524a First Time in Italy; Duck Season in Gascony

20:04Rick Steves:I like to buy my ticket, you know, about when I arrive into town for the departure just to get that taken care of. But it shouldn't be any problem. Thanks for your call, Samantha. Thank you. Bye. Tammy's calling from Windermere in Florida. Hi, Tammy. Hi, Rick. Thank you so much for taking my call. I have a question. So I have the privilege of taking my mom on a trip this year. She's a young 73-year-old, and she's checking off a trip from her bucket list. She wants to do the Amalfi Coast, and then we're going to go to Croatia. And from what I can tell, you know, Sorrento is a good local place or a central place that we can get to everything we want to see.

20:39We're only at the Amalfi Coast for five days. She loves the water, anything to do with the water. She's not a big museum goer. She's not a big church goer. So I know she wants to see Pompeii. She loves history. But I just would love to hear, you know, kind of what you guys, what are the local hidden treasures that you just go, you know, you can't miss this.

21:00Rick Steves:Well, from Sorrento, there's no hidden treasures, I would say. That's right. Sorrento is very touristy. It's wonderful. I absolutely love it. The one city that we would stay longer, more nights in than any other city, is Sorrento because it's such an amazing home base to travel out from there. A lot of people would be more comfortable sleeping in Sorrento and then taking the boat or the train into Naples, which is more of a rough-and-tumble big city. From Sorrento, you're about half an hour from Pompeii. From Sorrento, you can get on the boat, and in half an hour, you're at Capri, the beautiful romantic island where you can spend a beautiful day.

21:32Rick Steves:From Sorrento, you can take a trip down the dreamy Amalfi Coast, and Sorrento itself is just a delightful town. So, you've got one day in Naples, one day at Pompeii, one day at Capri, one day in Amalfi, and one day in Sorrento. There's five days. Now, if you're looking for something untouristy in there, don't. You're in the wrong spot to look for anything untouristy. I love all those places. What time of year are you going? Probably September. It shouldn't be too much. Unless you guys say there's a better time I should be going. You know, I love to hire a local guide, just the luxury of a local guide for a day.

22:06Rick Steves:When I'm there, there's lots of hardworking guides, and then you'll get a sense of what are the crowds like, get local advice. But as long as you get an early start, you want to beat the cruise groups. That's what you want to do. A lot of cruise groups and a lot of tour buses with Asian tours come in, and they all, when I was on Capri, they said, oh, we've got to do this and that and this and that before the Korean groups come. And it's just everybody on Capri knows the Americans come first, and then the Koreans come, and then after the last boat back to Sorrento, the locals retake their town.

22:34Rick Steves:So get there early or be out late. You should have a great time. Okay. And like one of the things that I've done in the past when I took my daughter to Paris, we did a cooking class. And for me, that was amazing. It was not something that a typical tourist would do, but it really showed us a lot about the region and what we should be eating in those different areas. So that's kind of what I was looking for, some of those, you know, yeah, I know it's going to be touristy everywhere, but maybe there's certain things that we should do. Do you guys know of any, I know there's cooking classes in Rome and in Florence and so on.

23:05Rick Steves:Is there one in the Malfi Coast area? Have you heard of? Well, yes. One of the things that they organize among the different excursions is cooking classes because Americans, they do love cooking classes, especially in a place where nature is so generous. And it's very trendy. Now, cooking classes and food tours. Food tours, yes. Wherever I go, I go to TripAdvisor, and I look under things to do, and there's always new and hardworking entrepreneur little outfits that are doing food tours. And personally, I just love a food tour. It costs about twice what a dinner would cost, but you'll get dinner out of it, and you'll visit six or eight little wonderful hole-in-the-wall artisanal places, and you have a local guide and a lot of friends.

