Day Twenty Eight

France: L’argentiere

Friday 1st August

Bumpy Landings

I awoke early and was on the road by 7:15am to pick up Johnathon from the airport in Montpelier. He was to join me for a further 10 days and I had been looking forward to seeing him all week. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, but I think perhaps that is a romantic ideal that reality has the cruel habit of surpassing. I’d clearly had too much thinking time and with my head running away with me, I had far too much to say to J.

One of the many things I’ve learnt on these adventures is that when you’re away from the day to day reality of life, you really do have a chance to live a dream, naively perhaps, but I’ve had the thinking time and space to be able to put a completely fresh perspective on life, to allow myself to sift through the negatives, grasping onto the positives in life. Reality however, is never too far away and we found it hard to reach equilibrium together. My flouncing around Europe clearly has no comparison to the harsh realities of the rat race back home; we were already balancing an uneven keel.

As we wound our way back to L’argentiere, we stopped off at a Hypermarket for groceries and also the sweetest little farmers cave. I call it a cave, as it really was straight out of the Aladdin genre, stocked full of homemade pates, conserves and all manner of farm grown fruits and vegetables, beautifully set amidst a restored stone outhouse by the side of the road. We bought melons from the tired looking farmer’s wife. My head in the clouds living the “goodlife” dream I narrowly avoided death as some French Madame veered onto the other side off the road, narrowly missing me as I bounced myway back across the road to Priscilla, entirely forgetting that It was the same road that had seen Priscilla’s wing mirror smashed, earlier in the trip.

We returned to camp and Ian and J chatted, catching up on life’s goings on as I pulled together some wine and nibbles for lunch. It was a surreal place to meet, especially as my immediate family is now so spread across the continents. The three of us needed to pull together a new dynamic, Priscilla being the common theme. The wine of course went straight to our heads and as the heat of the afternoon built, it was soon time for a cool down in the wellness centre.

Retiring for the evening to the Auberge we had a superb meal, as we had now begun to expect from this fine little eatery, we ate like kings and drank like queens!