It's my policy to eat "today's special" when I visit foreign lands, so when stopped for lunch after the German frontier, I pointed to the dish in the center.  The man behind the counter asked if I'd like it with potatoes, rice or pasta.  He heaped the scalloped potatoes in the bottom of the bowl, and spooned the "lyoner" on top.  It reminded me of the "nicoise" at the Petit Lux, with sausage instead of squid, no Pernod, in a tomato and pepper sauce.  Blair had pasta carbonara.  Both were delicious, and we traded half and half.  I was in the mood for German landscape.

We were on the trail of German photo opportunities in the region between Saarbrucken and Frankfurt.  In our never ending quest to earn a living, we'd been commissioned to decorate corridors in a hotel with camera images from that area.  I took out the atlas, and located something called the "route touristique".  "Let's go that way," I suggested to Blair.

Our rental car, a Fiat Panda, did not fit our image of a category B.  The seats were hard and it rode like a covered wagon.  We could barely break 140 kilometers an hour, qualifying for the slow lane on the autobahn.  The radio had no antenna.  We limped out of Paris at 9 AM, with little traffic and overcast skies.

We drank our pilsners and identified route 48 on the map.  German roads are not so easy for us, and there was a lot of construction.
I was completely unprepared for what followed:  the most beautiful fall color and uninterrupted landscapes I'd ever seen.  Coming from New England, I consider myself versed in fall leaves, but these were exceptional.  It was a mix of conifers and deciduous trees, giving an overall effect of the firs being "on fire".  There was a solid carpet of rose madder --leaves and pine needles on the forest floor, black tree trunks piercing through.  The sky was a perfect cerulean blue (for me, pthalocyline and white), providing the foil for brilliant gold leaves.  The sun shone on the falling leaves, as if gold coins were dropping onto the dappled ground.

We started and stopped for a full two hours as we took whatever pictures we could.  There is no parking on bridges, and the pictures that "got away" were as good as or better than those we captured.  We saw a large deer with a full set of heavy antlers.  I fed horses sugar cubes I've been gleaning from restaurants.

There were fruit stands offering cider and "new" wine, pumpkins and squash, potatoes and onions.  We bought a kilo of crisp tart apples (thankfully no "delicious") with dusty skins and blue-white flesh.  We took photos.

It has been a week of "artnotes" moments, after a dry spell in the US.  It was anything but dry while we were there, with an art fair being canceled on account of rain, and a small turnout for our opening in New York state, where the weatherman warned of floods.  We sold well in North Carolina, and my five-year-old nephew, Henry, and I explored the meaning of inspiration (what's that?, he asks).  As always, it was a trip of extremely good and extremely bad.  I am happy to be back in sunny, 70 degree Paris, painting leaves.

We thought about staying overnight in Germany, so I could see the Gutenberg bible on display in Mainz, but we decided to save it for another trip.  We returned to Paris 9 o'clock last night, with a camera full of images.  The designer wants black and white photos, and on the computer, I strip away the magentas and yellows, corals and crimsons reserved only for my painting palette.



Laurie (photo and text) and Blair PESSEMIER
"Colored leaves, Germany"