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Published: July 11th 2011
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FRIDAY 8TH JULY
Garden work abandoned for the day as so much rain fell yesterday evening and last night. Elaine did rooms with Zara while I did some DIY stuff, including trying to fix the loo in the “staff” quarters. I know getting out of the comfort zone is one of the objectives of this holiday, but in no way did I expect that to extend to the repair of French toilets…… The cistern was split so it was useless, and all the bolts that held it to the, er, operational bit were rusted solid so I had to smash it up with a hammer and Dominique said she would get another.
Then I fixed a few doors and things while Elaine practiced her hospital corners. Something to do with making beds apparently, but as a bloke, obviously I wouldn’t know anything about that. Anyway, it was our first opportunity to look around the rooms that Dominique lets out to the B&Bers at 70-odd euros/night, and very nice they are too as the pics will hopefully show.
It’s funny being here as a worker when people not unlike us, i.e. similar age, probably similar income, are the guests
– we manage to resist the temptation to tell them we could afford these nice rooms, we don’t have to work in the garden really! Although I don’t really envy them – OK they don’t have to work 4 hours a day but they are remote from the household, they don’t get to eat Dom’s lush food or hear all her stories, or have Bellis come and curl up on the sofa with you, or spend the evening just nattering away around the dinner table over a bottle of wine.
After lunch we took off to Utah beach. Weather was cold and windy with spits of rain so not really conducive to beach activity, so after a windswept 10 minutes we carried on up to St. Vaast and Barfleur, a couple of small fishing ports further up the coast and explored on foot.
When we got back, Dom had had a bad afternoon – couldn’t get a replacement cistern, but came back from her son’s with a basket full of apricots, destined to become jam within hours. After dinner, we were obliged to play cards with Macouf (that’s not a made-up name) who is Dom’s 10-year-old grandson and
he wanted to play some interminable game which carried on until one person holds all the cards. When he wasn’t looking, we were bunging all the cards into one hand to get it over with, otherwise we would probably all still be there.
SATURDAY 9TH JULY
This was one of the few days when there were no B&B’ers, so a bit of a lazy morning – anyway weekends are officially days off for HelpX’ers although it doesn’t always quite work out that way. Chooks have to be turned out and eggs have to be gathered as usual, for instance – we get 6-8 on average per day and the hens here lay really brown ones. They look the colour of German sun-worshippers after a season in Majorca…..
Dom was away pronto so left us to it - so we had a couple of boiled eggs each for brekkie – lovely – then Elaine and Zara did a bit of house-maidy stuff, I did a bit more diy, we all went and communed with the goats, and by 12 E and me were on the road to an area called Suisse Normande (Norman Switzerland), about 60 miles
away. Went down some brilliant roads – oh for the motor-bike, but I guess an open sports car is a reasonable substitute.
“Norman Switzerland”? Bit of a stretch, that one. Norman Derbyshire would be more accurate. There’s a nice big river that meanders through a few steep-sided valleys and gorges, and that’s about it really – not as spectacular as the Wye valley for sure, but a bit like Matlock maybe. We stopped first at Thury-Harcourt and had a picnic in a park in the town, swigging cider from a bottle that we brought with us. In England, we would have looked like the town winos and probably have been moved on.
Then we drove to Clecy, which gets glowing write-ups in all the tourist guides but was completely dead when we arrived – they obviously take their lunch very seriously in Clecy. So we wandered down to the river which was tourist city – loads of riverside restaurants, beer gardens and ice-cream parlours, and boat rental places. Mmm, nice idea we thought as we walked upstream, watching pedalos and kayaks drifting gently along.
We came to a kayak hire place and thought we would go for
it, so paid over 26 euros for what we thought was a 2-hour paddle starting and finishing from Clecy. Nope, we were asked to wait 5 minutes then 2 mini-buses turned up packed with more kayakers. They picked up a load of boats on trailers, and us, then we got driven about 3 miles upstream, dragged the boats down a narrow track through the woods and were launched into the river Orne with 20-odd screaming French, all intent on getting each other as wet as possible.
We paddled like f*** to get away from this mob and eventually had the river almost to ourselves – it was very still and slow so was easy paddling. Then we discovered why it was so still – a barrage appeared round a corner with a short, steep chute for the kayaks. We watched a couple slide down with no mishaps apart from a lot of water splashing about. This hadn’t been part of the plan – we had no change of clothes and were intending to eat out that night, but there was no way back now. 5 secs later and a nice restaurant meal was definitely out of the question as
the kayak nose-dived at the bottom of the chute, tipped onto its side and launched me into the water. Somehow Elaine stayed in the boat but we were pretty much equally saturated. All this in front of an audience – loads of kayakers had stopped there to watch the fun…..
The rest of the journey was fairly OK, apart from going backwards down a rapids section. We got back to the hire place, then had to walk back to Clecy, about 4km, leaving a trail of water drips along the road. So we drove back to Grandcamp, and it’s just as well we did as Dom was just on the point of serving up a veal stew and would have been well pissed-off with us if we had been schmoozing down in Clecy with a moules mariniere, or whatever…..
Afterwards, we stayed up with Zara playing a word game which was insanely competitive, racing to think of words to fit categories. After a few glasses of wine, this was not my finest hour and I suffered constant brain-freeze. Zara, 23 and on a lot less wine than either of us, thrashed us embarrassingly…..
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