June 14, 2012
The tale of the hopeful nudists: Monpazier - Labastide-Murat (Lot)
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NICK AND SARA live at the bottom of a very steep, long hill. On a road which deteriorates the lower it gets. We know that now, because we rode down it, enticed by an advertisement at the junction with the main road. Had we known what we had in store, we might have stuck with the traffic and chanced our luck with what fate brought. We had just mortgaged the first hour of the following morning, the time we felt it would take to get back up it again.
Sara and Nick were sitting on plastic chairs when we arrived, outside the A-shaped building that doubles as bar and restaurant. Sara's parents were relaxing with them in what was evidently a working holiday.
"We bought this as our escape from England," Nick said, lighting yet another cigarette. He has a lean face and long hippie hair and an eagerness to see the brighter side of life. Sara is quieter, with big round eyes that look tired. "I was a web designer but I didn't want to be a 60-year-old in a young man's job."
Sara said she had been an accountant. Maybe doing the books had given her those tired eyes.
"What we really wanted was a naturist campsite. It would be perfect for that. We belonged to a naturist club in England and we had so many friends there and we were going there so often that we moved house to avoid all the driving and the tunnel tolls. We even had 6 000 leaflets printed before we discovered that more people were coming for the golf course than for camping. But I think the future is to run it for naturists."
Their 13-year-old daughter, he said, had seen them as devils incarnate for dragging her to France and putting her in a French school when she didn't speak French. "But she's coming round to the idea now and she's asking for a horse. I can't see how I can say no when there's so much land here." It didn't help that the previous owners had taken the stable and left just the foundations.
First, though, they need the money. And they need to get through their first year. The golf course brings in a few and pays, at the moment, for the fuel for the tractor that maintains it. And music evenings bring in customers. But we are their first paying campers since they opened last September.
Nick's latest idea to bring in funds is to start a glam rock band "with all the fancy outfits and hats and boots. The French won't know what's hit them."
I promised to get in touch again when the trip is over, to see how they're doing.
This morning we set off down the slight hill and rode along the valley before taking the steep rise to Monpazier. Today it is a peaceful village with a perfect square which this morning was occupied by a market.
In the past it was more bloody, for this is a bastide, a grid of mediaeval streets surrounded by walls and an imposing gateway that once took a portcullis. It changed hands repeatedly during the Hundred Years War, each side slaughtering the occupants.It wasn't much of a place to live.
It was tough today. We climbed 1 045 metres in 69 kilometres, all in shin-splint hills that climbed merely to push their way down to where they had started.
"This is like Missouri," Karen gasped. "The hills are shorter but they're more frequent. It sure is priddy, though."
Why was it priddy? Because for hours we were on roads on which two cows would have trouble passing politely. The sun shone through trees and left an endless bar code of shadows and brightness like a carpet at our wheels.
But it was very, very hard.
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