We’re definitely making progress with Pat and the cats.  While Andy held Patches, Steve had me walk Pat past her several times, making him behave.  He got a couple high collar corrections, but in the end I was walking him up and down past Patches and he was behaving beautifully.  It will take a few more of these sessions, because he's still too excited about the cats if I am not right on top of him.  In the end we’ll get to consistently acceptable behavior on his part and lack of open hostility from Patches and Bella.   If they actually become friends, excellent, but they don’t need to be.  Pat just needs to behave and the cats just need to get on with life.

Steve said training a guide dog to avoid even looking at cats (or squirrels or other varmints) no matter what isn't a good idea.  Cats and squirrels are all over the neighborhood, and if one walks across our line of travel, we don’t want Pat averting his eyes and possibly running me into an obstacle in the process. 

I’m getting the hang of clicker training, too.  The clicker is a simple little plastic box with a springy piece of metal in it that you can “pop” or “click” with your finger to make a sharp and resonant clicking sound.   The dogs are trained to associate the click with their favorite thing in the world:  food.   By clicking at the exact moment the dog shows the desired behavior, and then rewarding the dog with food, the dog learns the desired behavior faster.  

So … at a specific street light on Riverside Boulevard, where I usually cross the street to get to Vic’s Coffee and Ice Cream, there is a pole with one of those buttons you push so the light will change to stop traffic and allow pedestrians to cross.   I want Pat to take me right to that pole.    Steve taught me the “fist training” technique to teach Pat to do this.  Standing in front of the pole and holding Pat on my left, I put a kibble in my right fist, and bump my fist against the pole right under the button, saying “Button!”  At the instant Pat touches his nose to my fist, I pop the clicker, and then I open my fist (keeping it againtthe pole) and let him have the kibble.  After I do this a few times I push Pat back about two feet back using my hand against his chest.  Now I bump my fist (with no kibble) against the pole, saying “Button!”  At the moment Pat touches my fist with his nose, I pop the clicker and then (and only then) I reach into my right pocket and pull out a kibble reward, but Pat doesn’t get it until the back of my hand is on the pole again.   After repeating this a few times, we step back a few paces, I take up Pat’s handle, and command him, “Forward, find the button!”

At this point we ran into problems.  Pat kept taking me toward the pole and then veering off from it.  Steve figured out what was happening.  Pat is trained to regard poles as obstacles to keep me away from, rather than take me to.  So we ended that clicker session, and this afternoon we worked on fist-training Pat to take me to the breakfast nook bench.  This time the process was magic, even when I flubbed the timing or called him “Trace” sometimes.  Part of my homework tonight was extending that session so that he would take me the bench from the hallway as well as the kitchen.  Pat will now take me right to the breakfast nook bench from the family room, the kitchen and the hallway.   Eventually we’ll go back to that pole, after Pat and I hone our teamwork and he’s more familiar with his new stomping ground.

I was glad we didn’t start until 10 a.m. today.   Pat did well in the crate last night, and I didn’t need to use the blanket over him, either.   If he did cry I was blissfully unaware (there ARE some advantages to being deaf).   I actually got a decent night’s sleep, but still, It wasn’t easy getting up this morning.  

I knew i’d have more energy earlier than I would later, so the first workout session was our long one.  Beautiful day for getting out and about — everything fresh and clean from yesterday’s rain, and bright sunshine to warm the chill out of the winter day.  It was a good workout, even though we didn’t have the best results training Pat to take me to the street crossing button pole.   And I was disappointed we didn't get to reward ourselves with a nice little pit stop at Vic’s.  When we got there, four or five pesty little yip-yappy ground huggers were hanging around.   Steve said at least one of them was not on leash.   We decided this was not the time to subject Pat to a pack of pests, and just did an about and started working our way back home.

That route has changed since I last worked it with Trace more than two years ago.   I didn’t recognize many of the sidewalk corners, because they’d all been changed, some of them within the last few months.   They used to all be nice and distinct with identifiable characteristics.  Some  curbs were quite high off the street, others were cracked in a certain way, and still others had distinctive grass or gravel at the corner.   Great for blind folks, of course — we look for those distinctive edges to keep ourselves oriented — but impossible  for the wheelchair folks.   So now all those nice crisp corners are ramped down to the street so you can’t find the curbs anymore.  And worse, instead of nice crisp 90-degree angle corners, they’re all gently rounded so it’s a challenge to stay aligned when you’re crossing streets.

Still, Pat did stellar work, and again, he did not blow a single curb.  There was one street crossing, though, where he just didn’t want to take me in a straight line to the ramped up-curb.  He kept moving me over to the right so that I had to step up onto the curb, and then work him to the left to get back into my line of travel.  Steve and I couldn’t figure out what was going on there, but eventually we will.

I was tireder than I realized when we started our second workout in the afternoon.  Good thing it was a short one, too, because I was seriously wobbly by the time we got back home.  I even forgot where I was at one point and started turning right a block too early on the home stretch.   I took some ibuprofen as soon as I got home — I ache all over —  and now that Pat’s had  his final relief time  and is settled in his crate (and NOT whining!) for the night, I’m gonna go take a nice hot epsom salt bath and hit my pillow early. 

Well we have a hitch, a glitch, a twitch…  we have the flu.  Or something.  Andy came down with it a couple days ago.  He's been feeling like hell, putting in short work days and going straight to bed when he gets home.  I was hoping to escape it, but alas, no, this morning I realized that the mild ache and tiredness I was feeling yesterday wasn’t just old lady creaks and new dog stress.   This morning I felt absolutely lousy and could barely crawl out of bed in time to be dressed and ready for Steve at nine.

It didn’t help that I didn’t get much sleep last night either.   Andy and I agreed that during our training period, it will be best for him to take Trace as usual to his crate in our master bedroom, and for me to sleep in our front guest bedroom with Pat on tie-down.   

