Wendy's Platter…travels

October 23, 2025

Pain perdu or French toast in France with French bread, topped with French butter, French marmalade, French salted caramel, French fresh pears, French fresh grapes, plus French coffee, and French orange juice. Did you know we are in France?

Sunday morning while on vacation. What is better than French toast? Not much, but add the espresso from our apartment espresso pod machine and you are sitting pretty.

At breakfast, we looked out the window and saw that this would be another great day for a walk, given that a storm was threatening the rest of the week. Sunday breakfast lasted a little longer than usual and we didn’t get out the door until after 1:30.

As we drove, we were once again enveloped in the reds, browns, and yellows of autumn that were highlighted by the deep greens of the fields, and peeks at the blue sky from behind the billowing clouds. The drive through the countryside with small towns about a half day’s walk ,or a 10 minute drive, from each other was what Sunday drives are all about. For a brief moment, we wished we had our Miata, with the top down, winding through the small valleys and large vistas. But the true logistics of such a small car burdened with my luggage and no hope of including passengers put the idea out of our heads.

The gour is actually a crater lake. The much larger Crater Lake in Oregon has a circumference of 32 kilometers (20 miles) while the Gour de Tazenat has a circumferencee of 700 meters (not even one kilometer) or 0.4 miles. The depth of Crater Lake is 350m. The depth of the Tazenat gour is only 66m.

Both lakes have interesting histories both geologically and how they elicited legends in their regions. Here is a translated (AI) quote from one of the information display at the gour:

“The Gour de Tazenat is a site rich in legends. A legend tells that in the past, on the site of Gour, there was a village. Its inhabitants were known to be as hard-hearted as stones. A poor man passing through asked for alms. Only one woman offered him a miserable crust of bread. To thank her for her generosity, the beggar invited her to follow him without turning around, because the village was about to be engulfed. But the woman, disobedient, turned around and was instantly petrified!

For a long time this stone occupied the edge of the lake.

Rumor has it that the cows that came to rub against it lost their horns. Many times, the population tried to get rid of this accursed rock, in vain: each time it returned to its place. The rock was finally thrown into the middle of the Gour, releasing a groan, but never reappeared.

Some claim that on All Saints’ Day or Christmas Eve, the bells of the sunken village ring at midnight from the bottom of the lake.

Still, the Gour de Tazenat remains a most mysterious place…”

Given that we were almost two weeks away from All Saints Day and a few months from Christmas, we decided to go ahead with our walk without waiting to hear the sunken villages bells.

There were three walks available around the lake: 2.5 kilometers, 4 kilometers, and 7 kilometers. We chose the middle route as it had an option to continue on to the long route through the countryside without backtracking. During the summer, the lake is a popular place for swimming and kayaking. The empty kiosks for food and boats promised of great summer fun. In October, the hike was the thing.

The de Maupassant Tower at the gour. Nick heads up from the lake to start our hike.

One of France’s great writers, Guy de Maupassant, considered to be the master of the short story, fell under the spell of the Auvergne area and set one of the scenes in his novel, Mont-Oriol at the Gour de Tazenat. I will let M. de Maupassant describe the lake from his novel published in 1887:

“Brown rocks, oddly twisted, cracked the ground at the side of the road. We saw on the right a mountain whose broad summit looked hollow and flat. We took a path which seemed to enter through a triangular cut, and Christiane, who had stood up, suddenly discovered, in a vast and deep crater, a beautiful fresh and round lake as round as a silver coin.

The steep slopes of the mountain, wooded on the right and bare on the left, fell into the water which was surrounded by a high regular enclosure. And this calm water, flat and glistening like metal, reflected the trees on one side and the arid coast on the other with such perfect clarity that we could not distinguish the edges and only saw this immense funnel where the blue sky was reflected in the center, a clear and bottomless hole which seemed to cross the earth pierced from one side to the other firmament.”

From Mont-Oriol by Guy de Maupassant, 1887

Pictured above is a small stone tower overlooking the lake that has been named the Maupassant Tower. It is from there that we headed uphill into the forest. By the time we reached the top, I was ready to continue on to finish the long (7 kilometer) walk. I was so glad we did.

Out of the forest, we found ourselves in the countryside, walking past small farms and rural houses, old stone buildings, paved one lane roads, and tractor roads. The legend on the map of the hike promised that we would go through mixed forests, conifers, dry, and wet grasslands. The promise was kept.

The photos on top show a bright wildflower that I couldn’t ignore, just as much as I couldn’t ignore the fungus clinging to the log. In the photo below, I was first drawn to the colors of the foliage on the hill that was complemented by the color of the cows below it. But then I found myself enamored with the hill. Its gentle shape drew me to it. It wasn’t until later I realized it is a cinder cone. You will see this cone in many of the photos as we went around the lake.

The hiking path is used not only by hikers such as Nick and I, but if you look closely at the photo on the right, you will see a family of bicyclists at the top of the hill. The middle photo shows my favorite cinder cone.

As we walked, I commented that I just didn’t understand how there was this one little crater in the landscape around us. There were no volcanoes to be seen. It wasn’t until we had circumnavigated the lake and sat on the hill above the lake that, like a trompe d’oeil, it became clear. The water of the lake started halfway down the crater. In addition, from the crest of the crater where we sat, the surroundings “hills” were clearly volcanic domes and cinder cones from millennia ago. We weren’t worried about an eruption, but it gave us pause.

Mesmerized by the lighting, I couldn’t stop taking photos. Note on the back of the pole of the stop sign is a blue mark. It is part of the trail marking that lets you know if you are going the right way.

We had a small snack of hard sausage that we had picked up a couple of weeks earlier in the Loire Valley. It hit the spot and we descended to our car as the late afternoon sun left us.

On our way back to Thiers, we made a quick stop for gas and were astounded by the coffee machines.

Back in Thiers, we were now quite hungry and our larder was bare. Knowing it was a Sunday night, a favorite for the French to go out, I decided to be brave and call our favorite restaurant for a table. The owner had given us her card and told us to call for reservations. I stumbled in French through the call, but I could tell that the owner recognized my voice and was very forgiving.

On the left, truffade. On the right chocolate mousse with a lava lamp shot.

Dinner was predictably delicious. We chose a regional dish, truffade, which is mostly a lovely combination of potatoes, local cheeses (3 of them!), butter, and thin slices of the local jambon cru (think prosciutto) on top and a salad. As always, we shared the dinner and it was more than enough.

We were not going to have dessert, but the owner showed us the menu and pointed out what had been made in her kitchen. The chocolate mousse seemed perfect and we decided to order a French pastis, a mint flavored liqueur that she had given us (“from the patron”) the last time we were in. She said she was out of Pastis, but she would make us another “digestif” which would also be “from the patron.”

What arrived looked like an alcoholic lava lamp in a shot glass. It turned out to also be mint flavored and yummy. It was actually the perfect pair with the chocolate mousse. After we finished it, she gave us the recipe: crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and bélé…or so I thought. When I got home I looked it up…It was not “bélé” but Bailey’s Irish Cream! That accounted for the odd lava lamp look to the digestif.

Monday is going to be our day to figure out how to vote from here in the California election. Not having a way to print anything is our biggest challenge.

©2025 Wendy Platt Hill

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