Wednesday morning we awoke with visions of carpaccio dancing in our heads. We made it a two cappuccino morning, and got on the road by 9:30 with the hope that we could be back up north in Saint Florent by lunch. Why, pray tell, would we be in a rush to get back to some place we'd already been? Two reasons: (1) to return a certain gate opener back to a certain hotel that certainly hated us and (2) to maybe try and squeeze in another beach day on Saleccia.
So ROAD TRIP. We each placed bets on our exact arrival time, and I agreed to the dumbest terms ever. We stopped for breakfast in Solenzara, which had been our jumping off point the previous day for our canyon adventures. Liza was jonesing for a crepe (and who wouldn't be), and my oh my those ladies at the crepe shop did their best to help me out with the time bet. I swear they had that crepe made in America and shipped over because it took about 10 hours.
With only eight wineries visited, and one day to go, it didn't take much convincing to get Liza to pull into Casabianca outside Aleria. Editors note: totally thought it was called Casablanca....sorry I never learned to read. In addition to featuring award winning wines, Casabianca has the unique distinction of being the only place in Corsica that sells boxes of wine. BOOOOOM.
We continued on, and arrived in SF at 1:33, three minutes after my guestimation, and yet somehow I lost. We pulled into Hotel Dolce Notte and I forced Liza to be the bearer of bad news and gate openers. Thankfully there was a minimum of yelling, so we parked on the pier and settled in for lunch.
With our only responsibility of the day complete, now was the time to figure out our day. Options: (1) go to Saleccia in ridiculous winds and risk being covered in salt for two days (we weren't sure if our ferry cabin would have a shower); (2) drive around Cap Corse (aka Corsica's fist pump) and risk getting stuck on mountain roads and miss our ferry. A really tough call that the responsible person in me could not come to terms with. We ended with a compromise of sorts: hit a final winery in Patrimonio, go midway up the fist pump to a town called Nonza. and then work our way back over to Bastia for a final evening of walking tours and oysters before catching our 10 p.m. ferry.
In New Zealand, Liza and I came up with an elaborate story to use as an excuse for not buying a bottle at every one of the 21 wineries we visited. But in Corsica, it's really hard to leave these tiny places staffed by people who don't really like us or know why we're there without buying a bottle (my favorite is that at every place they asked us what we wanted to taste. The answer, sirs, is everything...now line 'em up!!!). Since we both make gobs of money, buying wasn't an issue until the last day when we had four bottles of wine left, and two more places to hit our desired ten wineries. Having to buy more wine = so stressful. LIFE IS SO HARD SOMETIMES YOU GUYS. Our solution to this was to go to three last wineries (bringing total to 11) and buy three last bottles instead of two. Success? Success.
The drive up to Nonza was just as advertised. Extremely scenic. The town is perched perilously on the side of a mountain, so we parked carefully and set up shop at a vantage point. Besides being gorge, Nonza is famous for two things: the beach is black because of pollution, and because the patron saint of Corsica, Santa Julia was martyred there. After being captured, her breasts were cut off and thrown at a rock, from which two springs arose (this is crazy - MINE TOO). You can see those vines in a church on the beach, but it's 800 steps down, meaning 800 steps up, meaning our time and energy was best used to consume one of those bottles of wine.
And now we've come to our final destination: Bastia. On first glance, Bastia sucked. It looked like any other industrialized city - perhaps the Milan of Corsica. We parked, had a beer, and found an hour long walking tour that would end with a delicious seafood dinner. Turns out we had Bastia all wrong. The port was, once again, perfection, and the old town, once again, totes quaint. We found a spot in the city's garden on a hill to work on the next bottle of wine, before heading down to Huegettes for dinner. We'd decided to just totally treat ourselves and blow our wad on dinner (except that the lobster was 85 euros...so nevermind). We split our last Etang di Diana oysters, some shrimp and some duck, before wandering back to our car and getting in line for the ferry.
It's hard to say where and when the day actually ended. We checked into our cabin, and were told we had to be out an hour prior to our arrival in Nice...meaning 6:30 am. I mean...what? We went up to the deck, tried our damnedest to finish a last bottle of wine, and toasted goodbye to Corsica. Corsica...really can't say enough about it. Au revoir.
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