Pat’s whining got in the way of that plan, at least the part about keeping him on tie-down.  He whined continuously last night, even after Trace had gone to his crate for the night and was therefore out of sight and out of mind. 

At first I tried to ignore it, but my nerves couldn’t hold out.  I thought maybe he really needed to relieve himself again, even though I’d already taken him out for his 8 p.m. on-leash “busy time” relief session.  I considered that Pat’s system might still be out of whack from jet lag.  So, even though Steve said not to, I took Pat back out for another “busy-busy time!”   He took a short leak, and seemed OK when I brought him back in.   I put him on tie-down next to the bed, and I was just getting ready to take my CI off and hit my pillow when he started up again with his piteous puppy sobs.   It was nerve-wracking.  I suppose I should have just taken the CI off and gone to sleep — but with a new dog, it’s hard to really know what’s going on when he whines and cries like that.    I almost called Steve, but it was late and I knew he was catching up on jet-lag-recovery sleep too.   So finally I let Pat jump up on the bed, and he was a happy camper. 

“No no NO!” Steve said, when I told him about it this morning.  “Not good, not good at all.”  First of all, Steve said, Pat is my guide dog, not my mate.    “He works for you,” Steve said. “He needs to know with absolutely no question that YOU are the boss.  Bosses do not sleep with their workers.  They sleep with their mates.  Letting your working guide dog up on the bed with you sends confusing signals.”

Steve emphasized his point with a story about his own experience training a dog when he was in the Marine Corps.  (Yah, he’s a Marine, right down to the buzz haircut!)   He’d kept the dog on tie-down next to his cot, but after a while he let the dog up on the cot, at his feet.  Everything seemed fine,  Steve said, until one night he woke up with the dog snarling and lunging for the throat of one of his fellow Marines who needed to wake Steve for some reason.  “It turned out OK,” Steve said, “but if I hadn’t been able to get to the dog in time, he could have killed somebody.”

What was bad about the dog’s action was not so much that it acted protectively toward Steve, but that it had assumed the authority to attack — because sleeping on the cot with Steve gave the dog equal status to Steve.  It’s possible, even probable, the dog would still have wanted to attack from tie-down if someone had disturbed Steve in their sleep.  But, in a tie-down position, the dog knew that Steve was the boss, and would follow Steve’s orders.  Even if the dog acted protectively while on tie-down, it probably would have been more of a warning growl and/or bark that would not have exploded into full-blown attack without Steve’s permission.  

“OK I get it,” I told Steve.  “But….”  and I told him about April, and how I’d kept her on tie-down at night for two years before I allowed her up on the bed.   I was staying at a hotel in Toronto, Canada, and my room was on the ground floor, with a sliding glass door that opened out onto a small patio and then the parking lot.  It was late and I was relieving April out on the grassy gravel between the patio and the parking lot.  All of a sudden I didn’t want to be out there.  No reason I could explain, I just had a feeling, and I didn’t like it out there anymore.   I hustled up April and got us back inside, locked all three or four locks and closed all the drapes, and made sure I was as secure and private as I could be.

Then I took a shower and got ready for bed.   I was sitting on the bed, facing the curtained sliding glass door, wondering if I wanted to get up and get my journal from the table, or if I would just put April on tie-down, turn off the light, and hit the pillow.   I decided to get my journal.  As I began to rise from the bed, April leaned back against me and I fell back onto the bed.  Surprised, I looked down and put my hand on her head and neck.  Her fur was standing up, and I could feel her growling deep in her throat.  I reached my left hand over to pick up my hearing aid from the bedside table and put it on.  

April was definitely growling, very menacingly.   She was staring fixedly at the door.  I thought I heard a tiny little jiggle, as though someone was trying to open the door from outside.  Before I could finish hearing the jiggle — before the jiggle was complete — my little dinky 50-pound yellow Lab exploded into a fit of ferocious barking that sounded like a pack of pit bulls.  I’d never heard her bark like that before, or ever again afterwards.   It must have lasted for only seconds but it felt like forever.   

When she stopped barking, my ears rang in the silence.  She walked up to the sliding glass door, sniffed each end, and then turned around and looked at me, as if to say, “It's OK now.”

If I had had April on tie-down a little away from the bed as usual, and I had not had my hearing aid oe when she started barking, I would have had no idea what was going on.  That was the night I decided April was sleeping on the bed with me.  I told Andy about it when we got back to Sacramento and off the plane.  “We have to go get a king-sized bed so we have room for April,”  I said.   And we did.

Steve said it was still important that, at least for now, Pat be on tie-down, for all the reasons he had just explained.  And I know he's right.   The fact is, I was lucky with April.   I’ve often said that April was much more assertively (as opposed to aggressively) protective of me than Trace.  If someone were to attack me in front of Trace I’m sure he’d move in to protect me.  But if someone were to attack me in front of April, I know she’d have torn his throat out.

I was lucky that when April turned over to me while we were still at Leader Dogs, and began to show her protective nature, my trainer was able to step in and show me what to watch for and how to keep April’s protective instinct under control.  There were a few  times when I had to correct April for growling at someone she didn’t like.  There was always a good reason she didn’t like someone, but still, it was my decision what to do about that, not hers.   When I got Trace, I was on the watch for signs of protective behavior once we had started to bond, and when i caught him growling and barking at a stranger in our dorm, I gave him one of the rare high collar corrections he ever got.  I’ve never had to correct him for that again.  

The upshot:  Steve went out and got me a crate for Pat, and that’s where he’s sleeping at night from now on.  Maybe someday he can get up on the bed once in awhile.  But not now.

Back to the flu … we kept our workouts short today because I just don’t have the energy.  But both of our workouts, as short as they were, were good.  I only dropped two, maybe three, baseballs, and Pat’s work around some unusual sidewalk configurations that are typical here in Sacramento because of all our street trees was excellent.  I only made him do one over again because he ran me into some bushes.  

