We arrived in Fécamp Saturday afternoon around 4pm and promptly got lost. I’ve been using a Nokia N8 with Nokia Maps to get consistently excellent driving directions. And, my trusty N8 continued to deliver the promise right up to the driveway of a group of homes where we were supposed to pick up our keys. But if you are looking for No. 12 rue du 11 Novembre 1918, and there are at least 3 buildings each with six unmarked doors, well, I wouldn’t expect even Navteq’s best engineers to figure that problem out. Maybe someday, Google will figure out an algorithm to solve this, while they work out how to determine what every soul on the planet is having for breakfast.
No problem, I rang up our hostess for the gîte (rental house) we were going to rent, and using my best fractured french, figured out that she was awaiting us at the house on the beach.
We arrived at the house, right across from the beach, and parked on the sidewalk because all the proper parking spaces were filled. Anyway, parking across the sidewalk and leaving only a tight squeeze for pedestrians is not an uncommon thing in France, and I think I am starting to go native.
We checked in to very attractive accomodations, decorated in Ikea’s latest with sort of an aqua blue and dark brown theme. Clean white walls all around. We finished up the paperwork and wished our hostess a bonne journée.
As we settled in, we noticed a slight smell. We unpacked, and set about making the beds with an assortment of linens (unmatched) that the hostess left for us. One of the twins caught it first. Some hairs in the bed sheets. One of the girls let out a quiet shriek from the kitchen, where she was making herself a bread and camembert snack. A few hairs on the breakfast table.
Looking around, we noticed more hair, both straight and curly, even little balls of it in the corners of the room. Rather than get too grossed out, one of the girls grabbed the vacuum cleaner and took matters into her own hands. A pretty bold act, since I don’t think she’d ever used any form of household cleaning equipment before.
While vacuuming, our hostess, a well-fed woman in her mid-sixties with short gray hair and thick glasses, returned to drop off some towels for us.
In french, the word for hair is cheveux (pronounced sheh-vuh). And, the word for horses is chevaux(pron. sheh-voh). Differentiating the pronunciation of either can be difficult for an american who studied french 25 years ago and hasn’t practiced it much since.
Anyway, she was curious why we were vacuuming as the cleaning lady had just visited that morning. We tried to explain. I even had my daughter, currently in her third year of french, try to elaborate. The woman seemed a bit confused. Clearly there weren’t horses everywhere in the house.
So, we kept vacuuming and she left.
(NOTE: This story was originally embargoed, because we thought we wanted everyone to think we were always having pure fun 120% of the time. But, part of the adventure is facing the challenges. If you don’t want that, you should go check into a Ritz-Carlton. Anyway, what’s the problem with a few horses in the breakfast nook, other than you might not want to take any meals at home?)
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