Four days on the beach. That’s what we wanted in Biarritz and it’s pretty much what we got, except for the actual beach part, sort of.

Biarritz, down in the very southwest corner of France, is described as a luxury beach resort known for its casinos, surfers, and the Hôtel du Palais. Now, we don’t surf and we have no use for casinos so we figured we should check out the Hôtel. Emperor Napoléon III bought land for a summer residence in Biarritz near Spain so his Spanish wife Eugénie wouldn’t get too homesick and then had this great palace built. Their stays brought the seaside location to attention of other fancy people and it quickly became the place to be for royals and those around them.

After Napoleon was overthrown in 1870, though, the property was sold and converted into a luxury hotel. So that’s where we stayed. And for a grand old hotel it’s still in pretty good shape. Beautiful, in fact. You see pictures of people like the Duke & Duchess of Windsor (Edward & Wallis, of course) staying there in the 1950s. All pretty elegant.

The only thing I thought was unusual, though, is that while the hotel is directly on the beach, it doesn’t have a beach itself. And the public beach there, while beautiful, doesn’t have the kind of loungers and umbrellas that Mark in particular needs to be comfortable. Add to that the fact that the seas are really pretty heavy there – it is, after all, known for its surfing – you couldn’t spend much time in the actual water. So we made do with great lounge chairs at the hotel pool overlooking the beach. It was a pretty acceptable compromise.

Otherwise, with one exception, there’s not a lot to say about Biarritz. It’s a beach town with at least one pretty fabulous hotel. We ate, we lounged, we read, we swam a little, we ate some more. But there’s one strange thing about France on this trip that we haven’t written about yet.

Mark & I first came to France together a little over 30 years ago and have been back many times since. My memory might be a little off but it seems as though way back then – and if not that first trip, not long after – restaurants in France had this great system for paying the bill. When it was time to pay the bill the waiter would come to your table with a handheld device and run your card right there. None of this nonsense of taking your card back to some station, returning it, waiting for you to sign it, and all that. For decades, literally decades, French restaurants were so much more efficient than American restaurants in that regard.

Suddenly, that’s no longer the case. In nearly every restaurant we’ve been to on this trip when it’s time to pay the bill, you the diner go into the restaurant (we’re eating outdoors nearly every meal), go to the front station, try to explain which table you’re at, and pay the bill there. It’s the strangest thing; we can’t figure out how or why they went from a system that was so efficient to … this.

Weird. A word that occasionally applies to more than just the Republican presidential ticket.

La Rochelle was a real surprise and a treat. It’s a small city, population around 75,000, but the historic center, the old port, and the green spaces all pack a serious punch. I just thought it was one of the most beautiful urban places we’ve been.

Our hotel was perfectly situated, right next to a long, narrow-ish park with nice walking trails that led down to the coast, but also on the edge of the old town. The buildings in that area were all this old, faded yellowish-white, a couple stories high, many of them with block after block of arcades to protect you from … well, presumably heat and rain, but that was no issue for us. We continue to have just about perfect weather on this trip, now up in the mid-70s during the day but that of course is totally pleasant.

Our first full day in town we rented bikes and rode out to Île de Ré, a cute not-so-little island just off the coast. It’s connected to the mainland by a bridge that runs a bit over a mile, and I had this vision of some long, flat, easy-to-bike motorway. Yeah, not exactly – it was a pretty strenuous climb up and up and up before we could head down and out to the island. Once there the biking was nice, the food was great, and then we turned around and biked home.

There’s one fun piece of history from La Rochelle. Back in the 17th century it was a major center of the Huguenot (French Protestant) cause. But when Louis XIV reversed Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes and took away the Protestant’s civil rights, a bunch of Huguenots boarded ships and settled what became the very French town of New Rochelle a little north of Manhattan. And just coincidentally, a bunch of our closest friends in New York live in New Rochelle. So we had a wonderful little time in the Mother City!

Another two-night stop, another lovely French city. In this case we stopped in Nantes, the sixth-largest city in France. (For what it’s worth, when this trip is over we will have been in all ten of the largest cities in the country.) A fun part of the stop was our residence, the Hotel Sozo. The hotel took over an abandoned chapel some years ago and turned it into a hotel, keeping as much of the historic architecture and even stained glass windows as they could. Our room was tiny, but it oozed personality.

Another highlight was the fact that just outside our hotel was the city’s oldest and probably most beautiful park, the Jardin des Plantes. Created in 1807, it was a delight to walk through the park as we went out to explore the city.

And there was plenty to explore in our quick stop. Sadly, there were two challenges in really experiencing Nantes. First, the cathedral looked impressive but was closed for what seemed to be pretty substantial renovations. And second, lots of restaurants are closed in Nantes both Saturday and Sunday evenings, the two nights we were there, Sunday in particular. And on Sunday pretty much everything is closed except for touristy cafes, so the city center felt like more like a ghost town than we would have liked.

Still, there was plenty to keep us engaged. There was an art museum that I really liked. In many ways I am simple: I like an art museum that takes me through whatever period it covers logically and systematically. I particularly like museums that take you with clear signage from one room to the next. The Nantes museum, covering art from the 14th to the 20th centuries, checked all those boxes and had a surprisingly good collection of modern art.

Similarly, the old Ducal Palace had a museum of the history of Nantes that was pretty good. It could have used more English translations, but I’m not complaining too much. In particular, they did not shy away from acknowledging the city’s role in the French slave trade. Because of its position at the mouth of the Loire River, Nantes was responsible for just about half of that shameful history and they covered it extensively.

There is one other important piece of history from Nantes. In 1598 Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes in the Ducal Palace here. Henry – who was born protestant but, famously considering the crown of France worthy of a mass, converted to Catholicism – upheld Catholicism as the established religion of the state but at the same time gave French Protestants significant political rights. The result was the end of the 35-year French Wars of Religion.

Finally, one more thing I learned in the museum. Mark and I were both a little confused over the fact that this was once the seat of the Dukes of Brittany but is no longer in the official French region of Brittany. What gives? Well, according to one exhibit in the museum, the collaborationist Vichy government in 1941 restructured things and put Nantes in what was then the Angers region. Today it is the capital of the Pays de la Loire region, one of 18 regions in the country, and it is still pretty controversial that it is not part of Brittany region. We’ll let them fight it out.

For us though, our memory of Nantes will be highlighted by one thing. On our last evening we were walking to dinner when I got a text from my brother Al: “Biden dropped out”. Yikes! Ever since that fateful and awful debate we’d been waiting for this. And in fact while we were walking on that Sunday evening I was getting genuinely angry at Biden for clinging to power so desperately. And then in the flash of a text it was as though a new era had opened: once again, we have a fighting chance to win in November. Makes for a pretty eventful stop in Nantes!