And he made an illegal executive decision to do a running left turn before I authorized it, so I made him do that over again too.  He has to stop at the edge of a walkway and wait for me to tell him to turn before we do the turn.   Later, I’ll command the running left turn, and then that will be our habit, but it will be a habit I choose, not one that he chooses.   Still, I like his initiative — he's definitely smarter than the average bear.

And his curb work is great.  He got every single one of them right again today.

So, no clicker training today, and no Gentle Leader work on ignoring varmints.  However, I did make progress on cutting down on the whining, and enforcing acceptable behavior with Bella and Patches.    The whining solutions:  short, sharp leash corrections and “No!” and “Quiet!” when he whines.  If he whines when I put him in the crate, go in and growl at him and tell him “No!”  If that doesn’t work, then shake the crate aggressively and growl and tell him “No!”   And if that doesn’t work, throw a blanket over the entire crate.    His whining has cut down remarkably by the end of the day, and his reaction to the cats is improving too.  I jerk him back hard, and give him a high collar correction every time he rushes at them (this is one of the reasons why I have him on leash and connected to me 24/7 when he is not on tie-down or in his crate for the next several months).  And I make him get down on the floor, and when he whines, he gets the short sharp leash corrections and the “No!  Quiet!!”   

But he isn’t barking at them anymore.  He’s just rushing at them.   So, I claim progress there.  Yep yep, we are patiently making great progress!!!  At some point Patches or Bella will walk by and Pat will just look at them, maybe with great interest, but without any rushing or whining.  And when that happens he will get a nice big fat jackpot reward.

It will all come together.  I know it will.  But I have to admit I’d forgotten how much work it is to work with a new and young dog.  April really was  a handful when I brought her home — she was only 16 months when I first got her, and I ended up keeping her on leash at all times for nine solid months.  And I was a lot younger back then, too.  Trace was a little older, 20 months, and I only kept him on leash for about 2 months.  Pat’s three years old, and in a lot of ways much more mature and skilled than either April or Trace were, but I have a feeling he’s going be at least a six-monther on leash.

And although I knew I had to factor in the attention and care I still need to give Trace, I hadn’t factored in how emotionally draining it is to be working so intensely with Pat while at the same time concerned and paying attention to Trace. He’s really getting old and slow, has a big growth in his groin, and lots of those fatty lumps that Labradors are prone to.  And he has his arthritic vertebrae and his palsied eyelid.  He’s still his usual sweet mellow goofy self and loves his feeding times and carrot treats.   I’m grateful he and Pat are getting along so well, and even more grateful that Trace is being such a good sport about it all.  Way better than April was, for sure, when I brought him home.

OK, time to hit the pillow before the overwhelm hits me.

​Just finished my first day with my new guide dog, Pat.  Turns out I did, in fact, hear correctly when I thought I heard my trainer tell me over the phone that my dog’s name was “Patsy.”   I ain’t calling him “Patsy," so he’s Pat, and that’s that.

Pat’s inky black coat is so luxuriantly wavy and thick that when I first felt him I was sure he was a Golden and Labrador retriever cross.  Steve, my trainer, said he thought so, too, but Pat’s papers say he’s all Labrador.  He has the classic Labrador boxy head, but he’s not stocky and stolidly-boned like Trace.  Pat is slim-boned and on the small side, around 65 pounds, which is perfect — easier to cram into cars, buses and planes than Trace was at 75-80 pounds.  Pat’s just over three years old, and  was assigned to another handler and then returned to GDF, not for any problems but because the handler was not able to use a guide anymore.  (No idea why … could have been anything, including death.)

Today we worked out a short half-mile-or-so walk from my house around the neighborhood and back,  patterning him to up- and down-curbs, sidewalk cut-outs for the street trees, and of course the brick light pillars at the sidewalk marking the walkway to my front door, and the door itself.  We also took him to my weekly weight management meeting and patterned him to the building front door, the elevator, and the door of the meeting room.

I’m a little rusty on my dog work, not having used a guide dog for more than two years until now, and there are things I’ve never had to pay attention to before.  For one thing, Steve wants my left arm held a lot closer to my body than I’m used to.  (Guide dogs are usually trained to work on the handler’s left side.)   So he told me to imagine that I’m holding a baseball to my body with my left elbow at all times.  He says “Baseball!!” everytime my elbow drops it to remind me to crook and tuck that elbow back in.  He did that a lot today.

But he also says I have a good way with dogs and that I’m the kind of dog handler “all guide dog schools really want.”  I didn’t remember that when I was dropping all the baseballs, but it’s  sure nice to remember now at the end of the day.  Remembering Pat’s name is another story.  I’ve called Pat “Trace” and  “Pace” a few times, and once I even called him “Trap," but that will work itself out.  (Steve liked my story about calling Trace “Trayple” at first and telling him “Trail!” and “Treel!” when I meant to say, “Trace, Heel!")

Pat’s pace is brisk but not too fast, and he didn’t blow a single curb today.  He’s smart and was right on the mark remembering all the new patterns so far.   He’s full of pep and very affectionate.    We’ll make a good team.

The biggest difference I’m noticing between my Leader Dogs training with April and Trace and the training I’m getting now with Guide Dog Foundation, apart from the differences in commands,  is the focus on food as a reward for doing things right.   I suspect this difference is broader than just Leader Dogs versus Guide Dog Foundation.  I think the movement toward using food to train and reward your dog for doing things correctly is a universal thing.  When I got April in 1999, using food to train a dog was actually frowned upon.   It wasn’t so frowned upon when I went back to get Trace in 2007, and in fact I recall that a bag of treats was included in the bag of free feeding bowl, grooming tools and other items that we all got when we got our dogs.  This time around, though, I’m filling up my pocket with a bunch of kibbles, and routinely praising and rewarding Pat with a kibble for just about everything he does right, and “jackpotting” him (giving him three to five kibbles, one at a time but all in a row, one right after the other) for the big things like finding the doors and elevators.  We even taught him to be quiet when someone knocks at the door in about five minutes with this technique.  It really works.  Tomorrow we’ll do a new route, this time down to my fave coffee-ice cream shop, and use clicker training.

