Another school year is about to start, meaning it’s time to take account of this summer’s merits.
The phenomenon known as summer break, for my part, had little to do with kicking back and relaxing. I spent most of this summer in Laroque des Alberes, a medieval village located in southern France, helping my slightly unorthodox dad (we’ll get back to that) restore my parents’ 400-year-old house. The house is tiny, with only one room on each of the three floors, and it was in need of a makeover.
At 43, my dad, who holds an MBA, gave up his business management career. He had one of those well-known midlife crises, which for him meant sailing the seas for a year in a 32-foot boat, only to settle down in Laroque — without a boat — after a huge storm during his return to Europe.
He is now a cabinet maker with the foggy idea that he is going to turn the house into a rustic, French-style luxury den. Just looking at the place and connecting it to that description should lead anyone to question the sanity of this person. But never mind.
One stormy night Dad woke up and decided to turn the third-floor walk-in closet into a bathroom.
He stocked the basement with a sink, a flat-packed shower cabinet, a bidet, tiles, silicone and other bathroom accessories, only to discover he could use some help getting this together; mainly, someone to carry all of this equipment from the basement to the third floor.
Enter me.
While the hauling proved labor-intensive, it required no brain-work. Then came the plumbing. Most plumbers are trained to be just that: plumbers.
After days of sweating and swearing over pipes, tightening, and applying silicone and the like in temperatures hotter than 100 degrees C, we agreed that plumbing was one career we both could do without.
However, France was not all about work. There was both food and play, in that order. Food such as snails (escargot) and wine, mussels and french fries and wine, wild boar and wine.
Food in France is not merely something to consume. It is culture, science and a hot discussion topic as well. I have never seen a nation so obsessed with talking about, preparing and savoring its meals.
One Sunday, we were invited to a friend’s house for a traditional family lunch. It started at noon with champagne and snacks on the terrace, followed by five or six sit-down courses inside, and ended about 6 p.m.
We discovered somewhere between the main course of alouette (forest sparrows) and the cheese platter that a family tradition is the cheese game.
At the table, each family member was asked to name a cheese to add to a list that would be compared with other families’ lists at a later time to see which family could come up with the most cheeses. We were talking types, so Tillamook, for example, was not an option, while cheddar would be an acceptable entry, save the fact that the protectionist French only consider French cheeses legal additions. The particular family I dined with had a list of over 200 French cheeses — no wonder each meal took awhile.
As for play, I preferred something more physical, so we joined a local tour group for a whole day of mountain biking. We biked from the French border over to Spain and back to France.
The trip started at 9 a.m. when we headed out in a 4×4 truck to scale a mountain. We were left at the 3,900-foot peak behind the village. We then descended the seven miles to sea level in Spain. After several sweaty hours on dusty gravel roads — and in my case a few dives over the handlebars and into the blackberry bushes — it was time to enter France again. What comes down must go back up.
In a scant two miles of biking, we ascended almost 2,000 feet. Our reward was the final descent from the border high point through French vineyards and rural farms to the beach in the French town of Banyuls, six miles later.
When we left France — two wooden ceilings, a bookcase, and an almost-finished bathroom later — the manager of the local dump knew me well enough to remind me that Aug. 15 and 16 he would close the dump because of family festivities.
The baker asked when we would return — hard work makes anyone hungry, and I bet she’ll be missing our business! Not to mention that we will miss her croissants and breads.
And the bar two doors down has one less customer to come daily and fill 1 1/2-liter bottles with the local wine on tap.