Somebody else is cutting up my 5-year-old son Alex’s poulet rôti (roast chicken) into bite-sized pieces, while I drink a perfectly chilled Lillet blanc, and gaze out the window of the Chateau de Locguénolé. From the table behind me, I hear Alex asking for more frites, and as I take another sip, somebody else gets up to get them. My husband joins me, and we stand together at the chateau’s windows. Alex knocks over his milk, and while we watch the light change over the Atlantic, somebody else mops it up. This is not my real life. Nor is it an alcohol-induced parental fantasy. It’s a Butterfield & Robinson family vacation, and it’s about as far from real life with a 5-year-old as Versailles is from Chuck E. Cheese’s. Canada-based Butterfield & Robinson is one of the most deluxe biking and walking trip companies around. Back before my husband and I had any reason to learn the evolved forms of each Pokémon, we took a B&R walking tour of Tuscany, staying at villas and castles, lunching at a cooking school, sampling Brunello at a private wine tasting at an enoteca in Siena. So when I saw that B&R had added family trips to their itineraries, I was all set to sign us up. But all that B&R luxury comes with a price. Their family trips start at $2,895 (U.S.) for each adult, and the seven day/six night bike tour of the Breton Coast I’d chosen cost $4,650 (U.S.). “We could take a couple of vacations for that money,” my husband said, when I showed him a happy family biking in the B&R catalogue. “The grownups get to have dinner by themselves,” I told him. “We could stay a month in Monterey.” “Every afternoon, there are separate activities for the kids.” “We could spend the whole summer camping in Yosemite.” “There’s a private oyster tasting.” “Let me see that catalog again.” Finishing the last golden drop of our Lillets, my husband and I stroll over to the chateau’s dining room where we join our fellow B&R travellers, three couples from the West Coast, four from New York. We’re seated at a window table, where we have a perfectly framed view of the Atlantic shoreline and our children climbing on Chat, one of the B&R guides. We order duckling and homard (lobster) from the one-star Michelin menu, followed by sorbet made from fraises (tiny wild strawberries) and runny cheeses served with Port. After dinner, we retrieve our children and take them back to our manor house rooms, tucking them into Louis XVI beds. The next morning, our bikes are all set up and waiting for us (Alex rides a tandem attached to my husband’s bike, the younger children ride in trailers). Our water bottles are filled, our helmets hang from the handlebars, there’s even a stamped postcard of Brittany on the seat in case we’re compelled to send a message home – “Sell the house, I’m never coming back.” We ride out into the Breton countryside, cycling past whitewashed cottages with blue-painted shutters, big hydrangea bushes covered with fat flowers that resemble cheerleader’s pom poms. Now and then, we come upon an old Celtic cross, its stone edges worn smooth by weather and age. Every time I catch up to Alex on my husband’s tandem, he shouts, “Go pod racer!” In the village of Poulinec, we stop at a fish market to show Alex enormous silver anchois (anchovies) and live boulot (sea snails) twitching in a cardboard box. At the town’s patisserie, we run into one of the families from New York. I’ve already begun to notice that the New York families seem to arrive at every village ahead of the rest of us. “You have to try these pains au chocolat,” insists the New York mom. She has small bits of flaky crust stuck to her lipstick. We sit on the stone steps in front of the patisserie eating pain au chocolat, until the B&R van pulls up to collect Alex. “Where’s he going?” we ask, as Chat detaches Alex’s bike and tosses it into the van. “On a pêche à pied,” he tells us. Which turns out to be a beachcombing expedition led by a French marine biologist. My husband and I wave goodbye to Alex, wipe the chocolate off our faces, and hop back onto our bikes. About half a mile down the road, we experience something we haven’t had on a bicycle in a long time – quiet. Nobody is making anybody discuss who would win a fight between a Stegosaurus and a T-Rex. Nobody is whistling the theme music from “Star Wars.” Nobody is making fun of the way anybody’s butt looks in bicycle shorts. All the way to the coastal village of Gavres, the only sound we hear is the sea and an occasional French cow. We ride all afternoon, just the two of us, stopping in cafés for cidre (the slightly fizzy, mildly alcoholic cider Brittany is known