Once he gets all the routes down, the kibble rewards will start decreasing and he’ll only get them when we do new things or when we’re doing the routine obedience maintenance games.  Right now everything is new to him here, so he is getting a lot of reward for good work.

One little problem is that he’s too interested in squirrels.  Not enough to drag me off my line of travel, but enough to turn his head and be focused on the squirrel instead of where we’re supposed to be going.    After Steve alerted me to what was happening, I was able to catch Pat at the squirrel distraction on our second workout — could see just enough to see his head turn, and give him short, sharp leash corrections.  I didn’t catch all of them, though.  So, in addition to the clicker training tomorrow, Pat will get some serious “varmint ignorance” training with a Gentle Leader.

And a big problem is that he’s way too excited about Bella and Patches, our cats.  It’s going to be a cold day in hell before Bella ever comes up to me again when I have Pat next to me.  I’m not sure how we’ll solve this one, but I am sure I’ll find out tomorrow!   Pat and Trace seem to be fine together, however.  We kept Trace outside for the first hour or so that Pat was in the house and Steve and I were going over introductory matters, but after our first workout, we let Trace and Pat have some extended but supervised sniffing time.  Then Trace plopped down on his bed behind the breakfast nook table and Pat (on leash) plopped down on the floor next to me at the same table.  It will be a while before they’ll get to go out and just play together, because right now I have to focus on developing the bond between Pat and me before I let him be buddies with anyone else, canine or human.

And he whines.  I’ve been around dogs who do the whining thing when they’re stressed or want to go play (as Pat does right now with Trace), but I never had to deal with that in either April or Trace.  I wonder if it’s really that Pat’s just a tired puppy who’s had a long hard two days, first traveling across the country and then working all day in a totally new place with a totally unfamiliar person, and now he just wants  his trainer back.   So that’s another thing I’ll be talking to Steve about tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, it’s bedtime for this tired puppy and her tired puppy.

​I could happily work all day every day in an environment infused with the heady and hearty aroma of roasting coffee.   But not chocolate.

I've never been a chocolate fan, and I detest milk chocolate, although every once in a rare while  I do enjoy a piece  of my own German chocolate cake.  And I like a really good-quality dark chocolate (with nuts).  I remember telling my mother when I was a kid to stop putting chocolate candy (it was all milk chocolate back then) in my Christmas stocking and to give me lots of nuts and some Starburst candy instead.  I make damn good chocolate chip cookies for everyone else, but I don't care for them myself unless I put nuts in them, and even then I'd rather have shortbread or oatmeal cookies.

All this I affirmed  absolutely and utterly this morning during our tour of the Bernachon Chocolatier shop, one of Lyon's premier chocolatiers and patisseries.  After only fifteen minutes in there,  I had a headache from all the chocolate fumes.

Bernachon has a small storefront and a series of large kitchens in back, where they make superb pastries,  candies, custards and other supporting vehicles for the star of their existence:  Chocolate.   The kitchens were all well-lit, impressively well-organized and well-designed for working in, and very clean.  

The rooms where the cacao beans are processed into chocolate were spotless, full of white tile and stainless steel machinery.  Our chocolatier himself was dressed in an immaculate white coat over black pants and very shiny black shoes.    I couldn't see his features but I could tell from the outline he made against the bright while walls that he was clean-shaven, had a beaky nose, and his hair was  close-cropped, almost a military buzz.   He had an engaging way of leaning forward on his toes as he talked in rapid-fire French with sincere passion for his craft.  Emmaneul translated, and often had trouble keeping up with all the information.

Our chocolatier told us they use cacao beans from South America, which are superior to (and fewer than, therefore also more expensive than) cacao beans from Africa.  The raw beans were in big burlap sacks, and I swiped a few to munch on.  They were a little larger than my index fingernail, and had an oily nutty texture and taste that I liked.  Their aroma was nutty rather than chocolate-y.  It's only after the roasting that they develop that distinctive chocolate taste and aroma.

It's a complex transmogrification from cacao bean to food of the Gods. The beans are cleaned, roasted, tumbled, spinned, dehydrated, defatted and fatted, sweetened, ground and powdered, heated and cooled, all for very precise times at precise temperatures and precise speeds.  

Even someone like me who does not care much for chocolate had to be impressed with the commitment to excellence in every detail at every stage of the process  that was evident throughout the Bernachon operation.   We could see superior quality from the very beginning, in the storefront display window.  

Andy said there were several extraordinary creations, the most impressive to him being a chocolate cake in the shape of an elaborate hat, complete with chocolate feather plumes.  Each chocolate, each confection (including some meringue sandwich cookies with chocolate filling) was exquisitely perfect and elegantly presented.

At the end of our tour our chocolatier brought out a large tray of chocolates for us to sample.   Andy, along with everyone else,  happily tried almost everything.   I asked him to find me chocolates with nuts in them ("and no froo-froo fillings, please!").   

He found two chocolates that were just right for me.  One was a trio of perfectly roasted  hazelnuts covered with dark chocolate.   The other was a  thin wafer of dark chocolate that had a layer of very finely chopped toasted nuts -- a wonderful crispy crunchy texture surrounded by the deep dark smooth chocolate.   

Even someone like me who does not care much for chocolate had to like those.  It really was excellent chocolate, far superior to any other chocolate I've tasted.   

Andy and I wanted some time to look everything over in the shop and buy chocolates to bring home for gifts.   I particularly wanted to see if I could get more of those wafers and chocolate-covered hazelnuts I liked so much.  But we were being rushed out.  So I told Andy, "just get me five bars of plain dark chocolate and five bars with nuts," and had to be satisfied with that.  I'm sorry now I didn't get ten bars of each, but oh well.  

