Carnival Pride Europe Cruise Review: Day 13 – La Rochelle (Bordeaux)featured
France is one of my favorite places to be. At any given time, if you asked me where I’d rather be, six times out of ten, I’d probably say Paris. But being in France? It generally terrifies me.
I don’t speak the language, for one. Not even a little. I can say hello, I can say thank you, I can say excuse me and yes and my name is Nicole. That’s about the extent of my French. Beyond that, being in France gives me a bit of imposter syndrome — I always feel like I stick out as a stereotypical American whenever we’re in Paris. The French are so effortlessly polished and chic and I’m loud and brash and very obviously American.
Despite all of that, though, I was so excited to be docking in France. When the EU started letting vaccinated Americans in again after months and months of being locked down, Stephanie and I booked the first flight we could get on and flew to Paris for a few days, where we literally just ate crepes, went shopping and rode the L’Open Tour bus over and over again. We felt like the only Americans in Paris. It was incredible, especially after such a long lockdown.
We were pulling into La Rochelle when I woke up. The skies looked a little ominous and the forecast didn’t inspire much confidence, but whatever the weather brought, we wouldn’t let it ruin our day.
La Rochelle is the gateway to two very special regions of France: Bordeaux (wine) and Cognac (…cognac). The “thing to do” when you go to this region is to drive out to Bordeaux and hop from chateau to chateau. Unfortunately, we were visiting on a holiday (Whit Monday), so tours (both through the ship and private) were limited, and La Rochelle isn’t a port you can easily do on your own if you want to visit chateaus. Public transit is more limited here and you can’t even walk around the port in La Rochelle because it’s fully industrial. You either go on a tour, in a cab or on a (free) shuttle bus to the city center, but you don’t walk around or walk out to a bus/train.
Stephanie really wanted to go out into Bordeaux to visit some of the winery chateaus, but the tours were super long and she wanted free time in La Rochelle, so she chose a shorter tour for us, Cognac Normandin-Mercier Visit & Tasting. Just outside La Rochelle is the Normandin Mercier chateau, where we could tour the cellars and do a tasting, so it allowed us the good parts of a chateau visit without having to actually drive all the way out to Bordeaux or Cognac.
We grabbed a quick breakfast up on the Lido deck and pulled our plans together for the day. Any remaining sunshine was starting to fade behind rapidly darkening clouds and we knew our rainless streak was probably coming to an end!
Our meeting time was around 8:45 AM in the Taj Mahal. We learned our tour only had 16 people, which really made it like a small, private tour. We’d be back by 12:30 PM, too, which would leave us nearly five hours of free time in port before back onboard time.
Once our tour number was called, we made our way down the gangway and down to bus number 6, where we met our guide Françoise and bus driver Bertrand. We had an entire bus for the 16 in our group, which meant we were all spread out and comfortable!
As we drove out, Françoise told us the plan for the day and Bertrand gave us the scenic drive out to the chateau. While the port area was incredibly cold and industrial, getting out into the city uncovered a city ripe with gardens, parks and beautiful houses. It almost reminded me of New York’s Central Park or Chicago’s Lincoln Park. It reminded me a bit of Arles, very quiet and beautiful, but felt a little less “French” than the other cities we’ve been to (they have strip malls! And a KFC!).
The drive to the chateau took us just over a half hour, but Françoise told us that, had we opted to go out to Cognac, it would take two hours each way! We pulled in to Normandin Mercier, where we met one of the owners, Audrey, who would lead our tour.
We were the only group at the chateau, and with such a small group, it was a really intimate experience. We started off in the tasting room, where Audrey explained to us how cognac is made and walked us through the chateau’s history (it has been in her family for many generations, and they’ve been producing cognac there since the late 1800s!).
Next, the tour moved into the cellar, where we got to see all the barrels where the cognac was being aged. It was such a high-sensory experience — we hadn’t even tasted any cognac yet, but the scent was so pungent, we felt like we could taste it and feel it in the back of our throats.
After the tour of the cellar, we headed back to the tasting room, where we sampled two cognacs (a 7-year and a 15-year), as well as two Pineaus (a mix of cognac and grape juice — it is delicious!). Audrey walked us through each tasting, guiding us through the flavors and the sensory experience. We enjoyed them so much that we bought four bottles to take home with us!
We bid farewell to Audrey (and the family dog, which followed Steph around the estate — she loves dogs!) and hopped back on the bus for the drive back to La Rochelle. It was a quick tour — just around four hours total — but we had so much fun!
The rain really started coming down as we drove back to La Rochelle. We couldn’t be mad about it (well, literally, because we can’t control the weather!) when we had such wonderful weather thus far. We ran our box of cognac bottles back to the room, got changed and turned around to head out for a shuttle to the city.
