February 2009

Manoir de Kergaric

Being a village of only 1000 souls, Langoat (the village we live in) has no Chateaux of its own. This ‘Manoir’ however, is the most significant and imposing abode in these parts. Built during the war of succession in Brittany in 1427, it was last restored in 1990. Among its many features are a private pond and an orchard on beautiful grounds. It is but a 3 minute walk from our front door. I don’t want to suggest that we are coveting the place but we have thought of taking the old codger who owns it for a long walk out on the beach at low tide…

Taking a stroll down memory lane
with… my Valentine

I was reflecting back to past celebrations we have had. In 1997 we had a particularly difficult one when Janice was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer on Valentine’s Day. Mandy was 12, Cassie was 10 and we were facing the very real prospect of losing our wife and mom.

My favorite though was when we were building our home in California. We were living on our property in a single wide 2 bedroom mobile home with four kids, both of us working full time and Janice pregnant with Cassie. I worked nights (graveyard shift) while Janice was at home with the kids so that she could work days while the older kids were in school. During the day, I would then be at home with Mandy who was a newborn, take her next door to a safe place on the job site where I could watch her constantly, and build all day.

The article can be read by merely clicking on it

Diaper changes and feedings could just as easily happen on a pile of lumber as play time was amongst drywall scraps. We would spend the whole day together even though she would spend a good part of it sleeping. Speaking of sleeping, I did too. Two hours in the evenings before going to work and two hours when I got home in the morning before Janice left for the day. On my days off, I dared not alter the routine except at night. Instead of going to prison I would turn the work lights on and build all night. I know the newspaper article said we would build the house in a year but that silly talk was for the bank. We kept this schedule up 7 days a week for 2 full years.



Building my own home, alone, was a goal I set for myself since I was 5 or 6 years old after seeing the family home my grandfather had built. At 16 I decided on a dome but had to wait 17 more years to find the woman who would support me in this hair brained scheme.

This project was quite a burden to lay on a bride of 4 months at the time we broke ground. As the years went by I would come to appreciate just how much she was capable of (and how fond of projects she was!). At the time though, I was looking for something that could tell her in a big way just how special she was to me. I happened to have a 33 foot high (11 meters) blank canvas I was working on and she caught a glimpse of it on the way home from work while still nearly a mile away.

Who would have thought?

Every once in a while I get really blind-sighted about some aspect of French society. Recently I was chatting with our village grocer in his shop when I saw an older woman I knew ride up on her bike. I was surprised to see her stop across the street to use the only phone booth in the village. “Doesn’t she have a phone at home?” I asked. “No” said the grocer, “or a TV”. In fact, she had recently moved into one of the few ‘affordable homes’ that the community is required to subsidize, the French version of low income housing. Apparently it was quite a step up for her as she had moved out of her home in the village that had no indoor plumbing. That’s right, no running water, no hot water and no indoor toilet.

I knew that some homes still had bare light bulbs hanging in some rooms and that heating was pretty marginal in some places. What I didn’t know was that there were still a number of homes either without or with limited indoor plumbing. Even one of our next door neighbors has her toilet in a concrete outhouse in her enclosed back yard. I have no idea if she has a shower.

The thing is, France has some homes that are every bit as opulent as any that could be found in America. Add the history of a renovated Chateau or Manoir, and no home in America could match it. But still, unbelievably, there are some homes with dirt floors. While the outside of most homes in Brittany are similar (stone exterior, slate roof) the interiors can range from completely remodeled, modernized, European “je ne sait quoi” luxurious to one step above medieval. The medieval thing can be extraordinarily cool. During our travels throughout Europe we have walked through righteous medieval towns and cities on numerous occasions. These, complete with ramparts, moats, dungeons, arrow slits in the walls, the whole shebang.

The homes in them are still lived in today, but I had assumed the interiors had all been renovated long ago. Yet, I have been in a home less than 100 yards (100 meters) from our front door where its owner lives without heat, cooks with a small propane bottle similar to those found on a camping trailer and part of the structure has a dirt floor. This can be found not only in our village, but in many other areas of the country.

