice dark beer for Trout.
There were some people who were there the whole time we were, but most of the people in these pictures were just there Sunday evening after the race was over.
Dessert was always a part of the fixed-price meals we had. By Sunday night, we had run through almost all the options. I did a repeat, but Trout decided to try the Calvados souffle.
The place was almost full when he ordered it.
Imagine our surprise when one of the waitresses rolled out a table by the side of ours. Then the chef came out.
Look at the size of that souffle! It was embarrassing and funny at the same time, as you can see from the guys staring and laughing.
It was light as a feather and fancy with the apple swan. The liquor had burned off, so even I could taste it. We ate the apples off the top and about half of the thing.
Trout had to deconstruct the swan.
The next morning as we and so many others were checking out, he struck up a conversation with one of the Brits. After years of going to Le Mans, they had the best methods down pat. I doubt that we will ever go again, but if we do, we will use their methods.
While he did that, I talked to the owner of the hotel. I think her husband is the chef. We had a very interesting discussion about how hard it is to get good help these days. She had one waitress who had been with her for 4 years and was going to leave soon to study to be a hotelier herself, or at least to work at a higher level in the hospitality industry. The rest, including the cleaning staff, came and went just like they do in the States. I had noticed that the owner was there in the dining room late at night and back at work the next morning when we had breakfast. That was not her desired work schedule. It was what she had to do because of the lack of staff.
Belleme is in the former province of Perche where Percheron horses were developed. Oddly, we didn't notice any near the roads where we drove, but as we left town heading south, we came upon this traffic circle. I made Trout stop so I could get a decent picture.
Wikipedia doesn't have much info on Belleme. That's why I chose something different for the link at the beginning. But Wikipedia did have an interesting chart of population for the town. In 2009, the population was 1,547. In 1793, the first year on the population list, there were 2,771 people. The highest year was 1846 with 3,350 people. It has become a vacation town more than anything else, it seems. That was fine with us.
