Rockin' the CHateau...

April 6th, 2009

Easter Monday here in France and it seems like the whole country is on vacation. The kids are out of school for two weeks and so many parents take that time off to be with their kids. And they all go to Castorama (roughly translated to me by Christian as “Beaverland”).

I began the day with a determined idea that I was going to cut up a bunch of trees I felled last fall. That lasted until the fiftieth pull on the chainsaw. I must have flooded it but whatever the case it would not start. So I looked around for what else to do and thought. to myself “I’ll spend an hour pulling down all those old vines that covered the west end of the farmhouse.”

I’d pulled down all the low stuff last year so I had to get the ladder out to get the remaining high stuff. At the limit of the extension ladder (21 feet) I could just stand on the top most allowable rung and almost reach to vines that had embedded themselves in the wall where it meets the roof. ..but not quite. I worked my way around the farmhouse leaving it looking rather like it had one of those mixing bowl haircuts of seventies fame. Vine and vine branches stuck up and out from like a fringe all around the west end of the house when I was through…some six hours later!

I picked up the chainsaw and it fired on the first pull confirming all of Murphy’s lesser laws, namely to do with things not working when you needed them most to work. Since it was late in the day I decided that instead of cutting up the felled trees I would cut down three more that I didn’t like. Of course the saw got jammed in the last one and I spent another half hour building a lever to lift the weight of the tree so I could get my saw out. Thanks for all of those woodcutting lessons dad! I wish I had paid more attention.

Christian and Corinne had their friend Benjamin over for dinner, he of race track instructor fame, so I joined them. We are going to make a day of it on the 13th going to Benjamin’s track for rally racing instruction on a closed dirt track racing, 200 HP Subarus around. And then visiting some wineries owned by friends of his. We talked of that for a bit but then spent a lot of time talking about a band that Christian and he know called Ecos who are a very good Pink Floyd cover. Think “all Pink Floyd, all the time” and you pretty much have Ecos figured out.

Turns out that Christian has had the lead singer up through the Chateau and he’d like to do a concert there (hopefully a benefit) for a few hundred people. “Rock the Chateau” I think we’ll call it. We went through everything from parking to security to how to deal with the old folks living in the sleepy Hameau de Montlaur. While I thought that the first activity in the Chateau in almost 400 years should be perhaps a classical concert or maybe jazz, or perhaps even a re-enactment I was soon swept up in their excitement and the general coolness of having Pink Floyd tunes echo around the stone walls of the Chateau…how cool would that be!

So we left it at that and I went home to bed thinking of Pink Floyd’s “Money” playing in the midst of the Chateau grounds.