All in all, the tour was worth the headache, and those dark chocolates with nuts really were excellent .... but I still would never want to work there, thank you very much.  And I still detest milk chocolate.

I was hungry for lunch when we got back to the hotel, so Andy called room service.  They told him they were closed.   "You're closed on a Wednesday during the lunch hour?" Andy asked, not quite believing it.   He got some  lame excuse and hung up.   It was 1:24 p.m., and the restaurant is supposed to be open until 1:30, so we should have been able to order something.  We were getting ready to go to Plan B (maybe a tuna and olive salad again from the place across the street?) when the phone rang. 

It was the room service girl calling.  Apparently, after Andy talked to her, she'd talked to the kitchen staff, and now called to tell Andy, "They're willing to make an exception for you as long as it's something simple like a sandwich or a salad."   All I wanted was soup, and Andy told her so.   They had a cream of fresh pea soup, and sent some up.

It wasn't bad, either, and made a good light lunch to tide me over until our finale dinner tonight.   

And what a dinner it was.  As soon as we walked into the Restaurant Pierre Orsi, we could see why it's been awarded a coveted Michelin star.   Pierre Orsi himself met us as we walked in and greeted each one of us personally.   I have no idea what he looks like, except that he is tall, was wearing chef's whites, and his hands are big and smooth.  He  took both my hands into his, bent down as if to look me straight in the eyes, and said in a soft, soulfully deep (and very sexy) voice, "Enchante, Madame!"    He sounded as though he really and truly meant it, too.  

Woo hoo.   I was ready to give him two more Michelin stars right then and there.

Our table was beautifully set with pristine white linens, several candles, and fresh flowers.  The ambient lighting was soft in the way "dimly-lit" can be really  (and rarely) attractive rather than gloomy.  Andy told me the restaurant was high-ceilings and   the carpeting and window coverings were a deep burgundy color, while the walls were creamy white.  

There was plenty of room for all seventeen of us at our table, so that we didn't feel crowded at all.  And in spite of the size of our party, it seemed like every single one of us was waited on at once.   I think they must have had one waiter to every two or three of us at the table.   First off, each one of us was given a spoon with a bite of salmon tartare, and we were offered little squares of what was either a toasted bread or a pastry with a broiled cheese topping that had minced ham and other good things in it.  Andy and I could have eaten a half-dozen of those.  Then we were served a small cup of cream of pea soup that put the room service pea soup to shame. I could have made a meal of just a nice big bowl of that soup.

We were offered a choice of first courses and I chose the lobster tail salad, while Andy chose the crawfish risotto.  (We had been served a white wine to go with the preliminaries, and now were served a different wine to go with our first courses, depending on what we'd  chosen; Andy and I were served a different white wine to go with our lobster and crawfish.) 

My lobster salad was arranged with the bright red lobster shell head and tail, and claw meat removed whole from the claw shells, so that it looked like a lobster on my plate.  The salad itself was some of the best lobster I've ever tasted.    Andy's crawfish risotto was adorned with the red shell of a crawfish, and he said the risotto was excellent.

(But he wouldn't eat the wild mushrooms in it, so I got to eat them.  They were wonderful, with intense mushroom flavor that just doesn't happen in mushrooms at home.)

And then the main courses (with appropriate wines) arrived.  Remember, there are seventeen of us around  this big oval table, and seventeen main courses.  Each one arrives within seconds of the others and is covered with a silver dome. At the exact perfect moment, in one smooth move, seventeen waiters lift seventeen domes off seventeen plates to reveal seventeen steaming hot dinners all at once In front of seventeen very happy and impressed diners.  It was an impressively choreographed moment.

My main course was a turbot filet served over a mix of vegetables, with very small potatoes on the side.  Again, all  attractively presented.   I'd never had turbot before, and later when I researched it, I found that it's considered a prime eating fish, with a mild white flesh, and is found in the waters of the North Atlantic and the Baltic and Mediterranean seas.   It's also expensive.  I can see why it's considered a prime eating fish -- it was tender, flaked just perfectly and very tasty with the beurre blanc sauce it came with.  

Andy had a filet mignon with greens and small potatoes that he relished down to the very last bite.

At one point during dinner he turned to me and said, "Dean Martin."

"Eh?"

"They're playing Dean Martin." 

And they were.  I couldn't hear well enough to recognize the songs -- indeed, most of the rest of our table couldn't, either -- but I did catch that voice.   Andy said all he ever heard the whole time we were eating dinner was Dean Martin, so it must have been one of Martin's albums from the 60s.

Dessert was several trays of chocolates and pastries that were passed around the table, along with coffee.  Andy, of course, eschewed the coffee but tried almost everything on all the trays.  I stuck to one of the Napoleons.  And then another one.   I was very happy with them and my decaf cappuccino.

After dinner, we were all given a special private tour of the restaurant's wine cellar.  We were taken right through the kitchen (I would have loved to linger there and have someone tell me exactly what everyone was doing at all the work stations), into an elevator and down to the wine cellar basement.   What a cellar it was, and what a collection of French wines.  There seemed to be no end to all the racks and racks of bottles.  The young wines were all in one area, precisely organized by type  and year.  And then there was the area where many of the bottles were dusty with age.  The really old and valuable wines and cognacs -- dome ports and liqueurs too -- were behind locked glass doors.  Several of the locked vintages were from the 1800s.  Andy said the oldest he saw was a cognac from 1805.  

I bet that is one helluva smooth cognac.

Restaurant Pierre Orsi was a wonderful finale to our French Cooking in Lyon tour.

Off to Barcelona tomorrow.

Short shots:

Date correction:

I know, I know, my last letter should have said "Tuesday 2 May" instead of "Tuesday 3 May."   At least I have the correct date in this letter.

Milk chocolate:

There wasn't any at Bernachon.  Apparently they detest milk chocolate too, and only make dark chocolate.