WWW.honeybeeisland.com

Last summer, I wrote about our launch of the Starfire intercontinental rental conglomerate by adding a Canadian division. (It sure sounds cool, doesn’t it?) Seriously, I wrote about putting our big toe in the water and managed to rent the Island out for the two weeks while we went traveling about. We did this by putting a ‘cutesy’ little posting on a free web site just to see if there would be any interest and we were buried in inquiries.

As a result, we turned the task of creating a professional web site over to Carl who had done such a beautiful job of our last one in France (www.my-holiday-in-brittany.com ). The new site is finished and we have already received our first inquiry. It is dead of winter, snow up the ying-yang, ice and -20C (like -200 F!) and someone wants to rent an Island. Go figure. Carl made the place look so good I want to go there myself! You can take a peek at www.honeybeeisland.com (If the link won't open just copy and paste it to your browser)

Mandy is an ICCC winner!

Mandy just finished competing in the International Client Counseling Competition. Held yearly, it assesses law students skills in meeting with "clients", covering everything from people skills to making assessments as to whether a client has a case to begin with. Recommendations are then made based on the applicable laws, etc.

The competition is held in law schools all over the world and the finals are held in Las Vegas , where the rest of us mere mortals know lawyers go to fritter our hard earned money. (Ooops, sorry Honey) Being a student in Maastricht, Netherlands she competed in the Dutch Finals and her team came in second in the nation. You go, girl!

Is life in Europe really
that different?

Some of the curiosities about spending months at a time in Europe are the things we see or encounter that we don’t get to experience at home. Off the top of my head there are so many that I will write of a few each month. Among them for example, is the scheduling of TV programs. In America, all programs begin and end precisely on the hour or half hour. Here, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Many programs begin and / or end at odd hours like 7:54 or 8:10. We have never quite figured out why as there seems to be no particular rhyme or reason to it but it does make it tricky to plan when to look for something to watch. I am guessing it is because they have fewer commercial interruptions but are much longer than ours. Here you would have time to prepare dinner, use the washroom and write a quick email during a commercial break.

We find it quite revealing (pun intended) that full nudity is permitted and occasionally used to advertise products on network TV stations during family hour. Being from conservative prudish California, we are quite shocked!

The use of military time is quite prevalent here also, so Janice has a hard time figuring out when ‘2130 hours’ is. (9:30PM) She insists her favorite program will start at “21 thousand three hundred o’clock” (!) and wants to know what time that is. I tell her it’s in three weeks.

We are not big on watching French TV as our satellite dish picks up programming from England. It is interesting to us though to note that a huge number of movies watched by the French are Hollywood blockbusters that have been translated. There are no subtitles and these are not the weird voice-overs where you see the actors mouth words seconds after you hear them end speaking. This is high quality synchronized voice over film and I have no clue how they pull it off. The kicker is that the top actors (Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, etc) all have an exclusive ‘French voice’ when the movies are translated. That is, a contracted actor who is their consistent French voice in every movie where they have a part. Occasionally, I have had trouble convincing people here that who they are hearing is not Denzel Washington because in real life he doesn’t speak a word of French.

Every two years (four if it is brand new), owners take their cars in for a state required ‘technical inspection’. This is a souped up version of the smog checks we are required to have performed in California. Here, the vehicle is subjected to a thorough and vigorous safety inspection before you are permitted to drive it on the roads. Everything from tires, brakes, windshield wipers, lights and smog emissions - soup to nuts- are checked by computer and compared to the manufacturer’s specifications.

You are given 60 days to correct any identified deficiencies, (We needed new tires as we wore the last set out having too much fun) and the vehicle needs to be re-inspected before they will sign off. On the other hand, there is no yearly vehicle registration fee here. That is done only once when you first purchase your car.

Something we don’t see at home is the way people park here. It is apparently legal to park on either side of the street facing any direction. So, if you are driving down a city street and you see an open space on the other side you just drive in and park, nose to nose.

Finally, France recently passed a law requiring that all drivers have a reflective Hi-Visibility safety waistcoat within their reach prior to getting out of their vehicles in the event of an accident or emergency. Many now hang it on their seat backs or keep it in the door pocket as you can be fined for having it in the trunk or ‘out of reach’.

See you next month