Chapter 1 (of 8) Holiday 2005

This year we decided to head off for a month to France.
In fact if it hadn’t been for a certain wedding we might have gone for two.
Sile is free for August as well as July and me, being on a very long leash, we decided to risk spending the whole month within the confines of l’Hexagone (this being what the French sometimes call themselves.)
Now no matter how carefully we selected a house this was prime tourist season so it was going to cost a fortune to rent one so we made the decision to spend the first two weeks camping.
We hadn’t camped for about 15 years, around the time that the kids put their feet down and said, mainly because of my snoring in the narrow confines of a tent, and the long nocturnal trudges of weak Dwyer bladders to “Sanitaires”, that next holiday would be in a house.
With only ourselves to please we decided to take the plunge again.
We still own a medium sized dome tent, having passed the huge two bedroomed chalet tent on to my niece Tara and her family, and we made a last minute decision to throw in a “Gazebo” which seems to be the modern misnomer for a sort of wall less tent used for shelter in patios.
As for the rest of equipment we were still reasonably flush and knew that anything we were short of could be bought for small money in any French supermarket.
The other huge advantage of camping was that we had to make no advance bookings so we could go exactly where the fancy took us.
That in itself was wonderfully liberating, and that is exactly what we did.
The only booking we made was for the first night, in an excellent Chambre d’Hote called

l’Houzardiere

near Le Mans,

where we enjoyed an swim in their little pool,

an excellent Dinner (boissons compris), an elegant bedroom and croissants for breakfast for a staggeringly cheap €80 for the two of us.

True to our original intention the following day saw us wandering the roads of the Sarthe region. There we fell on a beautiful town called Solesme which had the most dramatic

Gothic Abbey over the river,

full of little turrets and balconies which could have graced any Hollywood version of one of Shakespearian plays.

Discovering that Solesme was one of a set of “Little Cities of Character of the Sarthe” we decided to move no further but to explore these.
We found a fine quiet (almost empty) campsite nearby in

Roeze sur Sarthe ( from the bridge,our campsite was on the right,by the boats)

and set about exploring the other “Petites Cities de Carectere”.

It might interest one to know how we made our decision where to put our tent.
France is flush with Camp Sites, most towns having their own “Municipal” version. These usually have most basic campers needs so all we had to do was find a municipal with at least an on camp guardian, hot showers, private pitches (emplacements), and a freezer available so we could freeze our ice blocks to keep our cool box chill. We also knew from experience to avoid one with a swimming pool, these being almost inevitably overrun with children.
Having a current Michelin Camping guide is invaluable in this situation.

The Bridge from the campsite.

That said all did not go too well in our first few days camping.

The site was by the river and on our second night there some of the townspeople just at the other side had what was definitely a full blown “Seisiun”.
The singing started at midnight and went on intermittently until about 4.30.
It was as drunken and discordant as a Seisiun at home would be.
We were again woken at about 5.30 by some noises around the tent, Sile thought she saw some long legs run off as we awoke noisily but we assumed it was an animal.
I had taken a vagary to write a journal at dawn each morning of the holidays. (from which this blog is being gleaned)
For the great creative juices to flow the system needed the lubrication of a large cup of coffee.
This particular morning the juices were not destined to even trickle.
No where could I find out gas lighter to light the little stove.
Having spent a full and desperate 30 minutes trying to ignite a tissue from the cigarette lighter in the car, it began to dawn on us that, as our spare cylinder of gas was also missing that the midnight thief was of a definite two legged variety. To extract our lighter and gas it had to open a box with a fastened lid.
I went to Madame La Gardienne to report and to borrow some matches for the still strongly desired fix of coffee.
It was then that we discovered that our neighbour had been dealt an even crueller blow than us. They had burnt a hole in and consequently destroyed his sons large inflated Piscine.
This was obviously done with our gas lighter.
At this stage it became obvious that we were the victims of a visit by the drunken “Chanteurs” who seemed to have gone on a destructive spree after their choral session finished. Luckily we woke up when we did as this seemed to have scared them off, and the splash that I remembered hearing shortly after was no doubt our gas cylinder hitting the river.
Well!
What excitement!
You will be glad to know that this episode was taken extremely seriously by the powers that were.
We were interviewed not once but twice by Gendarmes during the course of the day, and the other campers now assumed that we were made of the right stuff and so were reasonably civil to us.

Safe again in our emplacement in Roeze

When I tried to start my car and discovered that I had drained the battery with my attempts find fire to obtain my coffee fix, Madame La Gardienne was on her bike in a jiffy and came back shortly with a borrowed jump leads and the use of her own car to “jump” it off.

The rest of our few days in the Sarthe region passed off without too much trauma.

The other “Petites Cities” proved just as interesting as Solesme with the star of the show being Asnieres-sur-Vegre, a little star with a church with the most marvellous

12th century frescos, depicting graphically the devils delight in being paid the wages of sin.
We even had a few candidates for them now.

While we were sitting outside the church in Asnieres a little episode happened to us which warmed our hearts and helped us get over the “Camping Raid of Roeze”
A party of three elderly but extremely elegant people, two ladies and a gentleman, made their way slowly up the path towards the church.
One of the ladies, who was using an old ebony walking stick, came over to us and smilingly asked, in beautifully accented French, if we were the owners of the Irish car parked down the village.

Asnieres-sur-Vegre with Sile and the corner of the Irish Car

When we admitted that we were she said that she just wanted to tell us that “just this year” she had so much enjoyed a holiday in our country and she wanted to thank us for it. “Even the weather was good “ she said, “and the people were so kind”
This quite made our day!
There will be further sagas of our holidays over the next few days!