The shuttles were supposed to run every ten minutes or so, but someone told us when we got there that they had been waiting more than 30 minutes. It wasn’t as messy as the shuttle situation in Bilbao and we couldn’t really complain because there wasn’t an alternative to get out of the port.
Once the shuttle arrived, it was a quick 20-minute drive into the city center of La Rochelle. In the rain, people were lined up for over a block and were bum rushing to get onto the next available bus back to the ship to get out of the rain. We felt like crazy people trying to go out into the city in the rain.
I don’t know what I expected of La Rochelle, but it wasn’t what I found: a bustling city center filled with shops and cafes and sites lining the streets well beyond what the eye could see. We could have easily made a day just walking around and exploring — La Rochelle is not a small city center and was much larger than what we expected.
We quickly spotted one of our favorite restaurants from Paris, Les Fils a Maman, but in the rain, every restaurant was full with people trying to pass the time through the storm with a meal. Disappointed, we kept walking.
See, we didn’t come to La Rochelle to wander or to grab lunch — we came for one reason and one reason only: to visit Monoprix. If you’ve never been, Monoprix is like this European pseudo love child between Target and H&M. It literally has everything — a full grocery store, home decor, fashion (and collabs with famous designers), a pharmacy full of french skincare — it’s a one stop shop. And it’s my favorite shop. I love stocking up on French groceries and Stephanie, well, she loves their reusable grocery bags (I’m not kidding — she has at least 20). And we came out, in the rain, just to go to Monoprix. Was it worth it? 100%.
An hour and €130 later, we emerged from Monoprix with bags bulging with French goodies and we were starving. It was nearly 3:00 PM and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast at 8:00 AM! We didn’t figure to have time for a full meal — service at French restaurants is notoriously slow and the last shuttle back to the ship was at 4:30 PM — so we stopped at a nearby patisserie for a crepe, a slice of quiche and some Coke Zeros. It wasn’t posh or gourmet by any means, but it was really good and it hit the spot!
The rain had finally stopped and we could see La Rochelle through new eyes. The harbor almost reminded me of Copenhagen, with streets of cafes and shops just lining the perimeter. I wish we’d had more time there because I could have explored for hours!
Instead, we made our way back to the bus pick up where, surprisingly and thankfully, we walked right back on the bus and made our way back to the ship.
We passed through security and made our way back to our cabin, changing into dry clothes and pouring through our Monoprix hauls. After so many days in a row exploring all of these new places, every moment of rest we could get, we were taking advantage of. We watched something mindless on the television and poured through our pictures. Before we knew it, we were pulling out of La Rochelle and into the open waters ahead.
Once we were out to sea, we reemerged from our cabin for dinner at Cucina del Capitano. What can I say about Cucina del Capitano that I haven’t already said in the many times we’ve dined there? It may not be the most innovative restaurant at sea or the most glamorous, but it is consistently a fantastic meal and a great value for what Carnival charges for it (or, at least, used to at the time of this sailing before all of the price increases!). It’s always a treat for us to be able to sail on ships that have a Cucina del Capitano (or a JiJi, for that matter) and this meal was no different.
After dinner, there was so much going on onboard that we were even more grateful for the sea day ahead! We immediately beelined to the theater for the evening’s headliner entertainment — a show by one of our favorite cruise directors, The Flying Scotsman! Chris came onboard as a performer and treated us to quite the show. He started on Carnival as a member of the Playlist cast, so seeing him perform outside of his capacity as a Cruise Director was really quite the treat!
As sat out on our balcony after the show, I had to marvel (yes, again!) at how it was nearing 10:00 PM and there was still daylight on the horizon. Will I ever tire of this? Find this mundane and not mention it or write about it? Probably not — especially with skies like this!
If the sun is out, even the teeeeeeeniest, tiniest little bit, well I just can’t go to bed. Part of me thought of quoting Frozen here (you know — the sky is awake so I am awake), but I can’t be that person. What I can say, though, is truthfully, even nearly two weeks into our trip, as exhausted as I was from such a port-intensive itinerary and terrible as my jet lag was, if there’s light in the sky, I’m out, I’m doing things, I’m experiencing…anything I can. I’m up. This night, it was the 80s Rock and Glow Party up on the Lido deck. Instead of getting our zzzz’s, we jammed to the hits of the 80s and tossed around glow tubes to the night sky. It was a blast. It always is.
And then, when we were glow’ed out, full of pizza (really the best midnight snack at sea!) and the sky was dark with the sun fully below the horizon, we crawled back to the cabin and into bed, ready for a restful and fun day at sea to recharge with before we docked in Le Harve!
