Family Holiday #2

Just nine days after returning from the ordeals already described my family embarked upon another. This one was a venture to the Loir Valley near Le Mans in central France with my mum's family, consisting of 3 of her brothers and their wives and children, a sister-in-law with husband and children, one of my cousin's girlfriend and a friend of my uncle. In all, 25 of us. This is a lot of people to have in one house, which is the exact reason we didn't stay in a house, we stayed in a Chateaus that used to be a monastery. This place was owned by a man called Claude, what else? He was quite possibly the Frenchest man in the world, his dog was called Fifi.

The house was a typical horror film location, caves underneath, a massive woods, dark hallways, bats and secret passageways. The house maintained by a team of zombie like people, led by the one we nicknamed Igor. We even considered making a Blair Witch Project.

I was in a room with my three oldest cousins and my brother, it was a great laugh, the lights were on a bare cable so we did tricks that made it spark. The room had the noisiest door known to man so if anyone used the door the whole room would be woken up. This however was nothing compared to the dog, it was a very clever dog but did not manage to grasp the fact that the alternate door was locked. It would throw itself up against it repeatedly in an attempt to get in, scaring the hell out of all of us, especially since it would grab the handle and we could see the handle turning. I hate dogs. The cat I preferred, it would get in through the window and pad around the room before snuggling up to one of us in bed and purring. It would switch beds quite often and was lovely (must not make a pussy joke).

My memory of the week is somewhat impaired by the fact I spent the majority of the time drinking. What I remember vividly is the cooking, it takes a lot of time and manpower to feed 25 people all at once. The system was that each individual family was responsible for one meal and anyone else could chip in. My family did meatball, hand made. In all we made 211 meatballs, made gallons of delicious sauce and served up lashing of spaghetti. The meal lasted us 3 days, meatballs for dinner, meatball subs the next day and the remaining sauce used to add taste to the youngest children's dinner the next day. Due to my skills I was put in charge of subs, I made 25 meatball subs in under an hour, who says I learn nothing at work?

We decided to take a guided tour of the caves from Claude, it was unbelievably fascinating. He showed us the burial sites for Monks who had lived there, the places where French people had taken cover from bombs in World War Two and where Jews were hidden from the Nazis. He then went on to describe the religious experiences he had had whilst down there, involving a secret room that only the enlightened could find, a massive, multiple headed moving statue and all sorts of weird stories. I'm a religious man but I didn't quite believe him, he was a massive stoner! He would quite often disappear up to his room with his girlfriend and they would both come down looking flushed and completely out of it.

After this one week I could happily never eat another croissant or baguette in my life.