Chateau Bonne Fontaine
Chateau Bonne Fontaine lies along the Couesnon River, at the frontier between Britanny and Normandy and is a fortified castle built by Duchess Anne de Bretagne's chancellor. It was erected around 1547 when King Henri II gave the authorization to Pierre de La Marzelière to build a fortification. I find it ironic that many of these castles seem to be situated out in the middle of nowhere. By today’s standards they are magnificent but not where you would necessarily want to live. Often, they are not near any big city, (but some are) beach (but some are) or any place where the neighborhood is such that you would want your castle near (although some are).
It is privately owned and this is as close as we could get. I had to climb over a fence and slither up to the tree line to get this picture. [Note to all the legal beagles in the family: this was not trespassing but merely exploring and recording France’s historical heritage so that I could share it with you…..]
On the road again….
As I signed off last month, I mentioned that we had just arrived in England for a 2 week break (from what?). Once again, we felt that we scored big time with a magnificent home exchange on the Ouse River in Bedford. You can take a sneak peek of the house at:
http://www.homeforexchange.com/England/Bedfordshire/1540-Riverside-town-house-and-narrow-boat-with-shared-island-Non-Simul-Exc-Poss.html (You can see the cantilevered deck with flowers off our bedroom above our canal boat in the photo).
Once settled, Janice and I first toured the Cathedral in Peterborough. Built in 665, this is where two Queens were buried: Katherine of Aragon and Mary Queen of Scots. Then, we caught up with 2 of my coolest aunts and uncles (Pierre and Kimberly) who had arrived from Arizona to join us.
Windsor castle
Together, we visited The Royal Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede (where the Magna Carta was signed). Here, 20,000 names of lost air crews from WWII whose remains were never found are inscribed. An uncle whose name I was given, was presumed to have been shot down off the coast of Spain after failing to return from a mission in WWII, is memorialized there. Being only a few miles outside of Windsor we decided to tour the Castle and see if perhaps her Majesty would care to join us for lunch. (She had a prior engagement)
As part of the home exchange, we also had a 30 foot (10 meter) canal narrow boat available to us so we took a daylong cruise downriver through the countryside traversing a number of locks. There is no staff to control these locks so you are entirely on your own. It is a very different kind of boating for us as this bad boy had a top speed of 4 MPH (6 km/ Hour)
Warwick Castle grounds
Deciding that we needed to pick up the pace, we took the train to London for the day. We visited Churchill’s underground bunker war room where he directed his forces during WWII, had dinner and took in an evening theatre show.
Shakespeare's houseThroughout the week, we visited Cambridge, a water mill in Stotfold, Warwick Castle (one of the best collections of medieval weapons in Europe), Stratford-upon-avon (Shakespeare’s birthplace), Ely and the 5000 year old Neolithic flint mine at Grimes Graves (flint from this mine was used in the flint lock rifles in the US revolutionary war).
We may have been having a blast but time was up for the working stiffs so we ran them out of town on a rail (they took the train back to the airport). While we missed them dearly we managed to raise our spirits by visiting the ruins of a roman villa in North Leigh and spending the day in Oxford. Rounding off our visit of the “Midlands” we toured the Bronze age museum and ongoing dig at Flag Fen, visited Nottingham castle on the edge of the Sherwood forest and the Canterbury cathedral.
Warwick Castle's collection of medieval weaponsEvery trip has many positive aspects but there are bound to be a few less positive observations to be made also. On the minus side, I have 3. I have always known that England has a plethora of CCTV cameras but we don’t recall seeing nearly as many when we last visited some 14 years ago. This time I was dumbstruck by the sheer number of them and how “watched” I felt everywhere. It should not matter, I suppose, since I was not doing anything wrong but somehow it did. It is 1984 in 2008.
