Avalon Wine Blog

It seems the Smith contingent were not supposed to be at the family gathering this weekend. I didn’t mention in the story about the Flybe fiasco that my sister and brother-in-law were coming over from the Isle of Wight to drive us to Wales. We managed to let them know we weren’t coming so they could head straight up from the ferry without waiting for us, then found out the ferry had broken down also so they were about 90 minutes late anyway!

Next morning I’m checking email, and there’s a message from my sister to say they never got to Wales! The van broke down half way there and they ended up getting the AA out to start it. By then was after 8 PM so they turned around as they wouldn’t have got there till 10 and were afraid they might get stuck again.

Planes, ferries and automobiles… evidently we weren’t supposed to go!

Sam had her adventures last week; today it was the turn of Grampy and me.

Having spent the morning busting my chops to finish ripping up the floorboards in the cellar and slosh on the nasty poison to keep the woodworm away, we bolted down a lunch of stuffed aubergine/eggplant and drove at breakneck speed to the airport at Rennes, to catch a flight to Southampton, England. My uncle Mel and his wife are celebrating their joint 70th birthday in my dad’s hometown in Wales with a party at the village rugby club with about 120 of the closest family.

Of course we’re late, but luckily no traffic so we actually got there about 50 minutes before the departure time of 5 PM. Just in time to see the flight posted as delayed till 8:20 PM! Obviously no point in going at that time, as we’d arrive in England at 8:20 local with a 3 hour drive to Wales. Might just get there in time to wish everyone goodnight. What a bummer!

So apparently Flybe doesn’t consider flights refundable unless they’re 5 hours late… mmm, we’ll see. Got my email off to Customer Service as soon as I got back home – and got a reply right back – which said: “We would like to assure you that your comments have been forwarded to a member of the Customer Relations Team and you will receive a response within 28 days.” How about that? At least their machine read it, let’s see how long it takes for it to get to a human!

Sam’s continuing saga, in her own words:

On Saturday monday, (Friday night east coast time), I left at 4:30 am from France to fly to Paris, then Paris to Chicago. Half hour too late to catch a flight to Syracuse. Sketchy hotel in Chicago and ordered pizza and watched Power Rangers and probably got bedbugs. Discussed the end of the world with the taxi driver the next morning.

Miraculously flew to Syracuse since all other NY flights were canceled. Found out past clients of my dad’s live there and spent the night with them – THANKS David and Nancy!! Today, took a $30 taxi to the station to find out all buses are canceled.

A jeweler, a Brown student and I hitched a ride with a man and his crazy mother-in-law Ethel who kept telling us to “read the clouds” during our scenic drive on the back roads of upstate. After 8 hours of driving what should normally be a 2 hour drive, we turned around and went back to Syracuse after using 3/4 of a tank of gas. The nice jeweler gave me a ride back to where I stayed last night and saved me another $30 taxi ride.

Roads don’t look good for tomorrow either. I may be overstaying my welcome here and staying another night in Syracuse. Just hope I find out whether the buses are canceled before I spend $60 going to and from the station tomorrow. Wish me luck! At least I have beds to sleep in this time. On my three day trip to Paris at the start of summer I slept in freezing airports instead!

Sam’s done her share of travelling for an 18 year-old – since her first move at 3 months (Fort Lauderdale to California) she’s been regularly going back and forth to France, either with the family or on her own. Last year though, she had her first real experience of travelling; planning a trip of a few weeks with her friends through France and Italy. She’s got her own story to tell about those adventures, but suffice to say she learnt a lot, and came back a lot more capable of looking after herself and figuring out things as they come up.

I’ve always said that the best thing you can do for your kid when they leave school is to give them a backpack and a one-way ticket and send them off to learn how to get around. Sam didn’t need any pushing!

This year she decided to visit a friend in Holland, then pop down to Antibes in southern France for a few days to see her sister who was staying with her exchange friend, before meeting us in Brittany. Not especially challenging; they’re all civilized countries and speak either English or French, so for someone like Sam not a big deal. Unless of course, you travel standby…

We’re lucky enough to have an airline-employee friend who helps us out with buddy passes, which in these hard economic times when precious few folks are going on wine tours really makes a difference. The only thing is, of course, you fly standby. So as long as you give yourself enough leeway to allow for the odd extended departure date, and you don’t mind kicking your heels now and then waiting to get on, it’s a great deal. One thing you never do: book yourself a paid connection with a tight turnaround after the flight you hope to be catching on standby.

