Chalet Shenanigans - Chapter 13

Where I Eat Pig’s Cheeks and Like Them

The week before Easter was bright and sunny in the mountains.  Perfect for some last minute spring skiing and going to the garden center to fix, once and for all, my window box issues.  You will remember that I had 80 geraniums wrapped in burlap hanging upside down all winter just chillin’ in the garage and that my not-too-sturdy planter boxes were, literally, tied with string to my balcony railings.

As those of you who follow this blog on Facebook know, all of the geraniums in the garage were goners.  They were SO dead, they were growing some kind of powdery, grey, lethal-looking fungus.  They were quite scary and they went immediately to the dump before they killed somebody.

Mr. Big bit the bullet at the garden center and pulled out the credit card for 15 heavy-duty planter boxes that screwed into the railing, all the while muttering “one time purchase, buddy, one time purchase” to himself.  I was a little confused as to why there were no geraniums at the garden center and why all the ladies were standing in line with flats of pansies, of all things.  Pansies?  Aren’t you supposed to plant pansies in the fall?  Where are the geraniums, O Giant Garden Center?

Please note that this was Clue Number One that went sailing right over my head.

Leaving my beloved at home cheerily installing planter boxes, I ventured over the border into Switzerland in search of geraniums.  The Swiss are nothing if not timely and regimented.  If it’s time for geraniums, the Swiss will have geraniums.  Lo and behold, the Swiss garden center had racks of them.  They were still in their packaging straight from the nursery wholesaler and were not even on display yet, but I was so excited I pulled four flats of them right off the big rolling carts and rushed to the cashier.

Clue Number Two:  my little geranium spriglets had no price tags on them and it took forever for the clerk to even know what to charge me.

By Wednesday, all my little plants were snug in their new beds and soaking up that glorious sun.  By Easter Sunday, they were dead.  Yes, it snowed a few inches overnight and, even though they were only two inches high to begin with, they now had that rubbery, droopy, frozen look about them.  Go figure.

Well, as you can imagine, I was depressed.  Mr. Big was, I’m sure, just wondering how much those dead little spriglets, which he only got to enjoy for about 72 hours, had cost him.  So, to take our minds off of the fact that it was blizzarding during the second week of April when we were supposed to be getting out the spring clothes, we did what any normal people would do.  We took a road trip to search for sunshine.

France is a big country.  We have been a lot of places in France but we haven’t been to ALL the places in France, if you know what I mean.  There are fly-over “departements” in France just like there are fly-over states in the US.  For instance, I’ve never been to Missouri.  I actually couldn’t tell you one thing about Missouri except it has a big city in it called St. Louis and it’s somewhere in the middle, maybe near Nebraska.  This is the extent of my knowledge about Missouri.

Me:  Dude, get the map.

Big:  Why?

Me:  We are going to Missouri.

Big:  Why?

Me:  Because I am sick of looking at this snow and if I leave, maybe the Geranium Fairy will come and bring my spriglets back to life.

That is how we found ourselves in the region of Auvergne, France.  Basically, you drive south until you finally get out the Alps and hang a right.  Drive due west for 3 hours and voila, you are in the region called Auvergne.  Perhaps you have heard of the larger cities in this region.  Clermont-Ferrand?  Thiers?  St. Etienne?  Issoire?  No?  Well, me neither.  Which was, of course, what made it so perfect.

Before we left, I googled “The Most Beautiful Village in France” and “Auvergne”.  Eleven!  Auvergne had 11 beautiful villages!  It was beyond my wildest dreams.  I was hoping for one and I got eleven.  Who knew?  I jotted down the eleven names for Mr. Big to plug into his GPS and off we went.

The minute we got out of the mountains, the snow stopped, the sun was out, the rolling hills were green and starting to bloom and my spirits improved immensely.  You will remember that I make Mr. Big take only little backroads on these excursions because of my motto that states “Nothing Exciting Ever Happens on the Freeway”, but he was enjoying himself as well.  The scenery and the villages in the middle of France are really special and there wasn’t a tourist within a hundred miles.

It being Easter Sunday, it took some doing before we found a restaurant open for lunch but we did find one in a little town called Vienne on the Rhone river.  The restaurant was packed with big tables of locals with three generations at each table and there were no “a la carte” menu choices available. We were allowed to pick our drink of choice and then decide between two main dishes—pig cheeks or langoustines.   I went out on a limb with the pig cheeks because I’ve eaten beef cheeks and halibut cheeks before and they were both delicious so I wasn’t scared.  Mr. Big played it safe and opted for the shrimp.  The only reason I’m telling you this is because, when Mr. Big’s shrimp course arrived, while it appeared to be both lovely and tasty, it came with, inexplicably, a side of chocolate dipping sauce.  I do not know if this is a local “thing” or if the chef was just trying to be creative or what.  I mean, it wasn’t some Spanish “mole” sauce or some fancy dark chocolate/pink peppercorn sauce.  It was straight ol’ Hershey’s syrup.  Pig cheeks won that round.

