If you are a mother, have a mother, or even just know a mother, I wish for you a happy day today!

Our family has a 20-year tradition for celebrating Mother’s Day for me. I’m not much of a gifts and flowers sort of gal for holidays. I’m into spending them with people I love and, if I’m lucky, there will be a good meal. For Mothers’ Day, that meal tradition is a homemade crêpe breakfast, complete with blintz filling, strawberries, blueberries, and powdered sugar. I look forward to it every year.

France would seem like the perfect place to find good crêpes on Mother’s Day, however, nearly everything here is closed on Sundays. Retail establishments, bakeries, restaurants, museums, and more.

We went out to ride a tram (street-based train) here in Orléans from end-to-end to get a neighborhood view of the city east to west, something we are doing to scout neighborhoods as we try to figure out where we want to spend the bulk of our time in France. When we were done, we walked through the city center looking for a place that might have a pastry or something, not even focused on crêpes as those seemed like a long-shot.

We ended up in this crêpe restaurant which appeared to be themed as “Alice in Wonderland” with complements of the “Small World” ride at Disney and the original “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” circa 1970s. Our expectations were low as there seems to be an inverse relationship between the wacky-ness factor of a restaurant and the quality of the food. We ordered crêpes, Greg with caramel and butter sauce and me with raspberry sauce, both with mounds of real chantilly whipped cream and miraculously, they were delicious! Again, so good we forgot to take photos before we ate them. Whoops!

The best part? France celebrates Mothers’ Day on May 25th, so I’ll have an opportunity to have crêpes here all over again in a couple of weeks. Yay!