23:42Rick Steves:Nina? Yeah, and the hotel is an excellent resource for that, especially in a place like Sorrento, where they have all the contacts for people who do food tours and guides. So email your hotel and say, you know, these are the things I want to do. Can you give me a few suggestions of who I should book? Hey, good luck, Tammy. Thanks for your call. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. It's Travel with Rick Steves, and we're helping to turn your questions and concerns into a chance to enjoy Italy like the Italians do. with the help of our tour guides, Susanna Paracchini and Nina Bernardo. Lois from Pontevedra Beach in Florida has emailed us, and Lois writes, We're planning a two-week trip to Italy and want to include a visit to the Cinque Terre.

24:18Rick Steves:I hear the cruise ships talk in La Spezia now and can arrive en masse and overwhelm the little villages along the coast there. There's even talk of limiting visitors to the Cinque Terre. Are the crowds bad enough to warrant changing our plans? You know, Lois, I was just on a cruise ship landing in La Spezia, and I noticed, to my sadness, half of the tour buses parked in front of the cruise ship, which have 3 ,000 tourists on them, were heading for Cinque Terre. It's a very popular thing for cruise ships, and cruise ships inundate the Cinque Terre with crowds, and I think it's a serious problem.

24:50Rick Steves:If the cruise ships are in La Spezia, during the middle of the day, the Cinque Terre can be a real mess. But if you spend the night in the Cinque Terre and be out early and enjoy it until 10 o 'clock, and then everybody on the cruise ships is heading home at 4 o 'clock, and you've got six hours of beautiful evening light, you've got lots of time to enjoy the Cinque Terre. So I would not stay away from the Cinque Terre, but I would remind you, during the middle of the day, in season, when the cruise ships are at La Spezia, it can be a mess. Nina and Susanna, have you had any experience with the Cinque Terre and the crowds?

25:23Well, yes. In fact, the Cinque Terre, thanks to you as well, Rick, became such a popular destination that we are facing that humongous amount of people. And of course, for those who don't know Cinque Terre, Cinque Terre, there are these five little villages on a cliff. So it's the space and the possibility to accommodate as many people as they cannot do it. It's a beautiful countryside. Actually, it's nature and the shape of men, the hardworking people, and they create this incredible combination. But crowds. crowd

25:59Rick Steves:blame it on Rick Steves and the cruise industry yes I quote discovered it for American tourists when I was a kid and there were no hotels there and there were certainly no crowds there and now my just adorable little towns are they're filled with boutique hotels wonderful restaurants and happy tourists I mean the locals are wealthy now it used to be very poor the tourists are tripping over each other to get there so it's quite a touristed place plus all the thousands and thousands of holiday goers from Genoa nearby a massive city come to the Cinque Terre for a little break. But as Susanna was saying, this is the most rugged part of the Italian Riviera, five little villages near La Spezia, and it's just gorgeous, but it does like, you know, when everybody wants to go there.

26:40Rick Steves:A lot of people get upset with me for popularizing the Cinque Terre, and they wish I would have just kept it a secret and told them instead, you know. But we're all in this together, and this is just fun to be able to design your itinerary so you can have the best possible trip when you're in a wonderful country like Italy. This is Travel with Rick Steves I've been speaking with Nina Bernardo and Susanna Perrochini about their beautiful country, Italy. I've been going there all my adult life, and I just cannot exhaust that beautiful peninsula of what it has to offer. Of course, when we're planning an itinerary, we Americans have the shortest vacations in the rich world.

27:13Rick Steves:We want to see everything. We've got to be realistic. You've got Rome, Florence, and Venice. They're three hours apart by train, and they're the obvious cities to see. What if you're looking for beaches? Now, the Italian is going to go to these giant resorts where traffic jams and discos, and I've been to a few of them looking for some charm, and I came home with nothing. I mean, Via Reggio. The Italian coastline has just been overdeveloped, but if you want to, you could go to Sardinia. Yes, that's what I was thinking. Sardinia has some really unspoiled beaches, coves, rocky cliffs. That is definitely the coastline to see.

