France This Way...the blog!!

I’m a long way from home travelling around Burgundy at the moment, which presents me with a challenge – whenever I go away, Mrs B and the girls complain that I don’t think of them at all. This is based on the fact I that I never buy them presents from whereever I’ve been.

Earlier in the year I did buy them a nice bit of cheese from a farm in the Auvergne but they forgot that very quickly. There’s gratitude for you. So to make amends, as I was ambling around the village of Chablis, I thought I would buy a posh bottle of the local wine.

OK the girls won’t thank me, but scoring a couple of brownie points with Mrs B can’t do any harm.

I only had 2.50 euros in cash so popped to the cashpoint machine to get some money out of the bank, since a two euro bottle of wine is hard to come by in Chablis, only to find that my bank had ‘declined the request’. That is, my 2.50 euros has to last until the problem, either poverty or a bank error, whichever it is, is resolved. I’m not qite sure which will be easiest to sort out - poverty or a bank error – since our bank aren’t always very quick to deal with issues.

Unfortunately I didn’t think to bring a cheque book for our French bank account with me. I do have a cashpoint card for our UK bank account, but I haven’t used it for eight years and I’m not at all sure I can remember the number.

Since trivial considerations like bottles of posh wine take second place to basic survival I left Chablis without a present for Mrs B, fosussing more on how I can eat and drink for a few days and drive home again with only a couple of euros to pay for food, drink and petrol…

I wandered around nearby Auxerre while I thought about it, first stop the Tourist Office.

“Do you have a map of the town please?”

“Yes sir, that will cost 1.50 euros”.

Startled at the prospect of spending my remaining survival money on a map of Auxerre I rephrased my question. 

“Do you have a free map of the town?”

She stared at me for at least 10 seconds before reaching under her desk and saying “we do have this one”.  It was more or less identical to the one she had tried to sell me, so I took it.

Question: why do some French departments have tourist offices that try to sell basic information? Go to, say, Lozere or Vendee, and they give you so much free information that you need an extra suitcase to carry it and couldn’t possibly visit every place and attraction listed even if you were staying for the rest of your life. While others such as Yonne try to charge a couple of euros for each and every tiny bit of information they can bring themselves to share with you. So you don’t buy it, and you don’t visit places. Who loses out I wonder? Clue: it’s not the tourist, who goes out less, spends less, and takes his money home again.

Anyway, the map was useful for highlighting places that could be visited without spending anything, so served its purpose.

Assuming Mrs B can sort out my money problems when the bank reopen tomorrow (they are closed Mondays) I can expect to start eating again in the morning. If she can’t I’d best start looking for a job picking grapes until I can fill the car with petrol.

So if my blogging becomes rather erratic over the next few weeks, and I start talking knowledgeably about vintages and grape varieties, at least you’ll know why.