Sometimes in life you just don’t know when to call a time-out do ya? After that project finishes… oh no wait, after I get back from that audition or… and sometimes, we just get sick of saying “or”.
It’s hard to call it when your work is often play and your play is sometimes work (i.e. you don’t really know one from the other). In these cases, bite the bullet, take the bull by the horns and live on the wild side! And maybes take your own advice here too, Jensen.
I said goodbye to my teens in April and with that farewell I also said adios to England for a few days, which is a bit silly because I was going to France. Har-har.
We booked our extortionate flights to Nice (£60 return, ridiculous I know), stomped our feet, dragged our heels and almost point blank refused to get on the plain come reckoning day.
Welcome to Hell.
Our friends Sammy& Jonny first invited us over to the villa they look after last year when I went to the Monaco Grand Prix for the first time ever (you can read all about that cheeky little post here) and so we felt obliged to go keep them company when they told us the villa was free for a couple of weeks just after my birthday.
Seriously, you don’t wanna go there.
It’s just so unwelcoming, I mean it even has bars on the windows…
Then they had the audacity to put me in the ‘Moroccan’ room. Ugh.
I mean who wants their own private drench shower, decorated in a traditional Moroccan style anyway?
Not me that’s for sure.
What makes it worse, is that we had to share a 6 bedroom villa with two other people, I mean talk about a tight squeeze! It’s a good job S&J have their own cottage and didn’t have to squeeze in as well otherwise I think Shasta&Mike might’ve had to move into the gym!
To add insult to injury we were all then forced to eat a three course meal and I was thrown outside for bad behavior.
They all might look extremely happy and humbled to be with such ‘good’ company in a ‘gorgeous’ villa but its all just a set up and they’re really good actors.
Things took a turn for the worst when Jonny opened up the pool at 3am and pushed me&Sammy off the diving board and wouldn’t let us go to bed until we had perfected our dives and attempted a backflip at least once
you can see the reluctance.
To try and make up for the terrible, uneventful first night S&J took us on a day trip to St. Tropez, which was soooo disappointing. The streets were so devoid of color and life
and they were only made worse by us vagabonds traipsing our aching, back flipped limbs along the cobbles.
Since we’d been starved the night before Shasta&I were going crazy with hunger and everyone was scared that we would do something drastic so the boys dragged us into the first restaurant they could find, sat us down and told us to behave
whilst we struggled to contain ourselves, Sammy&Jonny played it cool (they must’ve sneaked more pancakes than us for breakfast)
and my Ma&Pa tried to distract us by asking me to take a photo of them but Shasta was getting pretty crazy with hunger so wouldn’t stop photo-bombing! Sorry guys…
I don’t think the waiter liked me very much either because before I could even place my order he brought me out a bowl of sea urchins, the French call them ‘moules’, which were smothered in something called ‘beurre et persil’ (I think this translates as ‘bugs and poison’).
They were so bad that I made everyone try one, so that they could feel my pain and make sure that the bowl was empty so the waiter wouldn’t be mad at me. Mind, Ma&Shasta had it bad too. Look at the creepy little blighters they had to fight off in their paella!
Seeing as we’d had to deal with so much trauma for our mains we decided to go to a local patisserie for dessert, on the recommendations of Pa&Jonny from their last jaunt in St. Tropez. Finally, I was in paradise.
Until I found out they didn’t do proper French macaroons. What’s a girl to do! My Pa didn’t seem to be enjoying his vanilla slice all that much either, so I steered clear – too much icing sugar, far too much cream and don’t even get me started on the pastry, he said!
Somehow I get the feeling I was being conned… Before I could figure that out though I had discovered my perfect little French macaroon shop just down the street, with it’s cute little window dressings, sparkling gold sign and… Pa&Jonny guarding the door, barring my way?
“€20 for 6 macaroons” said Pa.
“Blinkin’ heck” said I.
*Cue quick escape route to the car away from this expensive madness!
After this long, hard day of poisoned moules and a distinct lack of macaroons we all retired home *cough* I mean dungeon we had to call home and Jonny built us a fire and let us relax for the first time since we had arrived.
We thought we were finally going to be living the good life until we were served up left overs and these weird things called handmade burgers? Plus there was quinoa and homemade humous, I mean whats all that about eh?! No one could even decide how to pronounce the last two and that just goes down as not edible in my books.
Looks better than it tasted, trust me.
Yeah the cheese too, honestly, you would not have wanted to have been in my shoes I can tell ya that for nowt.
Stuffed full of badness, we whiled away our last hours with more cheese (it may have only had one mention so far, but there was a lot of cheese during this mini-break, more than I’d like to admit to), terrible chatter and Jonny made us all go in the pool again at 3am, or was it 4? I was having such an awful time I don’t think I looked at my watch once.
All joking aside, I had 3 sublime days. So sublime in fact, that I could barely bring myself to speak! Those who know me will understand how seriously weird that is, seeming as I’m usually never lost for words.
It must just take a view like this
and flowers like this
to chill me out good and proper.
Tagged: cheese, chill, family, food, friends, Grasse, holiday, lifestyle, mini break, Nice, relax, st tropez, sun, Travel, Villa, wine