27:47Rick Steves:Sardinia is part of Italy, right? Right. Corsica is part of France. And these are the two sizable islands. Right, in the Mediterranean. So you could fly there into Olbia or Cagliari, which is the capital. So Susanna, describe a little bit more about Sardinia. Well, Sardinia is very unique. And the fact that they've been isolated make these people very unique. They have their own language, even though we call it dialect, which is Sardo. But let me tell you that I would not understand a single word if they're speaking Sardo. The central part of Sardinia is very mountainous and wild. And in fact, some, because I'm a big fan of movies, some of the Spaghetti Western movies, they had some shot in some parts of Sardinia, in the central part, because it's kind of mountainous.

28:34I was lucky to visit Seychelles and Sri Lanka. And the kind of water and the nuances of the color that I've seen in the sea, it's even better. And not because I'm Italian.

28:43Rick Steves:So you don't need to fly all the way to the Seychelles for paradise. You've got it in Sardinia. Of course, you have different trees and plants, but the water, talking about the water, is absolutely incredible. Sardinia. Yes. And there's a local pride to the degree where they cling to their local dialect. Oh, yes. I love this as a historian and a fan of modern European history, how when they created a United Italy, they famously said, we've created Italy, now we have to create Italians. The Italians. We're still working on it. We're still working on it. And it's the land of a thousand bell towers.

29:13Yes.

29:13Rick Steves:Meaning there's countless communities that are loyal to their bell tower. Campanilismo, we say. Campanilismo. Yes. Their regional loyalties are very, very strong, yeah. I'd love to close just with a little bit of reminder to our travelers to learn a few key words when you're in Italy. Of course, we probably don't speak Italian fluently, but of anywhere in Europe, I think Italians are eager to communicate and we can be creative. And it does help to have a working vocabulary of just a handful of words. I love to be able to say complimenti. It's a beautiful thing. It's just if somebody does a good job, you compliment them.

29:46Rick Steves:Complimenti. That helps me a lot. I love it. Some phrases just seem to be natural in that language. Por que no? Why not? Why not? You know, that's a true to the Italian spirit, isn't it? Why not? There's no rule against it. Exactly. Por que no? When we're doing the beautiful passeggiata, you've got to remember your suffixes, right? To not mix up the genders. Right, the genders, right. If I'm admiring a woman, I don't want to say bello. No, you want to say bella. Bella. For years, when I was a tour guide, I would come into a little hotel and I would say, Excuse me, I'm a capo gruppo. And, you know, I would run in and you guys are laughing because you understand.

30:22Rick Steves:I just said, excuse me, I'm a female tour guide and I need help. So I should have said what, capo gruppo? Capo gruppo. So that little letter makes a huge difference. One letter. Dopo di lei. After you. So there's a word that I can pull out and surprise my Italian who thinks I'm just a silly tourist. You can speak Italian if you pull that one out. Posso guardare? Who are you asking if you can look at? No, I'm stepping in there. That was a good one. I looked right at me. Posso guardare? Can I take a look? Yeah. I'm saying that in a shop. So you step in a shop, you're not going to buy anything, you just want to look around.

30:57Rick Steves:Can you say that? Posso guardare? Posso guardare. Yes, absolutely. So that's a good word to know. Yes. Very, very handy. Formidabile? Is that it? Formidabile. Yes. That's formidable. What a great way to say instead of just beautiful. Yes. Wonderful. My wine, I like it full-bodied. Robusto. Robusto. Oh, I would have said corposo, but... Also corposo. I like robusto. There's a good example. Can you say that or am I mixing in my adjectives? No, no, no, you did it well. Robusto, corposo, you can use both. And both of you are molto gentili. Grazie. Grazie. And mille grazie and buon lavoro. Grazie a te.

31:33Rick Steves:We were speaking in understanding Italian. Complimenti. To all of us. Our next stop takes us to a delicious slice of the rural southwest of France. Travel and food writer David Mackinage explains how he took his love for all things French to a whole new level when his family rented an old millhouse on the edge of a small town in Gascony. It's travel with Rick Steves. There's another south of France, one that doesn't have the tourist crowds of Provence or the glitz of the Côte d 'Azur. It's called Gascony. To experience it firsthand, food writer David Mackinage convinced his family to spend eight months there.