Four courses later, we roll our stuffed selves out of the restaurant and continue on our merry way to Auvergne.  At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, Mr. Big turns to me, (because it has finally occurred to him that we are, literally, in the middle of nowhere), and says, “Trailing Spouse, which one of your eleven beautiful villages do you think will be our final destination this evening?  Because, Love of My Life, you need to make sure that whatever place we wind up in has the internet.”

Oh, crap.  I had forgotten about the Mr. Big Will Only Remain Calm If He Has Internet Rule.  Yikes.

Maintaining my composure whilst silently thinking to myself, “Man, I am so screwed”, I chirp, “Usson.  It seems to be pretty big.  Big enough to have the internet, anyway.”  Yeah, right.  I was soooo lying!  I didn’t think for a minute that there was a chance on God’s Green Earth that any of those medieval villages were going to have the internet, but, whatever.  It’s a marriage, right.  It involves compromise and an inherent understanding that one doesn’t kill one’s spouse over lack of internet access.

We pull up to Usson at about 5:30 and it is just beyond cute.  Unfortunately, it was really, really tiny.  Think miniscule.  Think hamlet.  Think whistle-stop.  As we get out of the car to go exploring, all I’m thinking is “please have internet, please have internet”.  Y’all.  There was only one inn in this entire village, population 233.  One.  I girded my loins and entered the establishment.  In my mostest, bestest, beggingest French I emplore the Madame to bestow upon two weary travelers a) the internet and b) a spare room.

Voila!  Oui, bien sur, Madame, nous avons l’internet!  (Yes, of course, ma’am, we have the internet!)  Usson, my new favorite place in France.  After I smirked a little bit at Mr. Big and flaunted my fabulousness at finding him the internet in the middle of Missouri, Madame Proprieteur took us upstairs to have a look at our room before we agreed to stay there.  This is completely normal in Europe, especially out in the countryside.  You get to approve your room before you agree to stay.  If you don’t like the room, you just ask to see something else and you wander around the establishment until you find something more to your liking.  Seriously.  It’s true.

Could you see the hotelier’s face in America if you said, “well, I’d like to see ALL your available rooms before I agree to stay here”.  He would kick you out in a New York minute and send you on your merry way to the Comfort Inn down the street.

Seriously, if you ever find yourself in the middle of France in the departement of Auvergne in a region called Puy de Dome in the petit village of Usson, go there.  The inn is called Auberge de Margot.  The food is awesome.  The proprieteurs couldn’t be any nicer.  The views from the rooms are so peaceful.  The history, all about a French queen who was exiled in this tiny place for 15 years in the 1500’s, was fascinating.  Not to mention, they have the internet.  Alright, moving along.

We only made it to 5 of the 11 villages.  The best ones were Usson, Blesle and Montpeyroux.  We found multiple, random chateaux (castles) along the way, just sitting out in the middle of nowhere waiting for a spare princess to come live in them.  The whole area was just amazing.

For example, in the little village of Blesle, founded by nuns and monks in the 800’s, yes, as in the 9th century, you or I or any old John Doe can just meander in the church, look around, touch anything you want, light a candle or whatever.  Hanging on the wall was a wooden sculpture of Jesus that had been mounted in that very same spot since 1100-something.  No ropes to keep you 10 feet away, no Plexiglas, no sign forbidding flash photography.  Just a 930-year-old Jesus hanging on the wall like it was his job.  He was hanging above a marble table THAT I SET MY BOOKBAG DOWN ON TO TAKE HIS PICTURE before I read the engraving in the marble that said that the Pope, as in THE POPE, had donated this table to the nun who founded the Blesle convent in 832 AD.  832 AD!  AND I SET MY BOOKBAG ON IT!

That would never happen in America.  Okay, well, maybe in Missouri, but not in the rest of the country.

I have to tell you one funny story about Montpeyroux before I close.  This is an old, medieval village that sits up on a hill.  The only remaining part of the original fortress at the very tippy top is The Donjon.  Now, I don’t know who coined the term, the English or the French, but they mean two completely opposite things, so there was an obvious mistranslation somewhere back in the day.  In France, a donjon is a tower.  In English, we would call it the Keep, as in where you “keep” the prisoners on bread and water rations until you cut off their heads.