And speaking of dark chocolate, every now and then when I have a piece of really good dark chocolate, with nuts, I like some really good dark roast coffee to go with it.  

Or a glass of red wine.   I  make some decadently dark chocolate biscotti that are wonderful dipped in red wine.

Chocolatier toilet:

When I went to India, my friend Andrea sent me a rubber funnel designed for a woman to use when she has to use one of those standing toilets that is really only a hole in the ground.   As it turned out I never did need it in India, and I didn't think I'd ever need it in Europe.  

But I sure could have used that thing today.

At the end of our Bernachon tour, I asked Andy to help me find a restroom.  He thought he found it, but then came back out and said,"No, it's a shower, I think the toilet is somewhere else."  He looked around some more and then said, "Well, I think this is actually it.  There's a toilet paper roll on the wall there, see?"

It was indeed very much like a shower stall, nicely tiled in white, but had a sloping pan leading to a fairly large drain.  On either side was a kind of step against the wall.   It took me a minute to realize that you're supposed to stand with legs spread apart and feet on those steps  (elevating the feet helps keep them out of the fall-out zone), and do your business (after removing any clothing that would obstruct the flow of the business, of course).

In that immaculate, totally modernized and state-of-the-art facility, that toilet is the surprise of the whole trip so far.

Andy and the  leftover pork cheek stew:

Yes, he ate it for lunch today, but he didn't have to eat it cold.  During my India trip four years ago, when Mayu and I were at the Kingsbury Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, she told me how she and her sister Aruni would use a hairdryer to heat up a leftover snack.  So I told Andy to try heating up his stew with the hotel  hairdryer.  He did, and was very happy with his leftover pork cheek stew.

Michelin stars:

The whole Michelin star thing started in the early 1900s when the Michelin tire company published a little travel guide book to advise its customers of interesting places to visit.  A one-star restaurant is a "very good restaurant."  If it has two stars, it's "worthy of a detour," and if it has three stars, it has "exceptional cuisine, worthy of a special trip."  Even a single star is very hard to get, and the review and rating process is very secret.

Dean Martin:

I remember Mom liking Dean Martin more than Dad did.  He used to play Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, and Harry Belafonte, along with Herb Alpert, and classical guitar music from masters like Andres Segovia.   And, of course, his beloved Beethoven symphonies, and anything the pianist Vladimir Horowitz ever did.  

We kids used to ride him unmercifully about Vladimir Horowitz.   "What the hell kind of a name is Led Zeppelin?  Or Three Dog Night??" he'd grouse.

"Way better than Vladimir Horowitz," we'd say, and tell him he had "no soul."   I would never admit it back then, but I really liked Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and all the rest.  Still do to this day.  And Beethoven's Ninth is my all-time favorite symphony.  (Dad's favorite was the Fifth.)

But I've had a good life without Vladimir Horowitz, thank you very much.

​Lyon doesn't wake up very early.   At almost ten in the morning, there was hardly any traffic on the streets, and very few businesses and shops were open.  It was so quiet and calm that it felt more like oh-dark-thirty than almost ten o'clock.  We were on our way to our cheese workshop, and I suspect the cheese shop  was open early today just for us.   It was a tiny little shop with room for maybe six people at once, and all seventeen of us crowded in.  

There was absolutely no room to swing a kneazle.   And unless you were packed in at the very front, there was no way to see what was going on, either.  Andy and I were in the middle and all either of us could see was the back of the person packed in ahead of us.  The cheesemonger started off by telling us that while it is traditional to sip red wine while tasting cheeses, recent research shows that the tannins in red wine tend to change the taste of the cheese, so now most cheese tasting is done with white wine.

And we were all handed a glass of white wine.   French cheeses are made with milk from cows, sheep and goats, and the reason you don't see many French cheeses in the United States is that many of them are made with unpasteurized raw milk and are therefore not allowed in.  We could all hear the discussion and description of each cheese, but because we only saw the cheese when it was passed back to us on a plate with other cheeses, and could not see it when the cheesemonger was discussing it, most of us had no idea exactly what we were tasting. 

No matter.  We happily tasted it all with chunks of good bread and sips of wine, starting with the mild cheeses and working our way up to a blue cheese that I liked best.  It wasn't a Roquefort or a Stilton, but it was very good, creamy and bursting with that classic blue cheese flavor.   The blue was the only one I recognized for sure.

And you know what?  White wine does go very well with cheese.  

After our brunch of bread, cheese and wine, we headed back to the subway and to a silk factory.  Lyon's silk industry began in the 16th century, had its heyday in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and began to decline with diseases that wiped out the silkworms in the late 1800s.  The Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern textiles such as nylon and other polyester fabrics added to the demise.   Today there are only three silk factories in Lyon, where there used to be 18,000.  

The shop we visited today is the only one regularly open to the public.    The shop proprietor learned his trade from his father, who learned it from his father, and so on. The shop has been in the family for centuries.  .  The work they do now is mostly restoration work for museums and places like Chateau Montmelas, but today he was working on a private commission from Japan. It was a silk kimono into which he was weaving solid gold and silver threads.   He wouldn't give the price for the kimono, but he did say it would take ten months to finish it.  ("That thing is what I'd call wearing the bank on your back," I commented to Andy.)

The silk shop proprietor showed us the silkworm cocoons, each about an inch and a half long and about a half inch thick.  (They come mostly from Brazil and other parts of South America now.)   We saw  how the very fine threads are unwound from the cocoons, and  I got to feel skeins of raw silk and finished and dyed threads ready for weaving.  Most of the threads are so fine that it takes 800 to 1000 or more to fill one square centimeter of silk cloth, and he often is only able to complete ten square centimeters or less a day.