Sam can’t use her buddy pass all the way, so she has to buy a ticket from London to Amsterdam. Budget airlines are cheap now in Europe, but non-refundable… The rest of the family have already left, and poor Sam’s been spending her last week in CA tying up the loose ends of the house ready for the summer renters to move in. Day before she’s due to leave, she gets a call from our airline friend: “Are your bags packed?” turns out the flight that looked great has just filled up, and she’s likely to get bumped. And that London-Amsterdam flight? Yes, you guessed it… booked for the same day she’s supposed to arrive in London. (I have to say here, that Sam didn’t make that booking; that was done by her parents…)

The bags were ready, so they’re tossed into the car, quick whip around to make sure the house is OK, and off to LAX. For the night. Didn’t make it onto the flight that day, and tomorrow still looks bleak. The contingency plan for an airborne hitch-hiker in this scenario is to find an alternate route. Off to Salt Lake City she goes, then on up to Chicago. Chicago turns out to be even less comfortable than LAX for airport lounge floor accommodation, and things are looking really rough from there to London. To cut to the chase, she ends up taking 3 days to get to Amsterdam, via SLC, Chicago, Boston and London, of course having to pay for another flight to Amsterdam, now not quite so “budget”! In the process though, she makes friends with a pilot and his family who are also going standby, who insist she stays in their hotel room for her London overnight, and make her promise to go visit them in Michigan – the best part of hitch-hiking is meeting new friends!

The rest of her trip goes boringly smoothly (normal tickets… no fun!!) till this week she’s getting ready to head back to NY to college… accompanied by her new friend “Irene”! Stay tuned, that one’s still a work in progress, with Sam currently in sunny Syracuse for her second night!

Took Holly and Sophie to the airport a couple of days ago, as Sophie starts back to school next week. Up at 3:30 AM, on the road at 4:30 to make it to Charles de Gaulle Airport by 9:30. Drop them on the kerb (impossible to park anywhere in our van ’cause it’s too high for the parking lots) then drive back home. Oh yes, with a detour into Paris to pick up a cabinet that Holly found for sale on the web…

On the way home I stop at my favorite “brocante”, antique/bric-a-brac/junkyard, where I found my classic 1968 Solex moped last year. Tonight, I’m looking for sinks for our kitchen remodel. Holly has been checking out apron-front sinks; only about 500 Euros for a new one! So I ask Serge if he’s got any. “Not much”, he says “there are a few lying around but they’re pretty beat up”. He’s right, all the porcelain ones are chipped, and anyway none are apron-front – we want a really big, deep bowl so we can get our big copper pots and jam confiture in there.

However, I do come across a really cool old bathroom sink that I’m sure Holly would love. Only problem, Serge wants 250 Euros for it. I take a couple of photos to send to Holly, and tell him I’ll let him know.

Serge has this amazing collection that long ago burst the seams of his two warehouses – stacks of dissembled armoirs, a gigantic steam tractor hidden behind an assorted pile of junk; picture frames, pots to make pate and terrine, broken old barrels… anything you could dream of, it’s there somewhere! I ask about the steam roller. “Oh, I’ve had it about thirty years”, he says. “Maybe someday I’ll fix it up…” I guess it’s just part of the place now.

About to give up, I wander past a 10-foot tall pile of broken and twisted lead pipe on the side of his warehouse to the stack of stainless sinks and tabletops, and just about break my leg tripping over the corner of something very hard and heavy.

