On Friday I journeyed from Bayeux, Normandy to the Loire
Valley by train, meeting up with my host dad to spend the weekend at his
mother’s home, in a small village called Les Bouchettes. Les Bouchettes is a small cluster of
farmhouses that is part of a larger sort-of village conglomerate called
“Montreuil-Ballay”, which groups about 400 residents under a sort of
administrative municipal appellation.
Pierre’s mother is very nice and her home is an old farmhouse that she
and her husband bought five years ago and began to restore. It is a very pretty building, which is
divided into two different wings. The
main part has two floors, the ground floor contains the kitchen, pantry, dining
room, living room, a study and a lounge with the upper floor containing five
bedrooms The other wing, where I am
staying, has more bedrooms and its own bathroom/shower. It is quite a cozy set up.
On Saturday, I helped Pierre do some chores around the
house. I mowed the lawn in a large
enclosure containing the chickens. The
grass had been about knee-high, so it really needed the mowing. The chickens were evidently happy with the
mowing as well, as they followed the path of the tractor, snatching up the
suddenly exposed insects. Some more of
Pierre’s family arrived for lunch, which was amazing, and more arrived after
lunch for coffee, but these latter relations left shortly after.
In the afternoon, we went to a château called Brézé, which
has the largest dry-moat in Europe. The
castle is surrounded by a massive ditch that is deeper than the castle is
tall. Brézé is called a “castle under a
castle” owing to the kilometers of subterranean tunnels beneath the château,
used as defenses, storage, a quarry, and for wine production. These “troglodytic” tunnels were straight out
of a fantasy story, one could imagine all kinds of monstrous beings guarding a
golden hoard or a member of a royal family around every corner.
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