PART THREE:

EUROPE

FRANCE, SOUTHERN GERMANY, AUSTRIA, CZECH REPUBLIC,

NORTHERN GERMANY, THE NETHERLANDS, BELGIUM,

ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, NORTHERN IRELAND, IRELAND, WALES

and back to FRANCE

 

 

PREFACE TO PART THREE

Taking delivery of the car in Nice on Monday 2nd of June marked the completion of the first third of the trip and signalled a fundamental transformation in how the next six months of the Awfully Big Adventure would unfold. The 1.9ltr Renault Clio Oasis diesel, with just 10kms on the clock, conferred a new freedom on our travels; it was goodbye downtime and backpacking and hello flexible planning and camping. The Silver Bullet, as it quickly and affectionately became to us, had plenty of space in the hatch for both our packs and then some, and a large back seat which we promptly filled with all sorts of stuff. It was comfortable, smooth, powerful and very economical.

Our arrival in France also gave us a unique opportunity to take a break from the road. Without going into chapter and verse here, Tess’s late Uncle John had lived in London for many years and had chucked in with a couple of friends to buy a villa in the French countryside. More on the very colourful John later, but as soon as we picked up the car we made a beeline for the villa where we’d arranged to stay for two weeks. Our route took us down the Côte d’Azur, a sombre gris under an overcast sky, through Antibes and Cannes to Frejus, where we turned inland for Aix and our first overnight stop in St Remy de Provence, all the while avoiding the expensive toll roads and sticking to the perfectly driveable and beautiful minor byways. The second day took us via Avignon up into the majestic alpine scenery of the Central Massif and through le Puy-en-Velay to another overnight in Issoire. The third day’s run took us through Clermont-Ferrand then, via a series of rural backroads skilfully navigated by Tess, to our final destination – the tiny hamlet of Antogny le Tillac south of Tours…

 

  

FRANCE

2nd June – 22nd June

 

                                                    Mabel: What are you going to do today?                                                                                                                           Stan: Nothing                                                                                                                                      Mabel: You did that yesterday                                                                   Stan: I didn’t finish…

 

ANTOGNY

 

I’m in such a hurry to do absolutely nothing, desperate to go absolutely nowhere. I never thought I’d ever describe myself as a flamed out travel casualty but by the time we pulled up outside the villa we were fully flamed out travel casualties. We craved home cooking, to sleep in the same bed for more than two consecutive nights, to wake up with the option of not waking up all day, to have no deadlines, no itinerary, no road routine. And the villa was the perfect place in which to not do all these things and less.

Antogny le Tillac is a small collection of houses, even hamlet seems too grand a word, near the town of Les Ormes in the Loire Valley. It feels like it’s been here forever - the modest church was built by the Crusaders in the 12th century. The inhabitants seem like they’ve been here forever – the average age would be about 80. Villa isn’t quite the word for the villa either, even though to us it was a palace. A long, narrow two storey building featuring restored medieval structural timbers, it was reputedly once a dance hall. A small patio gave out over the River Vienne, here about two hundred meters wide and flat as a sheet of glass, to an avenue of plane trees and green farmland on the far bank; you could flip the view vertically and be hard-pressed to pick the difference. The spring air was full of birdsong, the sound of otters echoing across the water, the days clear and crisp, the creamy twilights long.

To begin at the end of our stay, this is the message I left in the visitor’s book for Rosie and Rod, John’s friends who’d kindly given us free rein here and who we’d be catching up with in London:

Since leaving Perth, Western Australia, we’ve travelled 105 days, slept in 103 different hotel beds, dined in 157 different restaurants and flown, driven, bused, railed, sailed and walked across 7 countries on 3 continents to get here.

During the last 14 days we have:

·         spent 87.32% of the time watching the Vienne flow lazily past

·         consumed 142 bottles of 1664 beer (6.3%), 16 bottles of vin rouge and 4 bottles of French champagne, including a Moet off the supermarket shelf for A$29

·         made 10 trips to the bottle bin

·         counted 18 dead flies on the sticky strip in the kitchen

·         heard Madame’s cock crow 67 times

·         written 11 postcards

·         paid 9 visits to the supermarket in Dangé-Saint-Romain

·         eaten in a restaurant just once – in Les Ormes

·         cycled 15kms

·         paddled 5kms and drifted 7

·         walked 21kms

·         watched 12 videos

·         been stung by nettles 4 times

·         eaten 28 bowls of Corn Flakes

·         read 6 books

·         risen before 10am once

The following items all scored zero:

·         sleeping in hotel beds

·         travelling more than 80kms in one day

·         sighting tourist buses

·         number of fish caught

But who’s counting!

