A Weekend of French (re)Connections

Catching up with my old Southern Electric Contracting work colleague, Jo, and her husband Andy seemed a decadent contrast to the sombre history of Normandy. Jo and Andy retired to Sainte Gemmes le Robert near Le Mans three years ago, seeing out the pandemic in their beautiful oasis comprising of an extended traditional French cottage with pool, garage with additional accommodation and fishing lake. We were treated to the luxury of a bedroom with walk-around space and a view over the extensive garden. Quite a contrast to the first few days in the van!

We’d arrived on Friday evening and over the weekend we were treated to a local events extravaganza. After a late night catching up over red wine and locally home-brewed pomey liquor, (even sober I’m not sure of the spelling – potent stuff!) our hosts took us on a tour of the local area. We arrived in the pretty tourist town of Sainte Suzanne just after 1pm, right in the middle of the regimented two-hour lunchtime shutdown. The town harked back to a Covid lockdown – we hardly saw anyone else. A coffee and cake stop at a café owned by a friend of Jo and Andy’s saw us sat at an outside table in the village square as people suddenly seemed to assemble. But this wasn’t a post-lunch crowd, we’d found ourselves witnessing a funeral gathering for a local dignitary. We watched in respectful silence as the mourners filtered into the church, then quietly moved on to explore the castle. As luck would have it, Évron, their local village, had a music festival that afternoon. With sporadic showers during the afternoon, we joined the appreciative music lovers and spent an enjoyable few hours filtering between five stages that apparently contrary to the usual practice, ran seamlessly to time and was extremely well organised. We returned home to Jo’s slow cooker chilli, a darts challenge match and another late night.

We’d not planned to stay more than a couple of days, but the promise of Andy’s famous curry and the opportunity to meet their neighbours persuaded us to stay for one more night – at that point we’d not (yet!) been asked to leave. We joked that our tour guides couldn’t possibly top the entertainment they’d already laid on for us, but on Sunday a planned walk to take in the views at the highest point in the area evolved into being spectators in a historic motorcycling hill climb event. By early afternoon we were all a bit jaded from two nights partying like we were in our twenties – the enthusiasm had been there, but sadly not the stamina!

With hindsight, reminiscing over ‘the good old days’ from 30 years ago with an old friend was always going to be a boozy affair, but after 3 days of chatting, laughing, drinking and playing board games well into the early hours, our bodies screamed enough! Jo only half-jokingly suggested it was time for us to leave, later messaging to say it had taken them 3 days to recover!