Bordeaux week 1 – sleep, eat, rest

Gabe flew with us. For two days in the run-up to the holiday he had called L and my bluff and said he’d prefer to spend two weeks with his Grandpa than fly. As L and I made ready with compromises, he backed down. His aspiration for the holiday: sleep, eat, rest.

Mornings in the gite passed quickly. The kids rose late and lazed around the lounge with headphones and devices. To those activities they would return directly from finishing lunch. But some days we enforced trips: to Saintes, Bordeaux, Royan, the beach at St-Palais-sur-mer. These risked, and usually resulted in bad tempers, with frequency related to increasing age of child. The tempers could be assuaged with pizza lunch, or ice cream.

We went kayaking up a river that flowed gently into the Gironde. Robin and I had just established a good rhythm when a kayak occupied by two grey-haired men and a young woman capsized. Hampered by language and them being too heavy to haul onto our kayak, they spent ten minutes in the water holding onto their upturned vessel before they maneuvered to the bank, tipped the water out of their kayak, climbed back in and continued their trip.

Back at the gite, the pool and table-tennis prompted the most activity, particularly from Robin. We borrowed bikes and cycled on the narrow roads bordered with vines and sunflower fields. A couple of evenings, they joined in the rounders match run by the hosts’ children, involving the kids of the other gite and the French children staying with the owner.

At Domaine St Pierre-Le-Vieux

The pool was where the kids excelled: diving into the water, hauling themselves out, joking and challenging each other. Allowing a few minutes to dry, then back awkwardly over the gravel without shoes and a dash across the lawn into the apartment to rejoin games and videos on their tablets and phone. Gabe, flat on his bed, with curtains drawn shut; Eliza and Robin sprawling on the sofas, or wedged against a wall where their device was recharging. 

But there was also tennis – mostly for Gabe, Robin and me. Played in the heat of the day, the twilight or the cool approach of a storm. A rotating game of singles, one service game each and a long tie-break if those games were served. At the start of the holiday, Eliza and Robin hunted lizards around the monastery grounds. Eliza built up an unassailable lead. 

Meals also absorbed the hours. Sometimes on the terrace, until we became perhaps complacent about outdoor eating or intolerant of ants dropping from the creepers above. After the evening meal, we played scrabble and more often cards: Liar, Black Two. Gabe could sometimes be persuaded to put down his phone and join us. Robin sometimes had to be persuaded to go to bed to stop his tired incompetence messing up the game. 

It wasn’t holiday euphoria, but a real measure of its worth, that had us all conclude St Pierre-Le-Vieux was our favourite holiday home.