Three big birthdays in the year seemed a good excuse for a rare family get-together. We decided to rent a gite in the Dordogne; we could revisit some of our old haunts and have a trip down memory lane. Gemma’s so good at this sort of thing and soon found our holiday home, a place large enough to house twelve, with a pool and aircon.
Alex, Graham and Immy were hiring a car at the airport in Bordeaux, while Gemma, Chris and Elliott would need picking up from Angouleme railway station, having flown in to Paris from Australia. Belle and Tom would have to be picked up the following evening in Bordeaux. Kieran and I, having read of the hours long queues at airports since the introduction of the Schengen area security checks, were ready to set off late morning for Angouleme, when Gemma messaged to say that they weren’t doing said checks, so they’d arrive hours earlier than predicted. We finished the packing as fast as possible and set off in convoy. Having spent most of the previous day and night travelling, the Aussies weren’t very impressed by our tardy arrival; hardly surprising!
Eventually we got to the gite; Alex, Graham and Immy had already arrived and had cold beers ready. The gite was great; rambling and quirky, with a huge kitchen/living/dining room, a big terrace with a table tennis table and a lovely pool; the weather was glorious – still hot and sunny, but so much fresher and less humid than Dax.
We visited the nearby town of Brantome several times; it was an old favourite and still as beautiful as we remembered it. We wandered around the town, played in the river, hired canoes and found a very nice restaurant. In fact, Gemma and Chris went there every day as Elliott’s body clock was completely out of sync, meaning that he woke at about 4am every day; they must have been exhausted, as they took him out to avoid him waking the whole house.
Another day we went to Beauronne, where we used to have a little house. A walk round the village revealed that nothing had changed, except that the bar and the restaurant appeared to have closed down and even the spring water source at the bottom of the hill was nearly dry, though that could be just this summer. The current generation is either less foolhardy or less brave than my kids, and weren’t keen on climbing onto the top of the bus shelter, where my kids used to spend hours. We didn’t see a soul in the whole time we were there.
From Beauronne we went to Lou Marmitou’s for lunch, our favourite restaurant back in the day; it’s a lot more upmarket now than it was 20 years ago, but the food was good and the proprietor most accommodating. It was a real nostalgia trip, as we reminisced about our holidays back then.
Over the hill behind the gite was a disused quartz quarry; Immy, Arthur and Emily were very keen to go exploring, so Alex and I accompanied them one evening. They came home with their pockets and a bag laden with pieces of quartz, which of course, they HAD to keep. We allowed them to live on the TV table for the rest of the week, but then they had to go back.
We had a lovely dinner in the pretty village of St Pierre de Cole, just a few km up the road, a treat for our final evening then later, as we were sitting around the pool, watching a distant thunderstorm, we noticed that the lightning was orange and a bit hazy. It was the fires blazing near Bordeaux, two and a half hours drive away. Investigating, we learned that the town of Biscarrosse, near where Gemma, Kieran and Alex had booked to stay the following week, had been evacuated. Luckily they were able to cancel and rebook at Mimizan, further down the coast. The next morning we woke to what looked like fog, but was, in fact, smoke, blown inland from the coast. Belle and Tom had gone to Bordeaux the previous evening for an early flight to Rome and were unsure whether or not their flight would be able to take off until the last minute, but in the end it did, to everyone’s relief.
Packing the cars was complicated; Gemma, Kieran and Alex were going to Mimizan, but Arthur and Emily wanted to ride with Kieran as far as possible, then we swapped around so that I could take Kieran’s kids to their mum’s and Graham and Immy could come to mine, Chris and Elliott having left for the UK the previous day. Eventually everybody arrived where they were meant to be.
Graham seemed happy to get on with a project he’s devising for work, so Immy and I had a great week; we went swimming, she practised her guitar skills and enjoyed playing with my sewing machine to customise a denim jacket. Towards the end of the week we all met up at a huge water park at Seignosse, where there are lots of pools and loads of water slides, ranging from fairly tame to terrifying.
And so the holiday came to an end; the fires were still blazing, so Gemma’s train to Bergerac was cancelled as the line from Dax to Bordeaux was closed. I thought I’d have to drive her to Bergerac, but Graham and Alex decided to set off the day before their flight, to drop her off en route to Bordeaux, quite a detour, adding about 3 hours driving to their journey, and a gesture for which I was very grateful,
Life’s quiet again now, though I’ve got a few projects lined up and you never know what’s round the corner, do you?