Today was incredibly stressful. Most of today was spent traveling in the car, but before this we had a "petit dejuner" at the hotel which, had no kettle and copius amounts of mould growing on the ceiling. The breakfast was relatively simple, one tye of cereal, a jug of milk, tea, coffee, a selection of bread, jam (none of which was strawberry...) and fruit puree which was ridiculously sweet.
For the first time in ages I'd eaten quite a bit of breakfast, as usually I don't bother because I don't plan on waking up till about 11am onwards; by which time there's no point in having any.
I was pretty tired, not helped by the fact that there was screaming children running around the night before whilst I was harmoniously resting. Quite a few occaisions I opened the door to give foul looks towards the families with screaming offspring running up and down the corridors. Coincidentally, I found my father, standing outside the ajoining room, to be doing the same, hatred of loud children must run in the family...
So we set off, on our six hour journey to the gite, constantly dreaming about the pool, and sleeping in a bed that hadn't got ciggarette burns in the sheets. Every stop made on the way to a layby with the classicly foul metallic toilets signified that you were getting closer to some kind of paradise where of which there'd be decent toilets along with so many other luxuries.
On the way we stopped off at the "intermarche" which is a supermarket near to the gite, to stock up on the amenities. General things like bread, jam, coffee, cereal, wine, beer and then the slightly more unusual things like bolognaise flavoured crisps, sauce du frites (this translates to sauce for chips... It's basically sour cream with gerkins in or something...) haricot beans, BN biscuits (they used to sell these in the UK) and Cassis (It's really thick blackcurrant cordial which comes in a tin...).
Anxiously we drove up to the gite to greet the owners, the amount of releif on my face after near enough two days in the car was overwhelming; my dip in the pool was ever looming closer. The owners stepped outside and said, "Your a day early?!" My face dropped. My parents had got the booking date wrong. They had booked the ferry a day earlier than it should of been, and the whole time had been completely oblivious to the fact that they weren't even to be admitted to the gite a day later. We couldn't get into the gite because someone was still staying there. We were completely screwed.
The gite owners kindly invited us into their own house and made a call to a local hotel to see if there was any rooms available. This was a big help seeing as neither of me or my parents were fluent in french. If they hadn't lived on site then we would of been in huge shit.
We ended up staying in a private owned hotel in a small town about ten or so miles from the gite. It was this amazing traditional french house, which was small in width but the length of it seemed to go on forever! Inside it was dark and was equiped musty "cold pizza oven" smell. Luggage in hand, we marched up the spiral staircase following the creepy, camp, concierge as he showed us to our room. The room was quite spacious and so much cleaner than the hotel we previously stayed in the night before. Although this one had neither internet connection nor a kettle...
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