If there ever was a day I missed my colors, it was today.  Fabrics and fabric art are my first love, and I loved feeling all the silk threads and fabrics.  But I remember how brilliantly silk takes on color, and I just ached to really be able to see the colors of all the fabrics I was feeling.  The velvets were especially tantalizing, because the most brilliant color would seem deepest black until the light shone just the right way on the nap, and then I'd see ... a hint.  A shimmer of something warm that I'd think was deep red but Andy would tell me was bright orange.  Or I'd see palest blue that Andy would tell me was really a deep golden brown.  I gave up trying to see the colors and just let Andy tell me what they were.

They had remnants of fabric and several scarves for sale there, and Andy helped me pick out a couple scarves.   One is a dark red velvet on a black base, with a leaf design burnt into it (they use a heat-activated acid that eats the silk but leaves the polyester base).  The other is a sheer silk chiffon with colors merging from dark red to magenta to red-violet. I'll get a lot of use out of both of them.

After we finished touring the silk factory, Emmanuel took the group on a walking tour before our final cooking lesson at three this afternoon.   Andy and I skipped the walking tour and headed for an Apple Store near our hotel to get my iPad sorted out.   My email program and Internet connection have been spotty for more than a week and totally on the blink ever since we arrived in Lyon. 

We would have gone to the Apple Store here days ago, but everything has been closed over the weekend and decfor the Labor Day holiday yesterday.   (That's one major difference between Europe and America:   Europeans shut down over the weekend, but Americans stay open for business and go shopping every day of the week.)  

Once we got into the store, we had to wait a few minutes, but it was nothing like going to an Apple Store at home.   For one thing, the noise level was actually reasonable.   I had to work hard at it, but I could hear almost everything our Apple techie said.  For another, it was nice not to have to make an appointment.   A very savvy (and attractive) young lady named Doumya made quick work of getting me reconnected to the Internet and my email back in operation (I have no idea what she did, only that it worked). 

However, she was not able to retrieve my draft letters from London and Paris, and the first few letters from Lyon.  I've lost all those.  Fortunately I have been keeping notes, and Andy's good for a memory jog, too, so I should be able to get them all rewritten, even if it will take some time.  

Doumya also showed me how to use the Notes feature effectively, and helped me figure out what I'm doing when I delete stuff by mistake sometimes.  Part of the problem is that I simply can't see well enough to read the menu bar when it pops up and asks me if I want to copy or cut or delete all or whatever.  If I hit "cut" or "delete all" by mistake and don't catch it soon enough, I can't get my deleted text back, even with the "Shake to Undo" feature that Megan put me onto.  When you can't see the text above the line you're typing, it's easy to miss the fact that the reason you can't see that text is because you deleted it, not because you simply can't see.

Such is life in my lane.

Doumya was such a good help to me I told her she was way better than any Apple Store techie I'd ever gone to at home.  She said she was going to vacation in Los Angeles in a few weeks.  We told her if she makes it up to Northern California, to please  come see us, and I gave her my card.  She really was a sweetie and we'd love to see her again.

After getting my iPad sorted out, Andy and I stopped at a little Vietnamese restaurant for a light lunch of spring rolls and a very tasty shrimp salad.   We've seen quite a few Vietnamese restaurants here, which is not surprising considering that Vietnam used to be a French colony.

By now it was a long day already and we were happy to have an hour in our hotel room to catch our breath before catching our taxi to the cooking school to meet the rest of our group.   I'm feeling lousy.  The sore throat is bad and I'm sucking on cough drops to kill that awful post-nasal drip cough.   At least the tablets we picked up from the pharmacy are keeping the headache at bay.

We had our limpid-eyed chef back for our last cooking lesson today.   I have only just now learned that he is the same chef we had for our first cooking lesson-that-wasn't-really-a-lesson, and the one who impressed me the second day.   This is what happens when you can't see enough to identify the people around you.  Ah well.  Anyway, in hindsight and from his point of view, it was a smart move to turn us loose that first day, as that was an excellent way of gauging how experienced (or inexperienced) we all were.

So anyway, our last cooking lesson today was meringue cookies and fillings.   When I think "meringue" I think of that awful sticky sweet fluffy stuff on top of the good tart lemon custard in a lemon meringue pie.   But this meringue was something else.  He showed us how to make both Italian and French meringues, and because I thought I didn't like meringues much, on top of feeling lousy, I didn't put much energy into the kind of focused attention I would usually put into a good cooking lesson. 

I do recall that for the Italian meringue, he made a heavy sugar syrup, using a digital thermometer to heat it to the precisely proper temperature, and then drizzled the syrup into the stiffly whipped egg whites, whisking all the while.   The French meringue was made with granulated sugar.   To both he added flour and ground nuts.  And a little green food coloring (a powder, not a liquid) to one batch. The dough was stiff and sticky.

He showed us how to transfer the raw meringue into a pastry bag and pipe small one-inch diameter dollops evenly onto a baking sheet.

It takes practice to make nicely uniform and evenly-spaced dollops.   Some of the dollops our classmates made were very weird and wayward.

Then he picked up each baking sheet full of all our uniform and wayward dollops, held it up about two feet above the counter, and dropped it flat onto the counter four times.   This was to settle out any air pockets so that the meringues would rise and cook evenly.

While the meringues were cooking and then cooling,  we made custard fillings.  I paid more attention here, and got to make a lime custard, more of a lime curd, using a method similar to one for a classic pastry cream.   The fragrance from the fresh-squeezed limes was wonderful.   We also made a basic pastry cream, and a chocolate ganache. 

The fillings used up all the yolks we'd separated from the whites to make the meringues, and I remember the rule he gave us about eggs.  The French don't refrigerate their eggs.   But when separating the yolks from the whites, our chef told us, the yolks must be refrigerated and used within three days.  Whites can last for three weeks in the refrigerator, however.

When the meringues were all done, we had to let them cool completely before they could be lifted off the parchment-covered sheets.  We made little sandwich cookies, filling each pair with the custards and chocolate ganache.

