another travelogue 3

this must be it. is this is? looks like it.

after the slow dash across never-ending vineyards and almost so beautiful I’m bored of it now it goes on forever rolling countryside sprinkled with chateaux and chats and eau and the odd chien, we arrived at stop number one of our, well, 2 stop tour, which was apparently 2 nights in a youth hostel inside a cistercian abbey in cadouin where they used to have in the 12th century a towel that was wrapped around the head of jesus christ on a bike that all sorts of people used to crawl to on their knees from all over the place until someone said they didn’t make towels in those days and anyway that came from persia or something and people started wriggling on their back to places like lourdes and a bloke in limoges who had an ancient baguette shaped like the virgin mary’s right arm instead. because we are the cheapskates we are, we arrived in france 2 days before we could move into our gite to avoid overhiked school holiday airfares, so had to get somewhere to stay for the first 2 nights which wasn’t a bed and breakfast by bordeaux airport run by steve and mary who moved out 5 years ago and have just about recreated eastbourne in the dusty old dining room or a novotel by the ring road, and so after a bit of searching around and a swift 30 nicker to get our YHA cards, we dropped a line to a very nice woman in the abbey who said hell yes they’ve got a family room thursday and friday night if we just bring our YHA cards it’ll be 126 euros for 2 nights. lest we forget, that’s 126 euros for 5 people for 2 nights including breakfast, which is about 150 dollars or something, but even better, only about 80 quid which is what it would have be each if we’d gone to hotel flightpath. and the place is fricken brilliant. it’s like having a room in a medieval reenactment, but without the annoying people dressed up as archers and wenches at the weeked in a field in loughborough. there’s still scratches on the bedroom wall from about 600 years ago and we just spent our time lounging in the courtyard, cooking our pasta in the shared kitchen with lots of middle class french people like us who are all very polite and wholesome and we realise we’re really on holiday now and the children gaily skip around the cloisters and little baby jesus appears from a packet of chocolate milk and winks at us and the world sings hallelujah as angels come down from heaven and turn back the corners of our bed sheets and lift us up the stairs and into bed with their little wings and the sun sets over the spire and everything becomes one.

actually, some kids loitered around outside our window talking bollocks in french until about 1 in the morning by which time the neighbours with tiny children are throwing fruit out the window at them and a storm comes over and unleashes about 2 inches of rain in 10 minutes at which point everyone is thorougly pissed off and wonders what the hell we’re doing here, nice as it is.