Once I’m done rubbing my shin, I look down to find that the offending object is none other than a deep, apron-fronted white porcelain kitchen sink! Actually, it’s more green than white as it’s pretty heavily adorned with moss and leaf-mold. Evidently Serge has written it off long ago. A close inspection reveals why; the thing’s really beat up – makes the other pieces he showed me look brand new in comparison! Still, I figure if he doesn’t want too much for it…

I track down Serge in his back yard, where he’s entertaining a couple of ladies with a cold drink at his garden table. Ah yes, he remembers the sink. “Vingt Euros”, he says. Twenty Euros… I call the house to ask Samantha to check on the web to see if there’s such a thing as a porcelain repair kit. A quick search reveals that apparently thousands of Americans fix their porcelain sinks every year, and we have a choice of a half-dozen solutions. My decision’s made, but of course I can’t finalize the deal without a bit of bargaining, that wouldn’t be fun at all. So I end up with the sink and a nice slab of marble counter-top for forty Euros total, load them into the van and continue for the final 90-minute drive home.

Ten minutes scrubbing gets rid of the leaves and moss, bringing out the chips in all their glory. Dubiously I take a couple of photos, then go inside to call Holly to see what she thinks. She loves it! Doesn’t mind the dings – even tells me it adds old-fashioned character. What a lovely wife I have; she just saved us 500 Euros… not a bad day’s junk-shopping!

Lovely day today in Brittany. After about 3 days of mid-summer gloom and rain, it made a nice break!

So today, we decided that the lovely wall Marcel built for us when we were both sick in bed with the worst cold yesterday… needs to be moved 70 cm (28 inches) so that you can actually walk around the bed without taking a chunk out of the bathroom wall. He’s going to LHAO when I tell him in the morning!!
Yes, it is a bit like a French “Green Acres” I guess… except Holly can’t put all the blame on me – she was as keen as I was to buy this place 22 years ago… ah, that was back a while, wasn’t it…

1989: no kids, young and adventurous and fresh from delivering a boat from Florida to Portugal (we were a “captain and cook” team on private yachts back then), we back-packed through Spain and France to England to see my parents. Our hard-earned savings amounted to $25,000, and we thought we should “invest” in something solid and land-based, having learned the easy way that boats are great repositories of cash, but not so good when you need to touch any of it!

Well, we didn’t have enough to buy a house in the UK, so my folks suggested France, where the Brits were all buying up “old farmhouses” and renovating them. Sounded like a plan… fix something up and turn it around for a quick profit, like everyone else was apparently doing (according to the Daily Mail, at least).

So hot-foot to France with Mum and Dad in their camper van, and a little ridge tent for us, to pass a blissful week in the rain of Brittany… We arrived in a village East of Fougeres to meet a French estate agent (realtor), a partner of our local agent in England. We were actually a day early (a rarity for us) on a Sunday, so went to check around the area before our appointment on Monday afternoon…

Seemed like a nice area, lots of pretty farmhouses etc, plenty of tempting stuff in the agent’s window, so we went to the village restaurant for lunch. And found the menu in English. And a waitress who spoke to us in English. And realized there was not a single Frenchman in the place!

As it happened, said agent had another friend with an agency on the other side of Fougeres… after our lunchtime discovery we fled the scene to check out the offers in his window, liked what we saw, and managed to reach him and ascertained that he’d yet to show a house to an Englishman. So we made an appointment for early Monday – and never did make it back to the original guy…

So we bought the first house we saw, and paid the asking price. Mind you, we checked out about 25 more over the next few days with our friendly agent, and the asking price for ours was by far the best deal we saw. Best of all, the neighbors were all French! Nothing against the English – I am one, and proud of it – but if you’re going to live in France, what’s the point if the local newspaper is British and the corner shop stocks Heinz Beans, Marmite and Wonder Loaf and there’s no-one to practice your French on?

So we plopped down our $25K and became proud owners of a farmhouse with one cold tap and 2 lightbulbs. Two rooms; a kitchen with a concrete floor, open fire, wood-burning stove and above-mentioned cold tap (and one of the lights), and a living/bedroom with another fireplace and the other light – and a rather nice solid oak floor. Upstairs was an empty grain loft, adjoining was a 400 year-old 3-story “cellar” and there was a stable and hangar thrown in, along with a third of a hectare (about 1/4 acre) of field, planted high with corn.

And there, for now, I’m going to leave it… it’s somehow become 1 AM and time for bed. By the way, the wall is now moved, but since today’s minor drama of surgery on Holly’s ear in the Emergency Room followed by said decon-reconstruction, maybe tomorrow you’ll get that story, if I can stay on track!