32:17Rick Steves:It's a mostly rural region of southwest France where a duck farm and vineyard and maybe a slow-moving tractor seem to lie around every bend in the road. Among the French, Gascony is famous for having some of the heartiest, tastiest food traditions in Europe. David Mackinage shares his Gascon adventures in his book, Duck Season, eating, drinking, and other misadventures in Gascony, France's last best place. He joins us now to tell us how living in small-town Gascony taught him to rethink his role as a cook and how to approach food, wine, and life itself. David, what's so different about Gascony that it actually changed how you live even after you returned home to Chicago?

32:59I hardly know where to begin. It is truly a magical place. I would say, first and foremost, the pace of life, As is the case in much of rural France, it's much slower than what I had been accustomed to, you know, living in a city of three million people. And we, as a family, had to learn quickly how to slow things down, kind of press pause, take more time with everything, but especially cooking. The Gaskins enjoy long meals. They enjoy hearty meals. And they take their time not just with cooking and eating, but really with every aspect of daily life.

33:32Rick Steves:So let's just take the dinner, for example. And then what about the time before the dinner, the aperitif? Well, let's start with that because every Gascon meal starts with that. The aperitif, or they call it for short, apero, is a sacred ritual all over France. But in Gascony, it takes on a really ritualistic aspect. I've had cocktail hours that last for three hours in Gascony before the meal even begins. That said, people don't get roaring drunk. They're always eating. They're talking, they're sipping usually wine or floc, which is an Armagnac spiked wine-based aperitif. This was a ritual we really adopted wholeheartedly in my tiny family, my wife and then kindergarten age daughter, who would usually have an orangina or a soda or a glass of sparkling water.

34:23And we made this part of our meal ritual, not just on weekends or when we had company, but every single day.

34:29Rick Steves:You know, it seems like the French are really adamant about creating a buffer between their work world and their home life. And they have this sort of special time that's really dedicated to the conviviality of their community or their family. And it's worked into their, they make time for it. They prioritize for it. I've often said that the Gaskins consider eating and drinking the main focus of the day and work is just sort of a necessary interruption. And that really held true for us. And admittedly, I was in Gascony to write a book about the cuisine and the wines of the region. So food was my focus.

35:05But by necessity, meals became the organizing principle of our day in large part because the markets were open in the morning but then shut down at 12 o 'clock sharp every day for two and sometimes even three hours so everyone could enjoy the sanctity of the lunch hour. So if you didn't have your provisioning and shopping done by noon, you were out of luck.

35:27Rick Steves:The sanctity of the lunch hour. You know, I've been working with my TV crew in France in particular, and, you know, if the sun's out and the light's good and we're getting stuff done, we just grab a sandwich and hardly stop. And my French guide friends, they just shake their heads and go, oh, you barbarians, don't you know this is lunchtime? Heresy. Yeah, heresy, sanctity. You know, you've got to take that lunch break. And it sounds like in Gascony, even the food conspires to make you slow down because you cook it slowly, don't you? That's absolutely right. The Gaskins favor slower and lower methods of cooking.

36:01Now, this was also an adjustment for me. I was a city guy. I favored high heat, quick cooking methods that didn't take a long time where you could sear a piece of meat on a skillet or over a grill. And they do that there. But the most beloved and traditional dishes are often cooked in a cocotte, which is a Dutch oven or an enameled cast iron vessel. and they use cheaper but more flavorful cuts of meat that take a long time to tender into submission. And so it took a while for me to kind of slow down and plan ahead. And frequently a real traditional Gaskin meal has to be begun a day or even two days before you eat it because the meat tastes better if it rests overnight in the fridge and is slowly heated back up the next day.

