Poitou Charente - "the Green Venice"

Coming down from the mountains, it didn't take take long to be back  in heat and humidity.  This time, our next stop was Coulon in Poitou-Charente....where you might say... Poitou-Charente is one of the lesser known regions of France on the central west coast.  The part we were headed for is called the Marais Poitevin, also known as the Green Venice due to the many winding canals that have been built through reclaimed land that was previously swamp (sounds romantics doesn't it).  It was beautiful.
We hired a double canoe for 1/2 a day.  As is frequently the case with our travels we found ourselves lost in the first 10 minutes.  There are main canals that you are supposed to stick to.   The first canals we found ourselves in became rapidly thinner and surrounded by blackberry brambles and the occasional float dead critter (we believe they may have included otters and beavers but didn't look too closely...didn't we tell you it was romantic).
We did see quite a few critters along the way, mostly they slunk into the water ahead of us.  We couldn't tell whether they were otters or beavers....we'll just call them botters.  We did get up close and personal to beaver during lunch though: they make a tasty beaver rillette (like a pate)...we'll refrain from making any jokes about "eating beaver" ;-)
The advantage to being down at water level in our canoe was that when a curious swan decided to scope us out we got totally eye-to-eye....these creatures are so graceful and it was a treat to be considered so unthreatening by it.
Food didn't go unexamined, of course. As well as the beaver rilletes we discoverd a drink called pineau, which is made from mixing cognac and unfermented grape juice and aging in a cask for 5 our more years. Very approachable as an aperitif (only about 15% alc/vol). We also sampled our first carpaccio of St Jacques (scallops) and were immediate fans.