Thank you so much for everything and we’ll see you soon J

*

We idled away much of the first week between the bed, the kitchen and the patio. A couple of visits to the large supermarket at Dangé were about as adventurous as we got, loading up with fresh meat, fruit & veg, gourmet cheeses, sundry extravagant delights and grog so we could lie around, feast handsomely and watch the Vienne slide past long into the late twilight.

Enjoying our new found freedom with the car, during the second week we mounted a few short expeditions to nearby points of interest. The most interesting nearby point of interest remained the supermarket, but we spent a day up at the Decathlon warehouse in Tours investing in camping gear and another afternoon at the underwhelming Chateau Ussé where legend has it Charles Perrault wrote Sleeping Beauty. Sadly, the chateau has fallen into disrepair and the most legendary thing about the experience is the third-rate tackiness. Two other destinations were much more worth the effort of dragging our lazy arses out of Antogny.

The moderately large town of Descartes lies a short drive east of Les Ormes. The first concept you’re introduced to if you’re friendless enough to take up Philosophy at university is Cogito Ergo Sum – “The Cogito” to the cognoscenti. “I think, therefore I am” is considered the opening statement of Modern Philosophy and the sexiest summary of Epistemology since “Eureka!” As if this weren’t achievement enough, René Descartes wasn’t finished; among much else in a stellar career he also created Cartesian co-ordinates, which are the foundation of Analytic Geometry, while contemplating a stain on the ceiling and established ground breaking principles in the study of the human eye. The home of his birth in the town named after him is a cosily crowded shrine to this revolutionary 17th century thinker, featuring his carefully preserved original jottings, manuscripts, scientific illustrations and, rather bizarrely, what the curators claim to be his actual skull in a display case. Being friendless enough to study Philosophy at uni, and having read all his philosophical writings, I was completely absorbed.

A little further afield, the city of Amboise lies on the Loire east of Tours. The road took us up through the fortress town of Loches where Joan of Arc petitioned the Dauphin to take the crown after her victory at Orleans. The walls of the dungeon deep in the keep still carry the markings left by Ludovic Sforza during his incarceration there; the story goes that when he was released in 1508 and saw the sun for the first time in four years he was so overjoyed he had a heart attack and carked it. The 360o view from the tower of the castle showed an orderly patchwork of fields receding into the far distance in every direction.  

The main destination of the day, though, was Clos Lucé in the centre of Amboise. Here Leonardo da Vinci spent the last years of his life. By 1513 Leonardo had pooped in just about every nest in Italy; having failed to complete commissioned works in Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome he’d managed to piss off some of the most powerful people in the country, including the Pope. He was offered sanctuary in France by King Francis I, a long-time admirer. When he crossed the Alps by donkey with Salai and Francesco Melzi Leonardo brought two of his favourite paintings rolled up in his saddlebags – John the Baptist and Mona Lisa, which is why the latter hangs in the Louvre and not the Vatican. Francis kept a lavish summer residence in Amboise and had it connected to Clos Lucé via a 500 meter tunnel which the pair used to visit each other, spending long nights in animated conversation.

Although Leo’s health declined rapidly during his 4 years here he repaid Francis’ hospitality by designing elaborate entertainments for the court and completing many of his anatomical and more visionary technical drawings. The real attraction today is the collection of models of many of Leonardo’s inventions built by engineering students in Paris, all in Leonardo’s specified materials and many to the original scale. There’s his spring-driven car, his parachute, his tank, his machine gun, his device for draining the Pontine Marshes…the list goes on. We burned off several hours at the estate, including a picnic lunch in the manicured gardens.