for), lingering for as long as we like near tidal flats where French families in rubber boots collect clams in plastic buckets. When we arrive back at the Chateau de Locguénolé, Alex comes clacking across the courtyard to meet us, his pockets stuffed with shells and the discarded bodies of tiny green crabs. “Did you have a good time?” we ask. “We saw starfish and hermit crabs and shrimp, and my shoes are soaked. Can I go back now?” An hour later, Alex is eating pizza with the other kids, and my husband and I are sipping ice cold Muscadet at a seaside restaurant called La Dégustation de Saint Guillaume. Outside the window, a man with a long hook like Little Bo Peep’s staff is lifting boxes of fresh oysters out of the water for our dinner. We’ve ordered the super plateau de fruits de mer, which turns out to be an embarrassingly large pile of oysters, mussels, clams, crawfish, and lobster, as well as bigorneaux – tiny snail-like creatures that are eaten with a tool that resembles a hat pin. “Bon appétit!,” says a French lady at the next table. Then she takes a picture of us with the super plateau. We eat all of it, and it’s salty and briny and tastes of the sea. When we return to the hotel, Alex is sound asleep in our room, watched over by Jacquie, another of the B&R guides. “I’m doing your laundry,” she whispers, “because the hotel couldn’t get to it. It’ll be ready in the morning.” On the third day, we ride to the town of Carnac on quiet lanes, through forests of fern and pine, and out along windswept dunes bright with white coastside light. From time to time, we pass the other families on our trip: the mom from Colorado with the punk haircut, the grandmother in the “Boonetown Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society” t-shirt. We never pass the New Yorkers. Shortly before noon, the B&R van sweeps by to pick up Alex. “Where’s he going today?” I ask. “Surfing lessons,” Chat says. Once Alex is off to “hang dix,” my husband and I continue into Carnac, where we have lunch at a little creperie just off the village’s cobblestone square. We have ham and gruyère, followed by a chocolate galette (a crepe made with a slightly thicker batter). We eat the entire meal without having to ask the waitress for crayons. After lunch, we bike back up the road to join our group for a tour of Carnac’s famous menhirs. Menhirs are standing stones, and Carnac’s are believed to date from the late Neolithic age (2,800-2,300 B.C.). At least that’s what Peter, our spiky-haired Dutch tour guide tells us. Peter compares the menhirs at Carnac to the huge stones of Stonehenge. However, these menhirs are all about knee-high. They remind me of the scene in the film This is Spinal Tap in which the band has to perform with a miniature stone monument. On day four, we take a private boat through the Golfe du Morbihan, passing tiny islands covered with cypress trees, and oyster beds that look like giant moss-covered silicon chips. We dock in Port Navalo, where our bikes are waiting, and begin cycling along the Route de L’Huitre (Route of the Oyster), riding close to the sea, where the air tastes iodiney. Near the village of Brilliac, we turn into the oyster farm of Philippe Malbrunot. Philippe has rubber overalls and a chapped red face. He looks like an illustration of a French fisherman from one of Alex’s books. Philippe gives the kids a tour of the farm, showing them the mesh cages where he grows flat-shelled belon oysters. He lets them pass around an enormous oyster shell the size of a horse’s hoof. Alex almost doesn’t give it back. Inside a large tin shed next to the oyster beds, Philippe has set up a long seaweed-covered table and piled it high with oysters and clams, two kinds of crab and langoustines (miniature lobsters). Seeing it, my husband moans a little. We spend the next two hours sucking seafood out of shells. At some point during this feast, Jacquie comes to collect Alex and the rest of the kids, who have been eating peanut butter and jelly and watching us slurp oysters with little expressions of disgust. “Where’s he going today?” asks my husband, oyster brine dripping down his chin. “A cooking lesson at a two star French restaurant.” When there’s nothing left on the seaweed-covered table except seaweed, my husband and I bike the 50 or so kilometres to the town of Billiers and the Domaine de Rochevilaine, a hotel and spa that sits on a rocky promontory in the Atlantic. Our room is in the old part of the hotel, a collection of stone buildings with small niches that hold painted Madonnas and primitive fat-bodied Jesuses. That evening, the grownups eat dinner at