The second is my ongoing whine about the cost of living here. I had been warned by our Brit friends that the UK is very expensive, and shezam!, were they ever right. At first blush it seemed expensive but not horrible. A $6.00 glass of wine in a restaurant, $15.00 to $18.00 entrance fee to many castles and museums, $4.00 / hour parking in public lots,$5.00 a gallon for gas, even a $7.00 hamburger at McDonalds. Then it hit me. I was not paying in dollars but in Pounds. Double all the above figures.
Finally on a related topic, was parking. I have never seen such a fanatical emphasis placed on the subject. It soon became obvious that this is a big deal here, as we often could not find an available space in public parking lots (parking on the street is all but out of the question) and even residential areas are metered. Generally, people pay for the time they want to park in advance and place the receipt on the dash so it can be seen. You cannot “add” time to it later without buying a new ticket so you need to be precise in knowing how long you will be gone or pay extra for time you won’t use. Even restaurants and department stores charge for parking in their own lots. The kicker is that the parking enforcement police hover like vultures, going through one ticket book after another as fast as they can write.
We discovered this when upon our return from visiting Windsor Castle we found that our car had a metal “boot” clamped onto the front tire as we were 6 minutes over the grace period for our prepaid parking allotment.
Did I mention it was only 6 minutes……?
The fine? $250 (£120 or 158 €). Cash only, please.
Leaving England, we ferried back to the continent and took a little detour home by driving to Mastricht in the Netherlands to spend a week with Mandy before leaving for the season. Ferry rides can be pretty boring but ours was thrilling, to say the least. As we approached the French coast on a clear sunny day our ferry veered suddenly to starboard (right side), listing at an angle sufficient to send every glass, wine bottle and stack of dishes on the bar nearby crashing to the floor. I immediately told Janice to brace herself for the collision that I believed would surely follow when the boat veered as much to Port (left side). Mentally I began to plan for our exit strategy from a boat laying on its side but there did not appear to be any good options. Passengers began to point outside and when I looked I could see the wake from our boat with a large 10 foot (3 meter) steel oceangoing buoy right smack dab in the middle of the wake. We had run over a buoy and there was not even an announcement made.
Staying at---where else--- yet another home exchange at a large farmhouse just outside of town, we had a chance to see Mandy’s room, her University and her town.
3 borders meet: Mandy is standing in Germany,
Markus in Belgium, Janice in the Netherlands
Mandy’s beau (Markus) accompanied us to Aachen to visit the throne in the Dom (where Charlemagne’s coronation was held in 800) as well as the museum in the basement vault that contains gold encased relics that we saw including - it is said - Christ’s belt from his robe.
A particularly thrilling experience for me was when Markus took me to his glider club on base at the Geilenkirchen air base, home to NATO’s AWAC planes in Germany. His instructor strapped a parachute on me (reminded me of my college skydiving days) and took me up. They use a winch with a 4500 foot cable (1500 meters) and pull the glider from a dead stop to 100km / hr (60 mph) in 3 seconds. Not quite the jolt of an aircraft carrier launch but similar to a Formula 1 racecar. Additional excitement was provided when the cable broke mid takeoff. Unusual but not unheard off, it caused my flight to be cut short while the pilot bled off altitude by spiraling into tight turns (we were at about 900 feet [290 meters]) taking us back for final approach. Wow, dude! What a kick.
We wrapped up our visit with Mandy by visiting the caves in Remouchamps
http://www.mondesauvage.be/grottes/fr/point.htm
Safe to say we have seen our share of caves over the years and have seen some bigger (Carlsbad caverns in New Mexico) and longer (Mammoth caves in Kentucky is the longest in the world at a staggering 365 miles [587 kilometers]). Like Chateaus and Castles, they are all different and each has it’s own special little something. This one was no exception with -according to their web site- the longest subterranean boat trip in the world. It was a very impressive way to visit a cave.
Finally we spent the day in Wuppertal Germany with our friends and Mandy’s former high school host family Ulrich and Annegrette. One big last goodbye to Mandy and we drove back home to France.
