Unexcused Absences France 2014 (he said)

France 2014 (he said)

by Kent 1 Jul 2014

Welcome back to the Unexcused Absences website. No, we have not fallen off the edge of the earth (although we sometimes feel like we have), and no, we have not forsaken our irresponsible living for *gasp* going back to work full-time. What we have been doing, though, is experiencing a bit more chaos in our lives than usual (more on that in a few months or so). But all that is in the past, and now we have been back in France for a week and are ready to get back to cruising the canals aboard our little boat Après Ski.

Versailles Palace

A couple years back, at the grape harvest in Vosne-Romanée, we met a young lady named Marine who was about to move to New York for work. We invited her to spend Christmas with us the past two years, since she couldn’t return home for the holidays, and have become friends. She invited us to stay with her and her parents in Paris, and that’s what we did for our first two nights in France. They live near Versailles, so we took the opportunity to see how the 0.1% lived a few hundred years ago. We didn’t get to meet Marine’s dad since he was out of town, but her mom was a wonderful hostess and we had a really nice welcome back to France.

Versailles Hall of Mirrors

Our visit to Versailles exceeded our already lofty expectations; we were expecting enormous but it’s hard to appreciate how big the château and grounds are until you actually visit. For example, it required a brisk half hour walk just to go from the main house to the two “accessory” château, where the king went to escape the formality of the main house. Apparently the man who had it all simply needed a place to get away from it all! And we saw all the required attractions, including the hall of mirrors and the little village Marie Antoinette had built for her so she could participate in the strenuous activity of watching other people go about their daily work.

Part of Marie Antoinette’s village

We can also report that unlike last spring (where it rained 30 out of 31 days in May, the exception being the day it snowed), spring of 2014 has been quite dry in France. Things are approaching drought conditions, although there is rain in the forecast for next week. Some of the canals are on water restrictions, which means the VNF (French waterways authority) insists that traveling boats pair up in the locks. This shouldn’t affect us since we’ll be traveling on the Champagne/Burgundy canal, which is fed by a set of enormous reservoirs, and is rarely under restriction even in the driest years.

One good thing about the low rainfall is that the French have made significant progress in la guerre contre la verdure (the war against greenery). The French love to have their gardens and public spaces neatly trimmed and organized, and last spring’s rain posed a challenge. Even with an army of weed-whackers, lawn mowers, and tree trimmers, the greenery was winning. But the French are clearly in front of the 2014 skirmish, and the countryside, gardens, and parks all look great. Anyone who still believes the myth of the lazy French worker should watch a group of landscapers as they vigorously snip, clip, and whip mother nature into submission.

Versailles seen from the on-site farm

After a couple nights at Marine’s parent’s place, we rented a car for a week (one-way, Paris to Dijon) and said our goodbyes. An interesting thing about driving in France is priorité a droit, which loosely translates as “give way to a car entering from a similar-sized street to your right, unless that street is listed in the national registry of intersections that do NOT adhere to the priorité a droit protocol”. After probably 8 weeks of cumulative driving in France, I still cannot parse this subtle rule. I’ve seen cars approach from the right and come to a stop when they should have pushed ahead (I guess that intersection is in the national registry), and I’ve come to a stop myself when entering another street from the right only to have the other driver stop and glare at me as if to say, “Don’t you know that this intersection is NOT in the secret national registry? Get moving, I’m in a hurry to get to work so I can begin my lunch break.”

But we love France and we love being in France and we love the culture and we love pretty much everything about France except possibly priorité a droit, and we hope to be logging updates to the website over the next 14 weeks as we cruise through the countryside at 5 knots on the good ship Après Ski. I’m pretty sure priorité a droit does not apply on the canals.