A couple days ago I spent some time in the woods with my camera doing light painting experiments. WIth the wonderful weather we’ve been having, it’s dark in the woods, even in bright sunshine.

Hard to explain. But sometimes nice to look at.

I took advantage of today’s fantastic weather to shoot some new photos of the cottage. Virginie has been updating the decoration (again).

This week has been a festival of public utilities. On Friday the city announced that would be turning off the water supply all day on Monday, starting at 7.30 AM. Lucky for us we had some very understanding guests who had to get up early anyway to catch a flight.

During the work on the water line in our village they severed the phone/internet connection to the house with a backhoe. The crew told me I was lucky since they barely missed slashing through the electric cable as well.

To France Telecom’s, credit they got a team out here and had it patched by late afternoon. They came back the next day to finalize the repair by pulling some new cable and installing a new inspection manhole in the village (in case this were to ever happen again). Works like a charm.

And at lunchtime today (that’s right lunch time, in France) an electric company technician showed up to change the main breaker in the cottage and give us some more juice. For all you electricians out there, it turns out were running at 6 KVA instead of the standard 9 KVA, which probably explains why we would have the odd power outage when all the water heaters were running. Took him 15 minutes.

Since the 1st of May is one of France’s national holidays that everyone takes very seriously, there was no point trying to run around doing errands. Everything was closed. So Victor and I went for walk in the woods. I wanted to work on my photography and he wanted to collect slugs. It worked out well for both of us. I focused on flowers, he hunted gastropods. And yes, he did wash his hands afterwards.

On Sunday, we played host to a group of apprentice falconers. The best friend of our eldest son is one of them. We lent them the use of the woods to train three of their birds. In return I got to get up close with my camera.

Yesterday I took my parents to visit the gardens at the Chateau de Courances. It’s a little over an hour away, on the way to Fontainbleau.

It was recommended to us by a Belgian couple that stayed with us a couple weeks ago. They spoke highly of the grounds and chateau. As it turns out, it’s a nice destination for a day trip or as part of an excursion to the chateau in Fontainbleau. It is open in the afternoon on weekends and public holidays from the start of April through the first weekend in November.

The chateau has a fascinating history. Sadly we got there too late to visit inside, but the grounds are wonderful. The combination of English-stye disorder with the French-style symmetry gives it a relaxed feel. The Japanese garden in front of the tea room was especially colorful, despite being so early in the season.

The chateau is still family-owned and it shows. The staff is courteous and helpful. And it looks like they are putting the finished touches on a new walking path through the woods that surround the gardens.

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Last Saturday I took my folks and the boys to see the American Cemetery and Memorial at Omaha Beach, near Colleville-sur-Mer. I wanted to go for a number of reasons. Dad was real interested in seeing it again. So was I. Some guests who stayed with us last year had attended the inauguration of the new Visitor Center and had told us that it was really worth seeing. I also wanted to see what the fastest route out to Normandy was.

In the morning we headed out, down the A11 motorway to Le Mans, then up the A28, getting off just after Alencon. We took the N158 up through Argentan, Falaise, past Caen and on to Colleville. Google said it would take 3h20, but it ended up being closer to four hours. We had lunch in Port en Bessin.

I’ve always found taking kids to memorials kind of tricky. Places like the American Cemetery call a certain amount of solemnity, but kids (happily) don’t always feel the weight on the location and the event on their shoulders like adults do. So I just tried to explain why the Cemetery was there, what D-Day was and how it touches their lives today. For example, our three neighboring towns and Chartres, all appear on the map of the air campaign on the left-hand wall of the Memorial (photo above). This is something they can relate to. I also told them about what happened at Jonvilliers during the war.

The new Visitor Center is very well done. Simple and poignant. The Cemetery is beautiful and immaculate. The American Battle Monuments Commission has done a wonderful job. I was surprised and pleased (is that the right word) to see so many French visitors, including children, among the groups of Americans and British.

We then headed west to the Pointe du Hoc. The boys needed to blow of some steam before the journey home, and it turns out that you can walk all over he Pointe du Hoc site, even exploring in the bomb craters and concrete pillboxes. This surprised me, especially coming from the manicured calm of the Cemetery. Here parents with strollers and kids were casually walking all over what was once the site of a gruesome battle that cost hundreds of lives. Not quite desecration, but a little too close for my tastes. Unfortunately you can no longer access the Ranger monument at the tip of the Pointe; erosion has made the path too dangerous.

We drove back via the route that I usually recommend to guests, down the N13 to the A13 and then down the N154 to Evreux, Dreux and home. Turns out that it’s still the best route. Much faster. A little under 3 hours and I wasn’t driving fast.

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A couple visiting this weekend were led astray by the Google Maps that we provide on our Maps & Directions page. Turns out that I had included a bum link and that Google had renamed the departure points. I updated all the maps this morning.

After much wrangling with the bank, we’re now able to accept American Express cards in addition to Visa and MasterCard. The new payment terminal arrived the other day. It’s something that we’ve been wanting to do for years. I regularly am asked if we accept it, and now I can say “yes”. In fact, I “swiped” my first card yesterday. And it worked!

France is in the grips of the Ingrid Betancourt saga. If you haven’t heard of her, she is being held hostage by the Marxist FARC guerillas in Colombia. Betancourt was campaigned for the country’s presidency when she was kidnapped in 2002.

Why is France so interested in her story? At first glance it shouldn’t be. She’s the daughter of a Colombian ambassador to France. She was married to a French diplomat, who she met when they were both students at the prestigious Science Po university. She moved back to Colombia in the early 90s to start a political career and got divorced in the process. She was kidnapped a couple years later.

Her plight jumped to the country’s attention when France conducted a secret rescue mission in 2003. They sent a plane to an airfield on the Colombian-Brazian border to fetch Betancourt after negotiating directly with the rebels. The mission failed and upset the Colombian government, who weren’t in the loop. Ever since then, Betancourt regularly makes the headlines.

Things have accelerated recently with the release of a handful of hostages negotiated by Hugo Chavez and film footage showing Betancourt to be seriously ill. Sarkozy has even recorded video messages in which he pleads with FARC leaders to release her. As I write this, a French military plane is sitting on the tarmac in Bogata. It carried a small team of French diplomats and medical staff who are trying to secure her release.

The French press and politicians have made her a cause célèbre. But why? At first glance, she’s too right-wing and bourgeois to interest journalists. There are other French citizens being held in prison or as hostages in other parts of the world. So why her? Well she’s no ordinary French citizen. She is very well connected. One of her university professors was Dominque de Villepin, who would later become France’s foreign minister and prime minister.

If you talk to ordinary French people, they’ll tell you that they don’t understand why the government is going to such lengths and expenses for her. When you listen to talk-radio and someone calls in to talk about her, the host gracefully cuts the person short and changes the subject. I have yet to see a news report examining her connections and the lobbying that has been going on for all these years.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s been an ordeal for her and her family and I hope they let her go before her health fails. I just find this saga to be a telling example of the reality gap between French politicians and the man on the street – not to mention the all too cozy relationship between the press and the government.