Estree-les-Crecy

Over the long Pentecost weekend, Matt and I and six of our friends decided to head to France for a much needed chill-out. The plan initially was to stay in the Champagne region and visit a vineyard or two, but we were late in looking for hotels and by the Wednesday before, every room in Champagne was booked. How crazy is that? By Thursday evening, we were all getting pretty down and thinking that our weekend was shot, but lo and behold, I managed to find a farmhouse that slept 8 adults in the Picardie region of France. No vineyards, but the beach was nearby, and it was still France and we could all be together.

We headed down on Friday night with Jane and Jason, and Jen and Joep arrived a few hours later. We spent the first night drinking wine, eating chips and playing Jenga - which would become a theme for the weekend. It ended up with me revealing my fear of midgets, and Matt impersonating ones for our friends' eager cameras.

The next day we explored our yard a bit, and found that the creature squawking all morning was the neighbor's peacock! What a strange pet. He also had a donkey and a sheep, both really cute. We made a heap of pancakes and anxiously awaited the bread truck, which never came. The owner of the house had told me that a bread truck came around each morning around 11 with fresh croissants and baguettes. Around noon we got ourselves ready to go to the beach. The beach was a real disappointment - it was very similar to the Dutch beaches. Grey sand that doesn't feel very nice between your toes, cold and uninviting water and ugly people. It was a lot cooler at the beach than at our house. We passed the time by digging a hole for Matt to get in and be thrown from (a game Matt and his friends discovered during Skeet Fest '05 on LBI). We then go a call from Ross and Sascha - they were on the prominade eating lunch b/c they hadn't been able to find the house. With all of our TomTom's it was still a pretty difficult place to find, not to mention the owner's directions were distinctly terrible. We met them at a cafe and had steaks and mussels with fries on the terrace - so delicious! On the way back, Jane, Jason, Matt and I stopped by the supermarket to pick up food and supplies for our BBQ, and left with no less than 12 bottles of wine in addition to vodka and beer.

That afternoon we hung around our yard - with the boys playing a strange bowling-type of game that involved the winners creating rules for the losers - things like having to leapfrog across the yard and not being able to drink with your hands. The girls sat around with wine watching the spectacle. We soon realized there were no restaurants within walking distance of our house and no one felt like staying sober to drive. So we decided to pick up some pizzas for dinner. One thing I learned during this trip - the girls always fall into the role of homemaker. Why is it that the girls are always the ones getting up to collect the dishes and wash up? We would get fed up with that pretty soon...We ended the night with Jenga - again.

The next morning we held off our massive breakfast of eggs and bacon to await the bread truck yet again. We asked the little boy across the street if the truck was coming and he said he'd call it for us. We were all cheerily discussing what we thought the bread man would look like - we settled on a Santa Claus-type guy with a potbelly and a happy red face. How wrong we were! When the bread LADY came Sascha asked her in French if we could please buy some baguettes. She looked blankly at us and said "no, there is no more bread. sorry" then drove off to sell the stack of baguettes she had in her trunk to the neighbors. We were devastated! And quite angry - in the quote that would help define the weekend, Sascha said, "I can't believe that b*tch! I'm wearing Chanel's for f**ck's sake!" And she was.

We made do without her baguettes and had our first feast of the day. We lounged around in the afternoon - playing games outside and laying around talking and reading. When the beer ran out, there was a moment of silence while we tried to figure out what to do. It was too warm to drink all the red wine we bought, so I immediately thought - Tinto de Verano! If you remember from our Andalucia blog, this is the Spanish drink of choice in summer - red wine, ice, lemon/lime soda and pieces of fruit. The boys scurried to the kitchen and emerged 20 minutes later, proud as peacocks, with a bowl of the delicious drink which we all enjoined.

In the evening we commenced our massive BBQ, with the 4 boys all firing up the charcoal and standing around the BBQ while the girls slaved away in the kitched chopping and boiling and preparing the pasta and green salads - oh, and drinking lots of champagne.
The girls were annoyed - why do they need 4 people to BBQ? We decided they would have to clean up afterwards. After a delicious meat festival, we told the boys our plan. And they then had the audacity to all get up and leave! They walked out the gate and were gone for the whole time it took us girls to clean up. So we locked the gate on them. We were sitting around drinking champagne and chatting when they arrived at the game holding flowers they had picked. We were such softhearts, that Jane went inside to get the key. That's when Joep says, "so are the dishes done?" The other boys were angry with him b/c they had run out of drinks and needed refills. So they had to wait another 20 minutes before we let them in, but not before they managed to wrestle a bottle of red wine from my hands from in between the gate posts and run away with it.

Later that night, we played the card game Kings. It's such a fun game, and definetely leads to drunken shenanigans. My all-time favorite rule is Rhyme Time, and I let everybody know this. Too bad the first time someone picked up that card and my turn came, I had nothing to give.

The next morning, Ross and Sascha went into town and brought back baguettes (take that, bread lady!) and pastries. The 8 of us sat around the table for the last time. In the late morning we took our posts on towells outside, this time drinking just water and eating pastries. At around 2:30 we all started mobilizing to leave. We alll vowed to return next year. We all had such a great time - the weather was amazing, the house was great, the group was laid-back and it was not a very difficult place to get to. We were back in Amsterdam by 8pm on Monday.