Anyway, the Donjon in Montpeyroux is still standing and available for visitors to explore.  Let me just tell you that if you are A) fat or B)claustrophobic or C)scared of heights, you need not apply.  Getting to the top involved the skills of both a rock climber and a cave explorer.  I felt like Katniss Everdeen.  So, here’s the funny part.  The toidy, the toilette, the lav, the loo, the potty for the prisoners is still intact.  Apparently, the prisoners perched on a board that was situated about 500 feet in the air and let ‘er fly.  The hole in the board was/is, (although it is now covered with a sheet of Plexiglas so that no one attempts to test it out), positioned OUTSIDE of the rounded stone walls of the tower.  Yes.  Picture it.  So, if you were a prisoner in 1075 in Montpeyroux, your feet and lower legs were inside the donjon, but your butt was hanging off the edge into space.  Get it?

Can you imagine?

Hey, Missouri, you got anything like that?

Chalet Shenanigans - Chapter 12

Where We Attempt To Not Burn Down the House

Mr. Big and I made a mad dash to finish up a few renovation projects at the chalet before the kids arrived for Spring Break so that the house didn’t appear to be quite as much of a wreck as it actually is.

As per usual, most of the projects ended up about 90% complete, but at least the kids got the general idea.  I found myself saying over and over again, “Well, NEXT time you come, this will have x.y.z…” or, “When you come back for Christmas, THIS will be/not be here,” or “Try and picture x.y.z…”.  Work in progress, people, work in progress.  At least they all had clean towels and no one had to sleep on the floor.



One of the things we really pushed for before they came was installing the new fireplace.  You can’t expect someone to come for a ski holiday and not have a fire.  This was a huge undertaking.  The chalet came with a perfectly good, working, functioning fireplace, which I, of course, hated, and began to sledgehammer almost immediately upon arrival.

Most Swiss husbands come home from a long, hard day at the bank and ask their well-manicured Swiss wives, “Gleebenarbeiten Gleibenachstellerung Glaubenausfahrtich?”, which in Swiss-German means, “Hi, Hausfrau.  Did you have a lovely day with the ladies grazing through the Zurich stores?”  To which Frau will respond, “Ja, Ueli, Gebensterichtnicht und Drubenzeibenglaubengloben”, which translates to “It was fabulous.  I picked up a new Bally bag and a snappy pair of alligator pumps.”****

My poor fella comes home on Friday from a hard week in Vienna or Birmingham or wherever and, literally whimpering in fright in anticipation of my answer, whispers, “Hi, honey.  Did you destroy or throw away anything this week?” to which I reply, “Well, actually, I did go to the dump once or twice and, um, the fireplace is gone and, uh, I threw away all the lighting on the second floor and installed new ones.”  It is usually at this point that Mr. Big’s hoarding gene starts to twitch and he runs out to “his” garage to see what I’ve thrown away that I consider junk but that he considers “treasure”.



Then I get to hear, from the garage, “TRAILING SPOUSE!!!  WHERE’S THAT PIECE OF 50 MILLIMETER PLASTIC TUBING THAT I WAS SAVING?  AAAH!  WHERE’S THAT CHUNK OF CONCRETE THAT USED TO BE RIGHT THERE BEHIND THAT ROTTEN PIECE OF PLYWOOD?  FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE, WOMAN, WILL YOU PLEASE JUST STOP TOUCHING MY STUFF?!!!”

He gets over it by Sunday.  Stop worrying.  If I didn’t make my weekly, clandestine trips to the dump, our new French neighbors would start to think the cast and crew from Deliverance had moved in next door.  As a matter of fact, it’s one of my favorite things to say to Mr. Big.  He knows when he hears the magic sentence, “Dude.  It looks like rednecks live here,”  that he has about 85 seconds to save anything that might remotely be considered “salvage” because I am already loading up the back of the truck for a dump trip.

Anyway, back to the fireplace.  So, I dismantled everything that I could lift by myself, that is to say, everything but the actual flue, fire box and a couple of pieces of 300-lb. concrete.  Then, I just left the rest for Mr. Big.  This is how I operate.  I get rid of the thing that’s bothering me, to the best of my ability, and then he has ZERO choice but to finish the project because his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder will not allow it.  Well, apparently this whole fireplace thing was just a massive task that I massively underestimated.  The demolition continued up through the next floor into one of the bedrooms and then up into the rafters and, finally, out onto the roof.  This project overwhelmed me and I am not easily daunted.