We now have a half dozen home exchanges under our belt and have absolutely loved them. We have much better and larger accommodations than we would have had if we stayed in a hotel, at no cost. Since we have our own car here, that’s pretty much of a wash also. This is our 4th winter here and we have put 70,000 km (44,000 miles) crisscrossing the continent. It has done exactly what we wanted when we bought a home here, a chance to travel all over Europe and get our yearly fix of culture, travel and history in manageable doses, returning to our maison-away-from-home for periods and catch our breath.
The home exchanges however, have gone wild. We have exchanges lined up in Maine before we leave the East Coast in the fall, a stunning Chalet in the Swiss mountains as well as a wonderful place in Bordeaux in the South of France next Spring to share with family and friends. An exchange for an absolutely spectacular home in Helsinki (Finland) had to be put on hold due to projected inescapable liquidity constraints, demanding wholesale fiscal discipline, necessitated by the aeronautical savings kitty. In other words, we’ll go broke and won’t have anything saved for an airplane. We get an average of two exchange requests per week for Australia and regularly get some from Brazil to Hawaii (We had to turn down Maui ….grrrr!) It is a good thing we started this retirement gig early as we have a lot of ground to cover.
The Memphis Belle
Recently, Janice and I re- watched the movie “Memphis Belle”. It was interesting to us because we have visited her in Memphis a few years ago. If you are not familiar with the Belle, she became a famous bomber in WWII because during the war, the air force had set 25 missions as an incentive for air crews to go home. Morale was extremely low because 80% of the bombers were shot down during the first three months of America's combat flights over Europe. The Belle was the most famous because she was the first heavy bomber in Hitler's European war theatre to complete 25 combat missions and keep her entire crew alive without a single major injury.
No major injuries to the crew maybe, but that didn’t mean to the bomber. In that time span she was bullet-ridden, flak damaged and had 9 engines replaced, both wings, two tails, and both main landing gears.
The BELLE shot down eight enemy fighters, is believed to have destroyed five others, and damaged at least a dozen more. She dropped more than 60 tons of bombs over Germany, France and Belgium. During her 25 missions she flew 149 hours and covered more than 20,000 combat miles. She is the only B-17 to have her own file in the Air Force Film Depository.
The movie caught our attention because of the number of bombing runs made in our neck of the woods here in Brittany. She laid waste to several cities including that of Brest, which was and remains to this day a large naval and submarine base. During the war, the infamous U boats sailed out of there.
Boneheads
Janice and I like to think that we are a couple of smarty pants, having made some good decisions that have paid off. Sometimes though even the best of us seem to be vying for the dumb and dumber award.
We take our airline flight times very seriously and make a practice of showing up quite early, but this time we cut it a little close to catch our flight from Paris to Seattle. Ehhh…actually a little too close as we arrived 10 minutes after they “closed” the check-in counter even though our flight was not departing for 1 hour. They were quite understanding, rescheduling us for a flight 24 hours later (US Air only has one flight per day out of Paris). We were forced to schlep our 200 pounds (92 kilos) of luggage to an airport hotel and cool our heels. Airline fees, fines and hotel: $650. Lesson learned: Priceless.
This being 6 and 10 minutes late business is getting a little pricey so we are going to have to straighten up and fly right. I just wish there was someone we could blame, other than ourselves ……
God Bless America!
As we go to press, we have pulled the plug for another season and have just flown to Seattle Washington. We had a blast in Europe, but God is it good to be back home in America. At some point you just have to get real and take a break from ‘adjusting’ to everything all the time. Occasionally we would see TV documentaries of San Francisco, Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur or some other place in California that is the center of the Universe and I must admit I would feel a little homesick and long to drive the PCH (Highway 1 in California is called the Pacific Coast Highway) to Santa Barbara or Ventura. It is not to be - yet- but it will come. It is hard to describe but here everything feels so….. “je ne sait quoi”……normal ! After making the rounds to see all the kidlets and their hatchlings, we will be back at Honey Bee on June 1st. Yahooooooooooo!!!!
Meanwhile, we were introduced to our newest granddaughter Megan Grace, a real doll.
