---

For myself and for most of my friends, Christmas 2006 was going to be our first Xmas away from family and friends back in New Zealand and of course the NZ summer. Nevertheless a plan to get a team together and head away for Christmas quickly materialised and we booked ourselves a large house in the French countryside about an hour inland from La Rochelle.

During the week prior to Christmas London was blanketed by a thick cold fog that was fair strangling London’s airports just in time for the holidays. Luckily for us though, we were flying out of Stansted where the fog was still allowing planes to take off. We arrived at La Rochelle and proceeded to immigration where a single French border policeman took ages to inspect our passports, eyeing each of us with a degree of scepticism. Its not like we were here to invade his country, although given that there were 9 of us we certainly had the numbers.

We had organised a couple of rental cars for the week and so on our way to our house we had a few laughs at Jezza and Spam’s expense as they manfully adapted to life on the right hand side of the road. We arrived at our lodgings, the rather palatially named Le Grand Malveau, and instantly it became apparent that it was even better than we had hoped. Bev and I conducted a video tour of the house on Christmas Eve which you can check out in the two videos. With generously sized rooms, an excellent lounge and good dining/kitchen area we were set! Perhaps most crucially there were two open fireplaces which we kept well fed and the house nice and toasty, as the temperatures outside were constantly about -3 to -4 degrees the whole time we were there.

The next day was Christmas Eve and we headed into the nearest town (Saint Jean d’Angely) to stock up on food and drink for the next 5 days. A most critical task this one but luckily the girls had the shopping list all sorted and they directed us around the supermarket with military efficiency. Three overflowing trolleys and about 700 euro later the mission was over and we headed back to base to get the fires burning and commence eating and drinking our way through it all, a task which occupied us for the rest of the day.

I’m not someone who can sleep in when there are presents to be opened, so I was first up on Christmas Day and got the Christmas songs pumping nice and early. Having nerdily loaded my iPod with some Christmas CDs, we soon had Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and a bit of Band Aid reverberating around the house. Each of us were tasked with buying two Secret Santa presents for two lucky recipients, a £10 serious gift and a £5 joke present. Its safe to say that everyone did well on the present front, particularly Jezza, Dan and I who were lucky enough to get dodgy g-strings from our Secret Santas, each of us hoping that someone was having a nice laugh and hadn’t seriously wanted to see us in them!

The cooking of Christmas dinner was a real pitch in affair, with everyone being entrusted with crucial tasks. Sean, Jezza and Dan were in charge of stuffing and cooking the turkey and everyone will agree that they pretty much aced it. There was so much food that it really became a meal of attrition, with people wearily pushing the plates away when they couldn't fit any more in. Everyone was mowing into the drinks as well, except for me as I was abstaining to battle a week long flu bug that just would not go away!

The next day was Boxing Day and we took the cars for a mission into La Rochelle and to Île de Ré, a large island off the coast of La Rochelle which is connected to mainland France by a large bridge. Apparently Île de Ré is a tourist mecca in summer but on a chilly Boxing Day it was pretty much deserted. Nevertheless we stopped at a small fishing village on the north coast called La Flotte for a look around and a much needed drink before heading back to base.

Then on the 27th we went on another road trip, this time to the town of Cognac. As the name suggests, Cognac is world famous for the brandy of the same name. We stopped at the Hennessy distillery, which is the oldest and perhaps most famous brand of cognac in the world, and went on the tour. I have been on quite a few tours of wineries or breweries in my time but I would have to say that the Hennessy one was perhaps the most interesting and professional so far (although the Speights Brewery tour in Dunners will always be special). They actually have barrels of Hennessy cognac that they have been ageing in their warehouse since 1802 - apparently it is so priceless that they will probably never consider opening the barrels to sell it! At the end of the tour I felt compelled to invest in a bottle for myself, and with my flu finally in retreat I broke the seal on it that night. That night Caroline and I took our turn at cooking and together with Chef Bev we made up a large lasagne. With the oven stacked with dishes of baking lasagne, we had nowhere to cook the garlic bread so we quite creatively wrapped each loaf in tinfoil and nestled them into embers from the open fire in the kitchen. Nevertheless while seemingly a practical and rustic idea at the time, barely 5 minutes later we were gutted to find that the bread had developed a rather thick charcoal glaze!

The 28th was our last day in France and we all got on the road early. Dan headed off down Toulouse way to do some more exploring of the south of France while the rest of us drove the cars a couple of hours north to Poitiers. Lucy and Sean had organised to spend New Years in Berlin so they caught the TGV high speed train at Poitiers for Paris and then made their way across to Berlin, while the rest of us had flights booked from Poitiers back to Stansted later that evening. Poitiers is quite an old French city and as it is perched on the top of this hill I think it used to be some sort of medieval fortress back in the day. We had a good look around but despite its interesting history, Poitiers is a pretty non-descript kind of town and we were really just filling in time before our flight back to London.

So when all is said and done we all agreed that our first northern christmas was great. As we are all used to spending Christmas with our families, we all found being Christmas orphans to be a different kind of experience, although spending that time away with your friends certainly proved to be a great alternative and more than made up for being thousands of kilometres from home. Our house was superb and we certainly filled it with christmas cheer and had some great fun.

Next stop: New Years in Munich!

---