Friday, January 02, 2004
Woke to find that the weather had turned sour with the sound of heavy rain upon the roof. By the time we had our breakfast of fresh chocolate croissants the rains had lessened considerably, and Erika suggested going for a walk down to the sea with the girls.
With the two Dobermans in tow (arguably the best behaved dogs belonging to the house) we all headed down the hillside using a long, sinuous path that eventually leads down to the sea hundreds of feet below. Erika filled me in on a bit of history of this path that I hadn’t realized before – it started as a path used by the donkeys used to haul the stone that went into the chateau at the hill’s summit in the 1920s, which explained the relatively gentle grade of the path. Still, there must have been plenty of exhausted donkeys at the end of the day.
When we last visited this path it was summery, and birdsong, butterflies and brightly coloured-flowers dotted the path. The cold and the rain on this trip made everything seem muddy and grey, but there were still there occasional shocks of bright green and enterprising daisies that dotted the landscape. No lizards and geckos to be seen this time, though we did see small birds flit across the path, the occasional rustle which could have been one of the local wild pigs (each rustle excitedly investigated by the dogs), and Vanessa was thrilled to see a wild mouse scurry into the undergrowth.
We ended up making our way to the boathouse, built by the original inhabitants 80 years ago. We made our way to long multi-story staircase that led to the ruins of the boat house. Built solidly of concrete, it had weathered the repeated batterings of the sea relatively well, with some of the iron rails and giant gears used to winch boats in and out were still there, picturesque though rusted beyond usability. There was a small stretch of beach here and the girls picked through the sand to discover small shells and beach glass while the dogs looked on. I was fascinated by the geography, with great jagged teeth of sedimentary stone had been cooked and heaved in the past to highly angled shafts, the bottom of some ancient sea bed twisted by the same processes that moulded the nearby Alps.
Going down was easy. Up was another thing entirely. Erika carried Annie on her shoulders, and I started to carry Vanessa likewise. Not surprisingly Erika soon outpaced me, and soon was out of sight. Once I had decided that there was no point in catching up, Vanessa and I took our time, looking for more wild flowers for her to pick. I almost missed one of the shortcuts going up, but from that point on Vanessa didn’t need me to carry her on my shoulders (which was just as well, as far as my back was concerned).
Not surprisingly, the kids were hungry and tired by the time we all arrived back at the Chateau. They ate ravenously and then watched some French children’s TV until they were tired and conked out.
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