I was surprised how good they were, and sorry I hadn't paid better attention.  They were really, really good, not too sweet at all, and we all scarfed them down with champagne.  Andy and I liked the Italian meringues best.  They were crunchier and nuttier.   I didn't care for the chocolate-filled ones but I loved the ones filled with the pastry cream or the lime curd.  

The lime curd ones were my fave, even if they were ugly as sin. Whoever piped the green meringues made the weirdest and most wayward ones.   (Andy had a more tactful way of describing them:  "They were very edible but not very presentable.")

So.   I will continue to eschew that awful sweet sticky fluffy stuff, but will go for an Italian or French meringue sandwich cookie any day.

We were presented sous chef hats to go with our aprons, had a group photo and a final champagne toast, and just enough time to hit the cooking school store again before we had to leave.  Andy and I bought a couple cans of the vanilla powder and a seasoning mix that I want to use for poaching pears or apples in red wine.  And I picked out a couple of savory seasoning mixes for Yvonne and Rita -- my two friends who cook as well or better than I do.

It was after five thirty by the time we all left the L'atelier des Chefs, and it was just beginning to sprinkle.   Emmanuel had planned a short walking tour on the way to Cafe des Federations, a bouchon where we were having dinner. (A bouchon, by the way,  is a type of restaurant uniquely typical to Lyon, that serves classic Lyonnaise food.  And like other French restaurants, it doesn't open for dinner until seven or seven thirty.)

So we set off in the very lightly sprinkling rain that we didn't mind, but it soon turned into a heavy downpour that none of us wanted to be out walling in.   We took cover in the open lobby of a large building that Andy thought was some kind of public building that had closed for the day.   It took about forty-five minutes for the downpour to let up, and then Emmanuel led us straight to the Cafe des Federations.  It was still early, but the restaurant let us in and took us down to their basement wine cellar, to wait while they finished geting ready to open.  

The basement was a softly-lit, arched room of solid stone crusted with mineral salt that flaked off if you brushed against it.  Getting down the stairs was scary for me -- no railings again -- but we women were delighted to find a very nice restroom down there, and we were all happy to dry off and enjoy an aperitif in comfort while we waited for our table.   In the center of the room was a large table with a glass top and a recessed base holding a three-dimensional map of the Lyon countryside.   It was nice down there, perched around the map table on barstools, chatting over over aperitifs and appetizers.   

I was hoping we'd get to have our dinner there, too, but we were called upstairs to squeeze around a long table in a crowded dining room.  We were offered a choice of main entrees such as pork cheek stew, andouille sausage braised in red wine, lobster quenelles, and a chicken and wine dish (I don't think it was a classic coq au vin, though).   I opted for the pork stew, and Andy got the andouille sausage.

There was a rillete of wild boar on the table, served with crusty toasted bread, and we were all served a tasty lentil salad dressed with a mustard vinaigrette.   And a classic Lyonnaise salad of frisée greens, bacon and poached egg, which was very good but I liked the one Rita made for me before I left on my trip better.  And there was a cup of a hearty meat and vegetable soup.  AND a small plate of very thinly sliced sausage served with little tiny pickles.

It was like a traditional Basque meal, with dish after dish coming to the table.   And then our main dishes arrived.  Four of us ordered the pork cheek stew, and it was served in a quart-sized Le Creuset saucepan (just like the one I use at home) for us to dish out our individual portions.  I was sorry I'd eaten all the preliminary dishes, because that stew was so good.  The meat was very tender and the sauce was rich and hearty.  Andy tasted it and wished he'd ordered that instead of the andouille sausage.  In fact, he liked it so much, he asked our waitress if she would give him the leftovers.  

"When are you going to eat that?" I asked him.   "We don't have a microwave in our room, you know."

"I'll eat it cold," Andy said.  "We're on our own for lunch tomorrow," he reminded me, "and I'll eat it then."  He was so pleased when our waitress brought him a plastic container full of the stew that he tipped her a five Euro note. 

And we still had dessert to come.   There was a wide selection for us to choose from, including profiteroles again, a creme brûlée, a chocolate fondant,  rum baba,  fruit salad, a pear poached in red wine, and various sorbets and gelatos.  Andy went for the chocolate fondant and was very happy with it.  I seriously considered the rum baba to see how it'd compare with the one I had last night.  But I really didn't want anything that rich and heavy, so I ordered the pear poached in spiced wine.   That was just the right thing for me.

The whole meal was wonderful, but not one I'd want to do often.  It's just too much food.  

We waddled our way out of the bouchon and were very pleased to find taxis waiting for us.  It was still raining a little and we've all been rained on enough for one day.  Tomorrow should be clear.

Tomorrow is our last day, too.  I'm hoping a good nights' sleep will fight off the rest of my sinus cold, and I'm looking forward to a relatively easy day tomorrow.   We visit a chocolatier in the morning and then have the afternoon off until dinner at Pierre Orsi, a Michelin-starred restaurant.  

LInda and Bill will be getting back into Lyon tomorrow evening, and then we'll all be taking off for Barcelona Thursday morning.

Short shots:

Profiteroles:

The French do like their profiteroles.  I grew up calling them "cream puffs."  They're not hard to make, and Mom made them fairly often.  They were a favorite family dessert, as well as one she often made for company.  She always filled them with vanilla ice cream and drizzled chocolate sauce over them.    

Too much food:

I'm sure I've gained  weight on this trip.  I remember Rita telling me that after her month-long vacation in France when she retired, she gained three pounds "but it was all worth it."   I've probably gained more than that, but I'm with Rita:  it's all worth it.

Cooking lessons:

Well, we  didn't get around to any duck dishes.   And it occurs to me that we never got any written recipes.   If we were baking, it'd be necessary to be a lot more precise, but most cooking is all about using basic techniques with recipes of general proportions rather than precise amounts.  Once you have a few basic techniques down, you can go with whatever you've got and improvise a bit here and there to make it all work.