36:44Rick Steves:You know, Gascony itself is almost requiring you to slow down if you're a traveler because Provence is sort of off of the beaten path because it's not served very well by the trains and the freeways, and Gascony even more so. It's a tiny little corner of France down in the southwest. Toulouse is the biggest city nearby, right? That's right. Toulouse is, I would call it, the gateway to Gascony, though it's not really in the traditional region of Gascony. If you look at a map of France, you can kind of see all the roads and train lines veering away from this area that has fewer place names on the map.

37:20It is not served by high-speed rail. There are no expressways going through it. So it's a little harder to get to, but you're rewarded when you get there.

37:29Rick Steves:Would you think there's a movement, David, among the local people to, why don't we get a high-speed train connection? Or do they think that's a blessing that helps them maintain their traditional quality of life? It's funny you mention that because I check the headlines of La Dépêche du Midi. It's the regional newspaper out of Toulouse. And the front page news over the past week or two has been the possibility of getting a TGV line to Toulouse that would cut through Gascony. I don't think it's a done deal yet, but there's a big public debate going on as we speak about whether that's going to happen.

38:01Rick Steves:In many places around Europe, a lot of people who are the traditionalists and treasure their lifestyle, they see the arrival of the freeway or the high-speed train as something that's going to threaten their way of life, and they actually work against it. Well, it's funny. That strain of thinking goes back generations in Gascony. There's a marvelous book written about rural France by Eugen Weber, who documented what life was like outside the cities in France up to the turn of the 20th century. And as early as the 16th century, Gaskins were resisting having bridges and roads built through their region, they were very proud and believed that they had everything they needed to survive without access to neighboring provinces.

38:45Rick Steves:They don't need no stink in Paris. Exactly. In fact, the very few Gaskins who made what was then the arduous journey up to the capital, up to Paris, and returned back to the native homeland of Gascony were forever referred to thereafter as Parisians. Those who had even been up there and had been exposed to it. David Mackinitch is our guide to the culinary culture of southwest France right now on Travel with Rick Steves. David tells us what his family discovered living in a small town in the French countryside in his book, Duck Season, Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place.

39:23Rick Steves:David is a former features editor for Chicago Magazine and contributor to the New York Times travel and food sections, and you can still find many of his food and drink articles in the archives to Savour Magazine. There's more with today's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. Now, David, we're talking about Gascony, and it's down there near Basque Country, near the Pyrenees in the southwest of France. I love the way you describe it in your book because it just sounds like it's a fortress that stands apart from the modern world, just sort of enjoyably frozen in time. The main city is, what, 12 ,000 people, and then you describe the little towns in the region is Borgs that are 5 ,000 people each, and then a bunch of hamlets, which are just a church and a little more.

40:09Rick Steves:Give us just a quick description of a region of France where you see the ducks outnumber the people seven to one. That's right. It is not the least densely populated department of France, but it is the most agricultural of France's 101 administrative departments, meaning more of its land is under cultivation than any other department. and that's the first thing you notice when you're there. Farming is the livelihood. It is technically the south of France and people speak in that bouncy accent that we associate with the south of France, with Provence particularly. But unlike Provence, it's a much more lush landscape.

40:47There's not a great deal of traffic. There's virtually no mass tourism. And like you said a moment ago, it does feel a little bit like rural France frozen in time.

40:56Rick Steves:Now, you lived in a little village, and I just love the way you describe your old mill house with a sparse kitchen and right there with a stream running through the mill and a stone bridge out the window. Can you give us a sense of what was your home with your family there for your stay in Gascony? Well, let's put it this way. I'll put it charitably. It was an adjustment at first. We lived in an air-conditioned condo in the city of Chicago and moved into a 200-year-old stonewalled textile mill that had been converted but only just converted for human habitation. It was actually a really picturesque place that we fully and completely fell in love with over time.

41:37At first, there was a lot of mildew to deal with. There was a lot of insects to deal with. There was a lack of heat. It's the first place I've ever lived and maybe the only place I will ever live where we really had to build a wood fire every night during the cold months to not freeze. And, of course, that eventually became a ritual that we cherished.

