1 to 10 June - Finishing up in France (part 2)

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Michel Telo - Ai Se Eu Te Pego

Our last week or so in France began with a real bang. We spent the first day checking out the upper Loire valley around Bourges and Pouilly, thinking about getting up to those pretty villages we’d seen around Auxerre, but ran out of time. In the middle of the night after our return to Argenton, I heard a bit of noise outside on the street after a car went past our house. The next morning we were alerted by neighbours who were gesticulating rather excitedly in the direction of our car. On inspection of the car I was greeted by a sad sight. The noise I heard during the night was a car getting a little too close to le petit pois, scraping down its side leaving a large red gash, smashing a rear window and ripping off the side mirror. The neighbours from across the road, Bruno and Jean-Pierre, came out to inspect the damage with me, and as they couldn’t speak English, we stood around with hands on hips, quietly cursing in our respective native tongues. At least we were sharing something together, as men can only do. Realising the need for action, Bruno jumped onto his mobile phone and requested a gendarme vehicle to come and inspect the damage. A couple of gendarmes turned up fairly promptly, took a few notes and photographed the damage. The vehicle that had hit our car left behind its own side mirror. The gendarmes grabbed this and sauntered off to find the culprit. I was required to front up at the local gendarme station.I first rang Pierre back in Australia to let him know about the damage. Gina had already rung him and he had already called the insurance office. The final step in getting things in train was to report the incident to the gendarme nationale.

Sensing that I might need a little help, Bruno drove me to the station and escorted me in giving the desk sergeant a quick explanation of what had happened. I was marched into the head gendarme’s office for what initially felt like an interrogation. After a few minutes I hesitated at a couple of questions that were asked of me, mainly because they were in French. The very muscular and heavily moustached gendarme, also called Bruno, reminded me rather firmly that we were in France, and therefore the interview would be conducted in French. Bruno turned out to be quite a nice chap, with pretty good English as well, which he did a good job of hiding beneath a rather burly nationalistic veneer. After about an hour I was presented with a set of printed statements to sign. Again I hesitated because everything was in French. Choking back the guilt of not taking any French in high school or any night classes to prepare me for this sort of situation, I put my reservations aside and signed each document. They did at least look like the sort of official looking documents I was expecting, quoting certain articles of French civil and criminal code. They also looked decidedly bereft of interview detail so I figured I wasn’t signing much apart from registering a certain incident.

Undaunted by the condition of the car, we decide to spend the last few days or so in Argenton with a series of small trips up to the Loire to explore a few more Chateaux. The ones we select to visit turn out to be less grand than those previously visited - Valencay and Chenonceaux – and have a more lived in feel. The closest of the three we visit is the Château d'Azay-le-Ferron. It dates back to the fifteenth-century as a castle. Apart from the grandeur of the building, it features some pretty impressive hunting memorabilia like hippopotamus and other exotics from a time when travel to Africa for wild game hunting was the thing to do. The chateau also has some good gardens (gardening demonstrations were running when we visited) and very large grounds.

On another day we visit Chateaux-de-Bouges, a fairly young building having been built in 1765. Amongst a cavalcade of owners was Talleyrand, Napoleon Boneparte’s foreign Minister. The most recent owners were the Viguier’s with Monsieur Viguier being the manager of a Paris department store. They restored the place and having no children left it to the French state in 1968. It’s a pretty modest place and we really liked the toned down grandeur although the dining room and hallway chandeliers was pretty spectacular. The Viguiers loved their horses, probably as replacements for children, and the châteaux has some fairly large stables.

The last place we visit was the Chateux-de-Montressor. It’s a very cool place, a medieval fortress built in about 1005 on a rocky spur that looks over the little town of Montresor and dominates the valley. It’s got a long history of owners, kings and knights going to and thro to the crusades including Richard the Lionheart. The current owners of the chateaux trace their heritage back to a Polish count, Xavier Branicki, a friend of emperor Napoleon III, who arrived in 1849 to give new life to the place. Branicki's descendants still own the castle, living in one of the larger buildings and running tours of the remainder of the estate to raise revenue for its upkeep. They look an eccentric lot from the stuff on show; one of the Branicki’s is on the gate to take our admission fees before going off to supervise the gardeners.

Driving without side mirror is difficult at times, particularly when entering a freeway from a looping overhead entry ramp, but this just brings the co-driver and navigator into play. The shattered side window was patched up with heavy plastic and survived ok as we belted along the freeways and side lanes of the Indre. On the whole we’d managed the whole driving in Europe thing quite easily. Only once did I get caught on the wrong side of the road and that was in a small town in Slovenia – gave the guy coming at me a bit of a fright.

When we did our trips around the countryside and across international borders, the bulk of it was on freeways with the car racing along at about 130kms per hour. In-car entertainment was very limited because the CD was not functioning due to a John Williamson CD being stuck in the unit. As a result we got pretty used to a few of the French pop stations – in particular NRJ, Vibration and occasionally Nostalgie. This last station had a jingle call sign that sounded like Mr G, from Summer Heights High and used to crack us up. What used to really crack us up was the penchant for the pop stations in France to play a very limited selection of songs, maybe 5 or 6, and absolutely flog them over and over. OK so there were probably a few more songs but all the dance tunes seemed to merge into one, a sort of blancmange of Katy Perry and Rihanna. Very unsubtle and meant that during our driving we got very familiar with the songs at the top of the pop charts at the time – Gotye’s “Somebody that I Used to Know”, DJ Antoine’s “Ma Cherie”, Adele’s “Someone Like You”, Katy Perry’s “Firework” and the best of all, a little Portugese ditty by Michel Telo “Ai Se Eu Te Pego” (Oh, If I Catch You). Apart from the dance stuff and some scratchings from ‘tude infected black rappers, the French have a real thing for latin beats and the song by Michel Telo is a killer example. Don’t think it has made it to Australia yet but when the song starts off with the chorus line of “Nossa, Nossa” we just couldn’t help bopping along. We were ready to jump out, and head to a shop or mall to buy the CD, if we’d ever stop driving.

After a series of phone calls, we arranged to drop le petit pois at the mechanics shop to have the insurance assessor (le expert) do his stuff. Over the period of time we’d spent in France, I’d got to know the mechanic quite well having been there to repair a windscreen and arrange a service before bringing le petit pois in this last time after the accident. We managed to overcome language difficulties with the aid of the PC in reception, conversing by using google translate. Funnily enough he ticked me off one day about my poor sentence construction. This time would be the last time we would see our faithful little friend. To think that we had belted all over Western Europe racking a hell of a lot of kms and experiencing absolutely nothing go wrong with the car, for it to get maimed on our door step.

On Friday 8 June we take the train to Paris to spend a couple of days with our friend Agnes in the outer suburbs of Paris at Roissy. After nearly 3 months in Europe we say goodbye to France and head off to Singapore.

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