*

When in France…

Back in Antogny we coloured in the rest of the week browsing in local brocantes (bric-a-brac shops), cycling in the countryside, paddling the canoe up the Vienne and drifting back down to the villa on the gentle current, indulging in artisanal confections from the various boulangeries from Dangé to Chatellerault. We allowed ourselves the one meal at a restaurant, a small family affair in Les Ormes where we were feted as guests and made to feel like we’d been personally invited to dinner. The atmosphere was charming and intimate, and whenever a new visitor arrived they greeted the entire room with a nod and a friendly “’Seur, ‘dames”. For entrée we shared plates of escargot and cuisses de grenouilles, snails and frog’s legs – I preferred the legs – before a main of spatchcock and a creme brulee for dessert.

After Rainbow Warrior and Mururoa Atoll the French have been on the nose in our part of the world, not to mention their unfortunate reputation for rudeness. One of the great benefits of travel is the dismantling of stereotypes and ill-informed prejudices (even if sometimes they’re replaced with other more well-informed prejudices) and I’m very pleased to report our neighbours in Antogny were friendly, helpful and pleasant without exception. Even though language was a barrier they appreciated our genuine efforts to perfect what hilariously bad French we had and our eagerness to learn more. We have many weeks ahead of us in France over two visits but our time here has begun on a very positive note. Let’s see how we feel at the end of it all.

In the meantime, we have much of Western Europe and all of the British Isles to cover, and on Thursday 19th June we packed the silver bullet, cooked a last meal at the villa and washed it down with a Rothschild Grand Reserve from the supermarket. On Friday 20th, day 121, we took the D31 to Loches then set course due east for the German border.

*

We followed bucolic backroads into the heart of Burgundy. Small stone villages called Prozac were painted on the landscape every few kilometres; they were so still and silent they might have been evacuated for all the life we saw as we passed through them. The weather began to close in as we approached Autun through hills steaming beneath low cloud. The village of Pommard west of Beaune is the centre of the largest contiguous vineyard in the entire universe; acres and acres and miles and miles of immaculately groomed vines combed onto gently rolling hills as far as the eye can see. There’s even a feature mini-vineyard planted in the centre of Beaune’s main roundabout. Almost immediately we left Beaune the skies just opened and the rain sheeted down so hard that visibility was reduced to a matter of meters at some points, like a wet season storm in Darwin.

Our camping plans washed out for the time being, we navigated our way to the gothically gloomy Youth Hostel in Cernay. We stepped through the door into a Beckett play. The young woman behind the counter took fifteen minutes to acknowledge our presence despite our polite attempts to attract her attention. I imagine she was hoping we’d piss off but when we didn’t her next plan was to treat us like naughty kids with a finger-wagging lecture. It was strictly forbidden to:

  • ·         park on the grounds, you must put your car on the street
  • ·         smoke or drink alcohol in the room
  • ·         stay out after 11pm
  • ·         have our own key to the room
  • ·         smile

The alarm on the security door at the end of the corridor connected directly to her room, possibly to her brain, so there was no sneaking out for a fag in the rain. The smoke detector above the bed doubled as a sex detector and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn there was a pube alarm in the dunny…we felt under constant electronic surveillance. For all that, we at least managed a decent sleep.

*

I’d read about the Ecomusee d’Alsace back in Bridgetown and liked the concept so much I snipped the piece out of the paper and glued it into the Let’s Go. We made our way there now under leaden skies. To pass through the gate of the Ecomusee is to pass through a wormhole into the Middle Ages. Ancient buildings rescued from demolition all over Alsace have been carefully dismantled and forensically reassembled here to create a working late-medieval village. Volunteers in period dress going about their everyday business bring the village to life, from the working sawmill powered by a millrace to the charcoal burners, to the fishermen mending their nets and trawling the tributary of the Rhine in their flat bottomed boats, to the dairy, the bakery, the pottery…it’s all a charming and immersive illusion unbroken by the regular flow of appreciative visitors. The most popular destination was the schnapps distillery with its generous tastings. I could happily have blown away another few hours wandering around but at one we reluctantly tore ourselves away and hit the road.

Coming up: If it's Sunday it must be Germany...

Location: 8 Rte de l'Île Bouchard, 37800 Antogny-le-Tillac, France

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