41:56Rick Steves:Did you consider yourself on some kind of a sabbatical? Was this a chance where you had an agenda where you wanted to recharge and be inspired and be changed? And if that was your goal, how did you reach it? Well, you know, as with so many of these big life projects you undertake, what you get out of it isn't always what you expect to get out of it. And obviously I went there to write a book and I was driven by an intense curiosity about the land, about the food and about the people. And that curiosity was more than satisfied during our eight months there. But what we came away with, and you hinted at this just a moment ago, Rick, is we ended up making family memories that have become kind of a touchstone for us.

42:36It was truly a magical time for us. It was kind of us against the world a little bit at first. We didn't know many people when we got there. And we did have more free time on our hands. Our daughter, who was seven at the time, didn't have a packed dance card of after-school activities. They didn't really have any to offer. She came home after school, and we spent time together as a family in our very chilly textile mill. We cherish these memories now, and we talk about it constantly.

43:05Rick Steves:You write that. Gascony is more soulful than Provence or Côte d 'Azur, more deeply French. How can one place be more deeply French? What did you mean by that? You know, it's a bit of a paradox because Gascony is both deeply French and also a bit of a country unto itself that had up until really the 20th century its own language and folkways that were pretty cut off from the rest of France. And yet all the qualities and ideals that I associate with Frenchness from what we just call the sanctity of the dinner and lunch hour to the notion of fraternité to a sense of hospitality, all that felt amplified to me in Gascony.

43:49And I think that it's partly because it has remained such a rural place for so many generations that those traditions haven't been chipped away at as much as they have been in the cities.

44:02Rick Steves:We're exploring Gascony in the rural southwest of France with David McInish right now on Travel with Rick Steves. David, his wife and daughter, spent nearly a year living in a 200-year-old millhouse in a small village to get acquainted with the region's cuisine and traditions. He writes about it in his book, Duck Season, Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gaskin, France's Last Best Place. Michael's listening in from Charlton, New York, and joins us with a question for David at 877-333-7425. Hi, Michael. Yes. Actually, my wife and I, being educators in the New York State teaching system, we frequent the Brittany region usually every other year or so for at least a month or two, actually enjoying a nice glass of Beaujolais Nouveau as we speak and just kind of curious as we try and recreate some of the dishes that we create and eat with friends and family that live in Brittany, but struggle finding those very French flavors.

45:01Wine seems to be nowadays more or less pretty easy to find, a good French wine, but the food is tough to recreate. So just are there any suggestions or simple tricks maybe that I'm missing. You know, we faced the same challenge when we got home from Gascony. And I imagine we were probably in search of a slightly different set of ingredients. I imagine maybe you were trying to find the special kind of buckwheat they use in the crepes in Brittany. The big challenge for me, as you might guess, was finding the same kind of duck that we got used to there. And I don't have a solution for that. You know, occasionally you'll find a farmer who's raising a breed of of livestock that you may have grown accustomed to over there.

45:44But it can be quite an odyssey to find that farmer. I found that what we do is we try to satisfy ourselves. If we can't find the right ingredients, we at least try to reproduce the methods of cooking and the style of cooking, even if we have to use a slightly different cut of meat or a different kind of sea salt or a different seasoning. And we get pretty darn close to what we were eating in France. But I truly sympathize, brother. It is hard to taste these things over there and not be able to reproduce them.

46:14Rick Steves:A big part of it is also you can't find a 200-year-old stone mill with a whole bridge out your window to eat it. I always find that frustration. Also a problem. You can't create the ambience of where you're eating it. You can certainly create the tempo, though. That's probably a major accomplishment, just to be able to slow down and enjoy the conviviality that comes with with mealtime. Yes. Absolutely. It is, and it's a great thing to try and recreate, and I don't want to sound negative. It's a tricky thing. The solution is just to physically travel there. I mean, it's, you know, for me, soufflaki in Greece is just only right in Greece, and bruschetta is only right in Tuscany, and there's something about it that you just can't...

