Symmetries and accommodations
Mar. 6th, 2006 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOne thing about a holiday that begins and ends with a long drive is that you - or at any rate, I, the perpetual passenger - spend long periods in a semi hypnotic state, gazing at the moving scenery and making patterns in my head. And one of the patterns about the Angoulême trip was that it began with two contrasting homes, and it ended with two contrasting hotels.
We had armed ourselves with the Routard guide, and managed to book a bed and breakfast near the ferry for our last night in France; but the penultimate night defeated us. Those establishments who answered the phone had no rooms available, or if they had a room would not serve an evening meal, and were in a delightful rural location which would have obliged us to drive some way in search of dinner. Eventually we decided there was nothing for it but to set off and see what we could find.
Which is how we ended up at the Le Mans Fasthôtel - tiny, new, spotless, characterless.
The following night, however, found us in a bed and breakfast run by antique dealers, who lived next door above the shop, and decorated the B & B with spare stock, so that there was always something interesting to look at, arranged sometimes with decorative flair, sometimes in a slightly random manner.
Our bedroom had a window looking out over the Somme estuary, and ajoined the bathroom through a pair of harem doors. As well as our double bed, it contained a decorative cast-iron single bed, a laquer cabinet with a missing bolt, two bedside lamps made of stacked beach stones, and piles of miscellaneous magazines and paperbacks. The following morning we breakfasted in a in which two tables had been crammed in, between the pictures and posters and a large cabinet of birds (mostly wooden decoy ducks, but with some stuffed birds in among them) and a rocking horse.
We had armed ourselves with the Routard guide, and managed to book a bed and breakfast near the ferry for our last night in France; but the penultimate night defeated us. Those establishments who answered the phone had no rooms available, or if they had a room would not serve an evening meal, and were in a delightful rural location which would have obliged us to drive some way in search of dinner. Eventually we decided there was nothing for it but to set off and see what we could find.
Which is how we ended up at the Le Mans Fasthôtel - tiny, new, spotless, characterless.
The following night, however, found us in a bed and breakfast run by antique dealers, who lived next door above the shop, and decorated the B & B with spare stock, so that there was always something interesting to look at, arranged sometimes with decorative flair, sometimes in a slightly random manner.
Our bedroom had a window looking out over the Somme estuary, and ajoined the bathroom through a pair of harem doors. As well as our double bed, it contained a decorative cast-iron single bed, a laquer cabinet with a missing bolt, two bedside lamps made of stacked beach stones, and piles of miscellaneous magazines and paperbacks. The following morning we breakfasted in a in which two tables had been crammed in, between the pictures and posters and a large cabinet of birds (mostly wooden decoy ducks, but with some stuffed birds in among them) and a rocking horse.
