How Not To Be Disappointed

This week our guests are a delightful couple who wound up with us after finding themselves highly disappointed with a rural gite they had rented. "The pictures of the other place looked so nice," they commented. Well, of course! Everyone tries to put on their best face. So how do you avoid what the French call les lezards (literally, "the lizards"), those unpleasant little surprises you find at what looked like such a perfect place in the advertisement?

This is no idle question. Disappointed expectations can cast a pall over a long-planned vacation and gite owners may not be willing to refund payments for a gite they consider perfectly acceptable by their own (or even local) standards. Our guests were fortunate, both that they were able to unwind the deal they had made and that they were able to find suitable alternate accommodations. It helped, of course, that they were travelling well off-season; in July or August they would have had to "grin and bear it."

There are more than 10,000 gites in France, so with an Internet connection, a little patience, and some skill reading between the lines you should be able to find a place just right for you in the area you want to visit. The basics -- number of bedrooms, smoking/non-smoking, whether pets are allowed, kitchen appliances -- are all well covered in any rental listing. Here are some less obvious considerations.

First and foremost, how much are you willing to spend? You can have it all, but usually at a price. Within your price range, what do you truly require, what do you really want, and what would just be nice to have? It's your holiday, so prioritize your wish list. The less you pay, though, the more flexible you need to be about everything else.

Among the things that may require flexibility (literally and figuratively): WCs, shower (or bath) facilities, small or low-ceilinged bedrooms, low doorways, "white glove" cleanliness, and groundskeeping. Many gites are portions of very old buildings that have been inhabited far longer than they have had indoor plumbing and when plumbing was added it was retrofitted as simply as possible. Other gites were built out at minimum cost in old barns or outbuildings. Sometimes, a bit of funk is part of the charm, but that may not be the kind of charm you are looking for.

Photographs can be a good guide if you consider both what is and what is not shown. If some aspect of the gite is not shown, perhaps there is a reason. The vantage point from which a photo is taken can be revealing -- for example, is a picture of the front of the gite taken from across a road that passes just in front of the entry (or bedroom window), or does it show a commercial building next door? Pictures of the kitchen can be particularly instructive, as the type and quality of the kitchen fittings are likely to be representative of the accommodations in the gite as a whole. No picture of the kitchen at all? A gite is self-catering, so unless you are planning to eat out every single meal you might want to inquire. There is nothing to be lost by asking the owner for more details, including perhaps another picture or two.

Which is more important to you, peace and quiet or a boulangerie and the village bar just down the street (and not necessarily in that order)? Sometimes you can have both, but even a "sleepy village" can be be amazingly noisy during the annual village fete or if it is too close to a railway or busy road or highway. On the other hand, a gite deep in the countryside may be unacceptably far from basic ameneties. A sixty minute roundtrip drive to the supermarket may mean you will be going shopping once and only once, or spending far too much of your holiday time on errands.

Is there more than one gite on the property? If you are traveling with others, or if chance meetings with other travelers by the pool or in the garden are part of what you enjoy about holidays, then a multiple gite property may be your cup of tea. If privacy is a priority, you probably want a single-gite property. Very few gites provide a pool for the exclusive use of guests; if you want that degree of privacy look for a villa or village house with a pool.

Are you tolerant of extreme temperatures? Many parts of France can be quite hot in the summer (and quite cold in the winter). Recently constructed villas are likely to be air-conditioned (and centrally heated), but many rural gites in renovated old stone buildings still rely on the traditional combination of shade trees, shutters and the thermal mass of thick stone walls (assisted perhaps by electric fans) to keep inside quarters cool by day. Likewise, being intended principally for summer lets, many vacation rentals are not heated and even central heating is turned off as early as possible in the spring and not restarted until as late in the fall as tolerable. At higher elevations this can mean cold nights, even in summer. If you must have a heated pool, make sure to ask. Due to the expense involved, many (if not most) pools are heated only by the sun. In high season that is more than adequate but mid-season water temperatures may be invigorating, depending upon the weather.

If you are traveling with children, are the gite owners welcoming to, and the gite grounds suitable for, your children? We stayed once at an upscale inn where we felt out of place because our young children, while not overtly unwelcome, were at best a curiosity among an otherwise exclusively adult clientele. The following week, by contrast, we stayed in a very simple gite whose owners love kids, whose own kids had a great time playing with ours, and with whom we became good friends. A place where your children can play without disturbing others or risking serious bodily harm from natural or man-made features can make the difference between a thoroughly enjoyable holiday and a one or two week-long endurance contest.

