Where I Slept in France

Where I Slept in France

Our springtime trip to France was an accident.  We had just spent two weeks there in January, when we drove up to Paris from our home in Oviedo, Spain, with our visiting son to meet his girlfriend in Paris and take in the sights.  After we returned, my wife noticed, among the piles of brochures she had picked up during the trip, a flyer for boat rentals on the Charente River, near the city of Angoulême.  “Angoulême?” I cried.  “That’s the most important European center for comics studies!”  (I had been laboring on a series of essays about images of art and archaeology in comic strips for nearly a year but I had only recently discovered the importance of Angoulême’s Musée de la bande dessinée and was kicking myself that I had missed it during our January trip, even though we had driven within only a few dozen kilometers of it.)  So we asked our friends in Oviedo if anyone would be up for renting a boat and cruising up and down the Charante for four days.  An ex-pat American couple said yes, so we booked a boat for a four-day cruise from the end of April to the beginning of May.

No sooner had we done this, than our landlady—a native Oviedian who lives and works in Paris—texted and suggested an apartment swap for a week when she came to visit her family for Easter.  So, off we went for another trip to Paris before heading back down to meet our friends and cruise the Charente. 

     

View from hotel, Biarritz, 17 April.                                View from hotel, Hendaye, 5 May.

Among the many crazy things about our trip is the fact that, except for the first and last nights of the twenty days we spent on the road/river, we never slept in a normal hotel room.  And those two hotel rooms were special in themselves for their calming view of the knife-edge horizon of the Atlantic.

                     Our tree house, Pons, 18 April.                         Raising our breakfast basket, 19 April.

After our first night in Biarritz, we drove on to Pons—a delightful little town we discovered on our January trip.  The nice hotel where we stayed on that trip was fully booked, so my wife had arranged for us to stay in a tree house!  Just outside of the town center there is the Chateau d'Usson's park, on the ground of which are a chateau that was moved there and fantastically reconstructed in the 19^thcentury, a treasure-hunt trail for children, and five glam-camping tree houses.  Situated seven meters above the ground, the tree house we stayed in is suspended from two oak trees and sways slightly in the breeze.  No electricity or running water and only a composting toilet were not a problem as we were provided with lanterns and bottled water and there were toilets and showers next to the chateau right near by.  One of the most charming parts of our stay in the tree house was the breakfast basket left for us in the morning at the foot of the tree; it was attached to a rope so we could haul it up rather than walking down the spiral wooden staircase to fetch it.

After leaving Pons, we drove through the heavy Good Friday traffic of Paris and made our way to our landlady’s apartment.  While it was a little strange to live in someone else’s apartment—definitely notan Airbnb, crammed full of our landlady’s stuff (how many pairs of high-heeled shoes does one person need?)—her place was just perfect for us and quickly felt like home.  Coming back there after an exhausting day of sight-seeing and museuming to make a home-cooked dinner and put our feet up to watch TV was a godsend.

Our landlady’s apartment, near Place Daumesnil, 12^earrondissement, 19 – 27 April.

After leaving Paris, our next stop was the Fontevraud Abbey, where we spent the night in an adorable cottage on the edge of the town.  The heavy oak beams and spiral staircase leading up to the bedroom gave the place a familiar tree-house feel.  Out in the yard there was a small storage cave carved into the soft limestone, in the tradition of the troglodyte dwellings for which this part of the Loire valley is renown.

“Columbier” cottage, Fontevraud, 28 April.

Our next stop was back to Pons to meet up with our Oviedo friends.  Rather than return to the tree house, this time we all stayed at Jolysables, a beautifully converted mill house, ten minutes from the town center. Of the especially remarkable aspects of Jolysables are the millstream that runs right under the breakfast area and the trout pond next to the Buddha-laden grounds.

“Jolysables”, Pons, 29 April.

And then, finally, it was time to move on to the original raison d’êtreof the trip—the boat cruise on the Charente.

The “Royan”, a 10 x 3.70 m. motorboat, Sireuil—Jarnac—Sireuil, 29 April to 3 May.

Although we had all studied the user’s handbook and detailed waterways guide and knew beforehand that we were not going to just gently float up and down the river while sipping good French wine and cognac, none of we four were really prepared for how much work it took to pilot the boat and to operate the twenty locks we went through on our four-day trip from Sireuil to Jarnac and back.  But we quickly fell into our roles of pilot and crew, and adapted to the slow pace of puttering along the river, enjoying its natural beauty. We docked early every day to explore picturesque towns and Romanesque churches, and to eat well.  Our dear friends let us have the “master suite” onboard (a double bed with cubbyholes on either side in a room about a foot shy of standing height) while they took the lower berth (a bed in a cabin one has to crawl into to enter).  Fortunately, there were two teeny heads onboard.

After going through that last lock and docking the boat in Sireuil (and visiting the Musée de la bande dessinéein Angoulême!), we all remained in the Charente area, lodging in two refurbished gypsy caravans located in a complex next to the river in Cognac.  It was a perfect way to transition back to dry land!

The “Roulette Baroque”, Quai des Pontis, Cognac, 4 – 5 May.

And just to round out the ring-structure of our trip, after our friends made a beeline back to Spain, we made one final stop in France before returning home, again staying in a hotel that looked out over the Bay of Biscay.

A hotel, a tree-house, a Parisian apartment, a cottage, a converted mill, a ten-meter boat, a gypsy caravan, and finally another hotel; it was time to get back to our comfortable bed in Oviedo.