EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALNovember 7, 1998
St. Sulpice et Cameyrac
Bordeaux is bathed in light. The glowing Baroque buildings on the
Quayside have greeted us and shrouded our Quick Palace nightmare with dreams of art
and culture. We park Alfi in a tree-lined parkade in the centre of town and walk to the
tourist bureau. There we are directed to the Gites De France office a few blocks away.
This takes us on a walk through Old Bordeaux and its promenade on Rue Ste. Catherine teaming
with the young and smartly dressed.
Erika is wearing a snug, pale blue sweater. She speaks very quickly.
She explains that we can’t book a gite from her office unless it is in her departement,
Girone. The departement we have chosen is called Landes (it’s below us), and
while it is also in the Region of Aquitaine, it has it’s own booking office in
Mont-De-Marsan. We leave the office for a Personal Pow Wow (this is where Rich and I make
a decision as to what our next move should be). Today is Saturday and if we want to book
and drive to our gite today, it will have to be in Girone because Mont-de-Marsan is too
far away. Besides, after a quick phone call we learn that the office in Mont-de-Marsan is
closed today.
We’re back at Erika’s desk and choosing a gite in Girone for
the week. We are sucking up our day with administrative decisions and losing valuable
museum time. I want to explore Bordeaux at leisure and this is a good solution. After an
hour’s worth of intense francais, we have booked a gite just 15 minutes to the east
of Bordeaux in a village called Cameyrac, in the municipality of St. Sulpice.
Next we find the Internet Café. Bordeaux Internet is packed
with boys. They are all networked to each other and playing a high-resolution combat game
where they shoot at each other and blow things up. We retrieve some email and make another
attempt to launch the website. Once again it crashes and Rich decides that it has
something to do with not having enough disk space.
We leave town to meet Monsieur et Madame Rosaven, the proprietors of
the gite, on their long gravel driveway. The gite faces the church in Cameyrac, which you
can’t miss because it is the biggest of four buildings in the village. M. et Mdme.
Rosaven live in Une Grand Maison at the end of the small road. It looks like a
castle, and there are a lot of them around here because we are surrounded by vineyards.
The gite is called Domaine De Beaumont and says so on the side of the building. It
looks like an outbuilding to the Grand Maison, perhaps a former servant’s quarters or
once a stable. M. et Mdme. speak no English and so we launch into a French vocabulary
refresher course as they show us about the place.
This gite is really spectacular. It has an open beamed ceiling and
stucco walls. The salon, salle a manger and cuisine are in a large room with
a hearth big enough to lie in. The floors are tiled. There is a grandfather clock in the
corner and a bureau crammed with a library of French literature and back issues of Art
and Décor. The bedroom is massive…the size of a large living room. There is a
sitting area with another hearth. There are four gigantic, solid French Provincial
armoires, two of which are facing each other on either side of the bed. Le salle de
bain is another large room with a chez-lounge, bidet, clothes washer, and another
armoire. There is a little room off of the bedroom and leading to the bathroom. It has a
tiny, ornate iron crib for a baby. A door from this room leads to a small watercloset with
a septic toilet and a gas-fired furnace. There are shutters on all of the windows that
close from the outside. Mdme. Rosaven has instructed me to close these at night in order
to keep warm. There are hot water radiators in every room, making the temperature
comfortable.
M. et Mdme. Rosaven have a three-year old Alsation named Lola. She is
spinning around in her small enclosure. M. et Mdme. are about to go our for the evening
and Lola is on guard duty.
I am boiling water in a large yellow stockpot on the stove. The bathtub
is deep and the water in the tap is hottish, but the large room is a little cold and I
want liquid-fire. A scalding bath, according to my 93 year-old Japanese Grandfather, is
the secret to a long life. In Japan a family takes turns in water that is continually
heated by a fire at one end. One must be careful to stir the near boiling water.
