Travel funnies 2014 – Le Mont-Dore, Massif Central, Auvergne,
France
Torrey Orton
June 13, 2014
The cuckoo and the cow bell called to us…
Travel funnies* – where everything
is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Le Mont-Dore in the Massif
Central of the Auvergne, where rises the Dordogne River in the Puy de Sancy. We
were here for the first time in 1993, so the return is long awaited, though not
consciously so over the intervening years before our deciding this revisit.
The cuckoo and the cowbell called
to us as we were climbing through the forest which clothes the steep slope of
the Capuchin at the end of the funicular ride from Mont-Dore to its foot around
1200 metres up…a slightest semblance of the cuckoo which I thought at first was
my wishing it to be there as it had been 20 years ago when I heard the first
cuckoo in my life in this place. As is often so, I did not then recognise that
what it was, was it: a cuckoo. By the time we had emerged from the forested
rise at the tree line, the cuckoo was undeniably itself, not my aural phantasm.
The cow bell on the other hand was
a decidedly unproven reality and remained agreed so between us until we started
our return an hour later. At which point some 100 metres back down the path, I heard
the plangent ping of the Reine de la Troupeau, at first a solo note and then the
burst of them which means the Reine is moving and munching at the same time.
She can sound like a herd when in high move and munch mode. Apart from the joy
of a tone recovered, there was the reassurance that not all location has been
subsumed by GPS plugins to every being with a bloodstream**.
And the violas and strawberries flowered at us
Being early summer, many of the
trees were still just coming into leaf and the earliest ground flowers were
about in abandon. I had forgotten strawberries, the wild ones which give the
cultivated types we’re accustomed to their deserved repute mostly experienced
in its absence in the Coles or Casino pretenders. Jane pointed them out in the
midst of other small-flowered upland delicates. Way too early for
consumption…and I’m wondering that I forgot them as an opportunity of this
trip, which of course they cannot be because the season is too late or dry or
something.
I noticed today on another hillside
that I have much too good an eye for the small virtues of nature – the obscure
bloom or unexpected one in a certain microclimate – to have never cared for
bucolic poetry or music, though as I thought it I remembered that there’s a particular
poem about the humble bumblebee whose provenance I cannot recall yet it is with
me in some vaguely accessible memory recess…strange ways, the mind. A 19th
century English poet? But then, I didn’t know what poetry was verbal music)
until I read Gerard Manley Hopkins aged around 20 as an undergraduate. No
teacher bothered to mention it. Since when was iambic pentameter music??? Any
more than the number one was a convenient fiction of mathematics?
…filled the plain of the grassed slopes
the cows were yet to munch…striking little natural daffs more delicate than the
garden prepared varieties I’m used to at home, yet still briefly, leading me to
wonder aloud where the peasants went who had set them out so numerously and successfully
as city workers had been doing in soaring numbers in the grounds of Versailles
a week ago…leaving trails of little forcing boxes around the place. Nature
beats a worker most times in the beauty game.
But the hotel room engineering has a weird hanging space…
At last a traditional funny! The
Hotel du Parc in Mont Dore has been recently renovated to good effect, leading
the space to bed ratio and bath room swinging a wet towel ratio to desirable
levels, but as seen elsewhere in French renovations there’s a glitch. There’s a
built-in robe with a foot’s worth of long hanging space – enough for three
shirts, a jacket or so and a couple of trousers.
Now someone created a short-drop hanging space
good for hanging pressed shirts and similar, but not trousers or long skirts;
neck to belly hanging space. However, whoever did the measures on this had
early adolescent sizing in mind, if anything, and so a serious shortage of
adult hanging space. I suspect it wasn’t even measured other than to divide the
space equally into four levels for some reason of construction simplicity
rather than customer need fulfilment. Well, it obviously met the needs of the
hotel chain purchasing division’s need for the renovation at best price or
whatever, but the end-user?
And the shower starts in reverse…
Discovering new ways to mix cold
and warm water in taps is probably one of the most useless endeavours of the
plumbing engineer fraternity and here we had another variant which stumped us
for 15 minutes. Intuitive it wasn’t. We couldn’t get anything from it for a
while, not merely just cold or hot. Once in hand, it was obvious as the newly
disclosed often is, but also purposeless. What’s the added value, as the
econometricians like to wonder?
As in Paris, Mont-Dore started out
a slight disappointment for me, it never having a hope of measuring up to Alps
or Pyrenees, its top most reach being the mere 1889 metres of the Puy de Sancy.
But as the days have rolled by and we’ve patrolled the region with persistence
the pleasures of very long views over totally green landscapes, rolling up and
down many hundreds of metres never failed the danger of repetition …rather
gained from it as the same sights were viewed from many perspectives and in
many lights, occasionally seasoned by the soft shadows of emerging thunderheads
(which threatened but never performed up to their promise, fortunately.)
And we drank about four different
local wines we’d never heard of (wines of Auvergne, huh?). Between our
traditional port-a-bottle approach to walking lunches for years in Europe and numerous
dinners, we never had a bad one and always had viable ones for about 15 Euro or
less across the selections, backed by true local delicacies in the sausage and
cheese domains supported by bread of reliable consistency.
Not at all funny – amazing! It
wasn’t until my third shower that I realised the slightly soft, ambient
temperature-neutral material under me was also totally slip proof … as good as
slip proof boat shoes of which I have a couple pair. At my age a slip is as
good as a broken something which may take months to recover from. Thanks water
proof room engineers. I may refloor a bathroom for safety’s sake.
*I am realising that the purpose of Funnies is to describe
various arising realities in my life in concrete ways that render them truly
for me and maybe so for others. Enjoy, as our culture challenges us to do.
**It just occurs to me that probably I can be tracked by my
pacemaker if I’m in the right company. I know I can feel its speed up response
to an electromagnetic source too near to its hiding place in my shoulder.
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