46:56Rick Steves:It almost... Thomas Jefferson said travel makes a person wiser if less happy. I don't think he was talking about the cuisine, but he may have been. You come home, it's just not the same. There's a sense of loss. I do agree. I agree. And isn't that why we travel? That's why we travel. We go and we taste the thing we want to taste the most. It's the first thing we do when we get off the plane. Michael, thanks for your call. No, thank you for having me, and all the best, and we love following the program. Oh, take care. Thanks a lot. Happy travels. Bye-bye. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with David McIninch.

47:25Rick Steves:His book is Duck Season. And, David, you mentioned people in Gascony have the longest lives in France. Their diet seems to be pretty heavy, but they have apparently a pretty good lifestyle. In spite of all that duck fat, how can they live so long? Well, that is what's commonly referred to as the Gaskin paradox, which is really the paradox within the French paradox. And if you followed the news over the years, that's a subject that comes up from time to time. France on the whole has a lower incidence of heart disease than either Britain or the United States and much of Western Europe, in fact. The Gaskins are at the heart of that statistical anomaly.

48:01The region to which Gascony belongs enjoys the highest longevity at birth of any regional population of France and the lowest incidence of heart attacks. And when you go there and eat Gaskin food for the first time, you are incredulous. You can't believe that that could possibly be true because the food on the face of it is very rich.

48:22Rick Steves:But, you know, I'm sure it has something to do with friends, family and lack of stress. I couldn't have said it better. I really I really think that those are really the most profound influences on longevity there. I would also say that meals are rich, but they're balanced and people eat to their satisfaction, but they don't eat in between meals. They don't drink to excess. And it's a rural place without urban stress. And people tend to stay close to family. Do they laugh a lot? And they laugh a lot. They also sing a great deal. Sing a lot and laugh a lot. That's right. That's a good counterbalance to the foie gras and the cream-filled tarts and all that duck confit.

49:05Rick Steves:This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with David Meckinich, and his book is Duck Season, Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place. So, David, now you're back in Chicago. You went there with your family. You had your sabbatical. you're back at your normal, you know, regular world. What part of Gascony have you taken home with you and incorporated into your everyday lifestyle that has made that trip to Gascony something that has been transformative for you and your family? We really take more time with our meals, just as a family, even on a weeknight.

49:39Now, obviously, there are some nights where we just can't make it happen, and we end up in front of the TV. I'm not going to say that never happens. One thing that we are pretty religious about now is taking a little bit of time before we eat dinner to put the phones down, gather in the living room with a glass of wine and some sparkling water for Charlotte, our daughter, and make the transition from the workday to the evening to our leisure time to the meal. Sometimes it only lasts 15 minutes. Sometimes we're able to stretch it out for an hour. We'll read a magazine, read a book. we'll chat and then we feel ready to sit down and have a really gratifying evening meal.

50:21Rick Steves:And if you don't have time for that 15 or 20 minutes, it's probably an indication that you need to take that 15 or 20 minutes. Exactly. It means we need to do a little bit of retooling in our life to make room for that. Wow. Now, if you just take that lesson home, duck season has been a beautiful thing. David Mackinant, thanks so much for sharing your love of Gascony and best wishes with your writing and with duck season. It's my pleasure. Thanks, Rick. Travel with Rick Steves is produced at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington, by Tim Tatton, Kazmer Hall, and Donna Bardsley. You can find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio.

51:00Rick Steves:Hey, I'm Rick Steves. It's clear to me that if you equip yourself with good information and expect yourself to travel smart, you will. That's why we offer a world of free content at ricksteves.com. All the TV shows we've ever produced, that's over 100 shows taking you from Turkey to Poland to Portugal. 50 hours of practical lectures, with talks ranging from packing smart and tech on the road to cruising and language lessons. There's articles covering every corner of Europe, a thriving family of travelers comparing notes in our forum, and much more. And it's all entirely free at ricksteves.com.

51:43Thank you.