Fast forward five months later and the new fireplace arrived just three days before the kids.  Now, the new fireplace design calls for it to be suspended from the ceiling.  And, it rotates 360 degrees.  It’s freakin’ cool, I tell you.  Let’s not even go into how many metal drill bits and metal saw blades Mr. Big consumed in the installation.  Let’s not even talk about how I finally suggested we get the jack from out of the back of the Defender to hold up this monster while we screwed it into the ceiling.  (The jack idea was mine and only mine after I discovered that Mr. Big thought it would be keen if I GOT ON ALL FOURS AND HELD UP THE STUPID FIREPLACE ON MY BACK while he screwed it into the ceiling.)

Form a mental image, please, of some 2 x 4’s spread across a gaping pit in the living room floor, upon which a tire jack is precariously balanced and extended.  Now place on top of the jack a thousand pound iron fireplace with a 6-foot flue coming out of the top that must be matched up oh-so-precisely with some pre-drilled holes in the ceiling.  Then picture a frantic Mr. Big and Trailing Spouse hanging off both sides of one ladder madly screwing in two dozen bolts before the whole thing falls like a house of cards and crashes into the basement.



That was such a fun day.

Once the cursed thing was hanging where it was supposed to, it became a simple matter then of Mr. Big just clicking the pieces of the chimney flue back together on up through the bedroom upstairs, up into the rafters and then connecting the flue to the part that sticks out of the roof.  Well, that was the plan anyway, but as so often happens in the Land of Mr. Big, something went awry.  The poor man was short about 3 feet of tubing due to, ahem, a miscalculation that his engineering-self will still not admit to.



Me:  So, does this mean I can’t light a fire?

Him:  Honey.  Can you not see the 3 feet of empty air in Small Son’s bedroom where the two ends of the pipe are not touching each other?  If you light a fire right now, you will burn the house down.

Me:  Well, technically, no.  One cannot SEE empty air, can one?  Is this situation Duct Tape fixable?

Him:  Please help me, Dear Lord, to not strangle my wife on this or any other day.

To make a long story less long, it took another week to get the right parts.  Finally, two days before the kids LEAVE, we are ready to light a fire.  We all stand around basking in the magnificence that is the new fireplace that spins oh-so-gloriously, (note that we are standing because the lounge chairs that are supposed to go around this wonder are on backorder), as Mr. Big puts match to kindling.



Oooh!  Aaaah!  It’s so cool!  But, wait.  What is all that black smoke pouring out into the room?  And, why does it appear to be, well, there’s no other way to say it, MELTING?

As Small Son runs for cover into the kitchen with his shirt pulled up over his nose to get away from the noxious fumes emanating from the fireplace that he is convinced are going to turn him sterile or worse, Charming Daughter steps up to assess the problem.  Remember, Charming Daughter works for a giant paint company and she is the Queen of Coatings.



“Hmm,” she says.  “I believe you have a faulty primer coat here.  See, see all of these bubbles on the outside?  See how they are popping and I can just rub away the paint off with my finger?  The manufacturer didn’t use a high enough heat-resistant paint.  You got gypped, Dad.  You shoulda called me before you bought this thing.”

By now poor Mr. Big’s eyes were bulging out of his skull.  He had both of my oven mitts on his hands, (because this sucker was HOT) and he was poking and smearing and cursing.  Oh, was he cursing.  GET THE CAMERA, TRAILING SPOUSE!!!  DOCUMENT THIS, THIS *&%*$ PIECE OF %$#* FIREPLACE!  THESE $%*&@S ARE GETTING AN EMAIL FROM ME LIKE THEY HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE!

I’m sure he scared the living beejayzus out of Small Son’s and Charming Daughter’s girlfriend and boyfriend.  No doubt they went home and told their parents, “The skiing was great but the Dad is a lunatic”.  To try and distract them from the meltdown of both the fireplace and my husband, I had all the kids go around and open the windows to air out the house.  So much for the marshmallow roasting I had planned.  That would just be the icing on the cake to send them home with a nice case of esophageal cancer from consuming toxic marshmallows.

I’ll keep you updated on what, if anything, Mr. Big hears back from his ranting email.  Lawd knows if they even understood it.  Mr. Big runs all of the emails that he sends to French and Swiss people through Google Translate to magically turn them into French before he sends them.  I have tried to tell him that Google Translate is notorious for getting things wrong, so we’ll see.  For all we know, the fireplace company thinks he has some problem with his shirt (chemise) and not his fireplace (cheminee).  If he gets a free shirt in the mail, I fear for his sanity.

****I, of course, have no actual knowledge of Swiss German.