As there was an underwhelming response to our suggestion that some of our friends guest blog, we haven’t really reported all the amusing and interesting aspects of our week at le Chat de Pierre. Therefore, in no particular order:
On our first morning when we all stopped for coffee at a lovely cafe in Sainte-Foy, Karen tried to fob off the waitress with a £1 coin, mistaking it for a Euro. The savvy lass wasn’t conned however, and returned it to an embarrassed Mrs Howlett, who rummaged in her purse and eventually came up with the correct currency. And of course, as £1 is worth more than 1 Euro so she would have been overpaying too!
Pool volleyball (i.e. throwing oneself around in the swimming pool whilst trying to get a Pocahontas football to someone on the other side of a pool noodle) was very popular in the afternoons when it was too hot to do anything else. Geoff and I were the mainstays, but Richard, Martha, Karol, Jenny and Karen all got involved too. Phil wisely stayed out of it…..
Boules was less popular however, as whilst everyone played a few games at dusk on Tuesday when it had cooled down (and dusk was approaching 10 p.m. by the way, so we did play on until it was dark!) and Jenny and Karol wiped the floor with everyone else, on the second occasion only Phil and I were game. We also played on until it was dark – first to 31 points, which Phil flukily won by about 10 points! I was robbed and gutted…..
It was bloody hot all week. When I say hot I mean really scorching, mid to late 30’s every day, and it got hotter as the week went on. The gite doesn’t have air conditioning, and the bedrooms were very hot at night, even with the windows wide open. There was a fan in each room but it only circulated the warm air. That was until I remembered what we used to do at Broker Network when we didn’t have air-conditioning. On Thursday I froze four large plastic bottles of water (one for each room) and placed one in front of the fan as we went to bed. It cooled down the air from the fan as it thawed, and seemed to make the room cooler for a while, although it could of course have been the placebo effect! Anyway we did seem to sleep a bit better with this contraption in place.
All the bedrooms had insect screens on the windows – unfortunately ours would spring open every time we closed it, so defeating the object. Grant eventually created a ‘Heath Robinson’ invention and managed to keep the screen in place with a teaspoon strategically wedged in the side of the frame – success! However it didn’t really help much with the heat……
Breakfast was a daily dose of seven or eight different meals all at the same time, with some people having cereal (Richard and Martha brought their own Weetabix and had locally sourced oats with them, whilst Karen and Geoff bought bran flakes) most of us had fruit and yoghurt and then various types of toast (some soft bread, others toasted french bread) with jams, cheese, or honey. And then there were the drinks, what with two different teas with either semi skimmed fresh milk or UHT semi skimmed, coffee with full fat or semi skimmed fresh milk, not to mention fruit juice and Martha even brought her own sugar in her luggage! Suffice to say breakfast seemed to take up half of each morning to prepare, eat and clear up afterwards. At least it was warm enough to eat outside every day which was lovely.
We challenged our brains with nightly quizzes started by Jenny with her Lidl special quiz book which had 1 answer for question one and led up to 12 answers for question twelve. Some of the topics were quite obscure but we did reasonably well, but eventually resorted to just doing the Times daily quiz and that was a struggle after a few glasses of wine. I think the heat affected our brains!
Anyway, this should give you a flavour of some of the more obscure happenings of our week at le Chat!