Finally, there is no controlling the weather. Sometimes it is gloomy or rainy, even in high season. If you enjoy curling up with a good book and passing a quiet day relaxing indoors, make sure to choose a gite that looks comfortable for that. In all events (as some very expert travelers who stayed with us last summer clearly did), have a "rainy day" list of things to do -- museums, wineries, caves, bookshops, or other indoor attractions.

The more adaptable you are to new and different situations, the less concern required. However, to the extent you have specific preferences that you need to satisfy for an enjoyable holiday, the more care you need to take in identifying those preferences and evaluating whether a gite meets your criteria. It goes without saying that the earlier you book the more choice you will have.

Do you have any suggestions to include here? Please let us know. ... read more ...

Brocante Season

Today we went to our first brocante of the season. We finally hit on the perfect strategy for flea-marketing with kids: leave the teenager at home to get her homework done, and tell the 8 year-old to bring his spending money. When the first table we passed had a display of PlayStation2 games, we knew there would be no complaining.

In this part of France, at least, brocantes tend to be village-wide affairs, with display tables lined end to end not just in the town square, but down entire streets that have been closed to traffic for the day. Most of the stuff, as usual, is utter junk, unless of course you are looking for used children's clothing, obsolete electronic equipment or VHS tapes. Used glassware, tableware, dolls, toys and games of every description, mounted wild boar heads, skis, auto parts, rotary telephones, plumbing odds and ends, it's no wonder these events are also known as vide greniers, or attic clearing -- in other words, a giant yard or garage sale. It's not hard to extrapolate from a vide grenier to conclude that there is an awful lot of junk in the world. Yet, in a way the selection is fascinating, both in its sameness and its incredible curious variety. It seems there is nothing you can't find at a village brocante.

What distinguishes these brocantes from flea markets is that for the most part the sellers are not professional vendors, but simply townsfolk taking advantage of a once or twice yearly opportunity to get rid of some of their stuff and make a few euros in the bargain. They do bargain, too, and a polite approach, even with a foreign accent, usually results in a deal satisfactory to all.

These are not merely commercial events, they are recreational and social events as well. As you stroll slowly down the middle of a street in a village you may be visiting for the first time, it occurs to you that a lot of the people there seem to know each other. It's not just the vendors and other locals either, because you recognize some of your fellow bargain hunters from the football league or from a shop in another town, and then a friend is shaking your hand or kissing you on both cheeks and there you are having a soft drink or beer together under the leafy shade trees in the village park.

We moved on past cartons of paperback bodice rippers in the language of love, vinyl 33s and 45s by musicians we had and had not heard of, turntables that would play them, tube radios, coin collections, odd tools, old linens and the occasional interesting antique. Among the antiques were beautiful hammered copper pots of all shapes and sizes, a remarkably intricate bed head- and footboard, old hand tools, and lo and behold a beautiful example of a hand-made traditional wooden farm implement. This fool and his money were quickly parted, and his wife and child knew there would be no disapproval voiced when time came to select a PlayStation game.

One of the benefits of having an eight year-old with a PlayStation2 in the era of the PlayStation3 is that there seem to be a lot of teenage kids who have either moved up to the PS3 and its more sophisticated games, or grown out of game consoles altogether. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of used PS2 games for sale at brocantes these days. Yet, here was one place where bargaining wasn't going to work. Having scouted out the entire selection of games available at every table throughout the entire brocante, and having kept and sorted a running mental tally of his favorite choices, our son returned to the very first table he'd visited. The teenaged owner of the chosen game seem willing to give a break to a young kid who was coming up a couple euros short, but his mother was shrewder than that. As long as the eager eight year-old's parents were standing right behind him, she knew full well that the last two euros were on the table. She was right. It was still 70% off retail.

Strolling back down the street, across the bridge, and up the grassy path to the car, our son clutched his game to his chest and mentally calculated driving time back to the house and the PlayStation. Dad lugged his handmade wooden farm implement and reflected with satisfaction that his purchase plus the PS2 game cost less than the PS2 game new. He entertained only fleeting guilt that mom (who had looked with some interest at the intricate wooden bed pieces) had bought nothing. The fleeting guilt disappeared when she pulled out the flyer stuck under the windshield wiper and announced happily: next brocante at a village near us, May 11. Mother's Day.

We'll have a stroll in a different village, perhaps see some friends and have a beer in the shade. And even if there is another PlayStation game involved, it seems likely that the price of the game plus whatever mom buys will be less than the price of the PS2 game new. ... read more ...