Vacation plans

Vacation started off well. We had a beautiful two days in a Norman chateau for the wedding of my good friend Jess. What a wonderful job her and her beau David did organizing such an event. We were really impressed. It might sound from reading this that they drive matching BMW's and spend their summers in The Hamptons but the actual fact of the matter is that they're just a regular working class couple from Manchester with a lot of creative ideas and they pulled off this amazing feat all by themselves. I have to post photos later because the whole thing looked like something a wedding planner had done. It was gorgeous!

After the wedding we spent a weekend in Paris and then headed South to Haute Savoie for a two week rest in our old house. We were as keyed up as two little kids during the drive and I felt like I would explode with anxiety as we drove past Lac Léman towards our old neighborhood. I have missed my home so much!

But life throws funny things in your path and plans can change quickly. No sooner had we posed our bags in the kitchen of our old house, then the renter rang to say he'd be coming back from his planned leave and he'd be bringing his two teenage grandkids with him to stay for the rest of the month. We sank into one of his strange leather easy chairs and sighed. Originally we were to have the house for the next two weeks, a sort of unwritten arrangement we'd worked out with him when we rented him the house last year. We'd planned between us that he'd always have the two first or last weeks blocked out in August and let us have our house back. He good naturedly welcomed us to stay with them but of course we said no. It wasn't at all what we had in mind for our time off. Oh well it was a good lesson. It isn't our house for the next two years or more and we just have to accept that as difficult as it may be. Next year we will plan on going somewhere else. It make me sad to think that we can't go back and stay in our home for a while.



After lots of scrambling about and two hours of telephone calls we ended up securing two measly days in a nearby hotel and it was nice because we were able to see all of our old neighbors, especially our pseudo grandparents Mr. and Mme. P who cried when they saw us. I really miss them. They won't be around much longer and it breaks my heart not to have them right next to us anymore. Our other neighbors were genuinely upset to see that we weren't coming back and it surprised me because many seemed so blasé about our living there the past four years but they were sad to hear we'd not be there for even the two weeks. Others were still the same, including Mme. B (the B doesn't stand for her name but for something more fitting...ahem) who greeted me with the same cold "hmph" and it made me laugh to think that she was always going to hold this invisible grudge against me and now obviously my baby. Some aspects of French village life never change.



We left after our short two days to wander off to an old haunt of ours, a small village near Macon. My friend Dee graciously opened her apartment to us and it was a good thing because this is the week in August in France where everything is booked solid. Dee is gone on her own vacation and it's weird to be in her place without her but very sweet of her to have left us a key. We're lucky to have such good friends in such a crisis. Even the Holiday Inn in Paris where we more or less live was booked for these next ten days. Vive le quinze aout!

(I must find a way to attach a French keyboard to my laptop because I can't memorize the keystrokes--in the meantime please pardon mon mauvaise orthographe)