the Auberge Bretonne in La Roche Bernard, the two-star restaurant where the kids had their cooking lesson. We have lobster salad with peaches and foie gras, pigeon and roasted lobster. Afterward, we’re presented with six desserts – sorbets and custards in tall glasses, as well as little white crock pots filled with chocolate mousse made by our children that afternoon. “Now this beats all those macaroni shell picture frames she usually makes me,” says the dad from San Jose, scraping his little crock pot so hard it squeaks. On day five, instead of biking, I lay naked on a heated bed of rock while a Frenchwoman slathers me with half a bottle of scented oil. The rock, which looks a bit like Cleopatra’s barge, is called a hammam, and is supposed to rid the body of impurities. There’s a little pillow filled with scented herbs beneath my head, a hot towel on my feet, and I’m being gently massaged with oil that smells of mimosa to match my astrological sign. The Frenchwoman has to practically push me off the hammam to make me leave. The morning of day six, the three of us ride to the town of Muzillac. On the way, my husband explains to Alex about the Celts who came to Brittany in the 5th and 6th centuries. Alex explains how to make chocolate mousse. It’s Friday, market day in Muzillac. The cobbled streets of the village are filled with stands selling torteaux (large brown crabs) and underpants, white nectarines and beach towels printed with pictures of Ricky Martin. We buy reblechon and Roquefort at the cheese vendor’s, oysters from the fishmonger, a bag of mirabelles that look like tiny yellow plums from the fruit stand, and a chilled bottle of Muscadet. We have to drag Alex away from a honey stand where hundreds of bees crawl over each other between two panes of glass. Our next stop is the Moulin de Pen-Mur, a mill that turns natural fibre cloth into paper using the enormous wooden hammers of an 18th century machine. Inside the mill, we walk through rooms filled with sheets of thick wet paper hangs drying from clotheslines. It smells a little like the mummy room of the British museum. When we come outside, Chat is waiting for Alex. “Where to today?” “Horseback riding.” Alex heads off to ride a French horse, and my husband and I picnic on our reblechon and oysters overlooking a little lake outside the papermill. We drink all of the Muscadet. On the ride back to the hotel, we stop at a field of zucchini the size of small blimps. The farmer, a large man with a high-pitched voice that makes him sound disturbingly like Julia Child, shows us zucchini blossoms as big as his hand. In bad French, I tell him that at the farmers’ market in San Francisco, we’ve paid as much as 10 francs ($1.50) for three zucchini blossoms half that size. Without another word, the farmer turns away and hurries off to his stone farmhouse. “Do you think I accidentally insulted him?” I ask my husband. “I think he’s going to tell his wife that they’re moving to San Francisco.” That night, at our farewell dinner, Chat brings us the developed photographs from Alex’s disposable camera. There are pictures of the kids splashing in the sea, sailing on an old wooden fishing boat, wearing little paper chef’s toques. Looking through the photographs, I decide that Alex will probably miss being on this trip more than I will. Then he dumps a whole bowl of vanilla glacé on the parquet floor, and somebody else cleans it up. If You Go Justifying the expense: To recreate this trip on your own, you’d first have to convince several other families to join you, and then make sure everyone brought along a nanny. Additionally, you’d have to rent a van that could hold all the kids, and their bikes. You’d also need to do some research to put together your biking route for each day, and you’d either have to arrange to bring your own bikes, or find a place in Brittany that rented them. To really recreate the experience, you’d also have to find a French marine biologist, a surfing instructor, a horse stable, and convince the chef of a two-star Michelin restaurant to let a group of kids into his kitchen. Going on Your Own Domaine de Rochevilaine, 011-33-2-97-41-61-61, fax 011-33-2-97-41-44-85, Pointe de Pen Lan, Billiers. Do not miss having a massage on heated rock at the hotel’s spa. There’s also an indoor and an outdoor pool, a sauna, and bike rental. Ask for a room in the old section, they have more charm and ocean views. Double rooms run $130-$220. Getting there: For more information:
Janis Cooke Newman lives with her husband and son in Northern California. She may be contacted at: E-mail j-newman@pacbell.net. |
