We left for France on Sunday evening (May 18), so that was day 0. After a relatively uneventful trip flying Boston to Paris (CDG) to Bordeaux (BOD), we arrived in Bordeaux early in the afternoon. (Although the transfer in CDG required several miles of walking, a train ride, more walking, security, passport control, and more walking. But we made it.) We took the tram "A" from right outside the terminal to the Mériadeck stop which was right outside our hotel, FirstName Bordeaux.

After a two hour nap, we took about an hour walk in the downtown area. We had no particular target, we just wanted to get the lay of the land. We did see the Hotel de Ville and a few other sites. We went back to our hotel, relaxed a bit more. We wanted a fairly simple dinner so we took a short walk to Brasserie Liber for dinner. Eileen had magret de canard (duck breast) and I had braised pork. Both were very good.

After dinner we walked back to the hotel and turned in for the night.

Some context for the trip:

The whole trip is in the administrative region call Nouvelle Aquitaine in southwest France, which is the largest of the 18 administrative regions (the 13 European regions shown below and 5 overseas regions). All of the places that we are visiting are in two departments, Bordeaux is in Gironde, and all of the other places are in Dordogne. It's a bit difficult to map the French administrative divisions into US equivalents, but a region is roughly equivalent to a state and a department is roughly equivalent to a county (but bigger in many cases).

Our days are organized as follows:

• Two nights in Bordeaux (days 1 and 2)
• Two nights in Bergerac area (Monbazillac) (days 3 and 4)
• Four nights in Sarlat-la-Canéda (days 5-8)
• Four nights in Les Eyzies (days 9-12)
• One night at a hotel near the airport in Bordeaux (day 13)
• Home (day 14)

FirstName Bordeaux
Brasserie Liber