More Croissants, Please!

On September 17th, I will embark on the adventure of a lifetime – a 5-week trip to France.  The first four weeks I’ll be attending a Pastry certificate program at the Gastronomicom school in a little town in the South of France on the Mediterranean called Agde.  Here is where I’ll document my journey as I bake, wine taste, trail run, rub noses with cows, and generally galavant around France and Switzerland.  I have gotten a lot of similar questions from people, so let’s start off with a Q&A.

Are you quitting your job?
No, I’m taking a “recharge leave”, which means I’ll have a job when I get back and I get to keep my benefits while I’m gone.  Pretty awesome program my company has!

Is Andrew coming with you?
No.  Andrew’s going to stay at home and take care of our two newest additions (we are fostering kittens!).  He will come out after my program is over to travel around for a week or so.

What are you going to learn to bake?
I have no idea!  I don’t know a whole lot about the program and there is no syllabus.  All I know is that it’s 15 hours a week of French cooking and 15 of baking.  My guesses are croissants, macarons, palmiers, and other delicious buttery treats.

Where are you staying?
The school has apartments for students.

Have you always wanted to do this?
No.  I’ve liked baking most of my life and have a huge sweet tooth, but I never thought about going to pastry school until recently.  I knew I wanted to take advantage of my company’s recharge leave opportunity and threw around a few ideas (including: camp counselor, thru-hike the Colorado trail, volunteer somewhere).  I decided on Pastry school, and if you are going to go to Pastry school, why not go to France?  So I started looking into it and here I am.

Are you going to quit your job and open a bakery when you get back?
Eventually!  I like to think of this as more of a retirement plan.  If I can retire early and spend my days baking delicious treats, curating an excellent coffee selection, and hanging out in my own bakery, that would be amazing.  Until then, I plan to share everything I’ve learned with my friends and family!

What else are you going to do while you’re there?
So far, my plans involve:

• The Desalpe festival in Switzerland, which is a festival dedicated to ushering the cows home from a summer of grazing in the mountains
• Overnight trail running trip in the Alps of Switzerland.  There are lots of huts (more like hotels) built into the side of the mountains there.  I’m going to run up the mountain and to one of the huts, then run back down the other side to a train station.
• Paris, Champagne, Marseilles, Lake Lucerne – this is the leg I’ll do when Andrew comes out.

I don’t have anything booked yet since I don’t know a lot about class times, proximity to the train station, etc., so things may change when I get there!

I’ll start posting more closer to when I travel.  I’m not sure how accessible internet will be while I’m there, but I’m hoping to post pretty regularly.  Until then… Au revoir!