What do you do while you wait?
Why - Go shopping of course!!!
All across Gascony it has rained a sea of yellow. Vast fields of sunflowers surround us where ever we go. I am ever watchful while driving as we will come around a bend to find a stopped car with cameras out to catch the sight of the happy flowers staring back at you. It is easy to understand why there has always been artistic passion for capturing these fields of magnificent yellow beauties on canvas, simply breathtaking.
We are counting the days to Château ownership, 37 days from today. 37 agonizingly slow days! In the mean time we get our work done, or try to, and continue to navigate our way around our new environment and the new options for food shopping. Definitely different than it was in Carcassonne. Markets are smaller with fewer options, which has narrowed the scope of items available to the food impaired. We have turned our foraging to the specialty shops and open air markets. There are specific stores that sell meat, stores that sell seafood, stores that sell vegetables and fruit, stores that sell frozen foods, stores that sell breads, stores that sell desserts, stores that sell that one special item that you may need, that of course means that hours are spent going from shop to shop to shop. It all sounds so lovely and romantic, and perhaps it is the first couple of times, but then it gets to be an all day affair that could be best spent doing other things. Nonetheless bags in hand we make the rounds, humming cute little songs from Beauty and Beast as merrily we roll along.
It may look like a rather fancy church, but it is actually an antique store!
Across the road from the Château is an organic vegetable farmer that grows limited amounts of all kinds of vegetables to sell at outdoor markets. They make an appearance in Solomiac (the next village just down the road from the Château) three days a week in the mornings, and we went a few days ago to meet them. Well apparently the rumor mill has started because when we walked up to them they already knew who we were! The village of Avensac, all 46 of them, is talking and it appears we are the subject, and it turns out we are not the only gays in the village! but that is a story for another time… The best thing about having a vegetable farmer across the street is… Vegetables! We will become their number one customers with weekly if not daily deliveries, and it takes the pressure off of having to grow anything ourselves.
Between work and keeping the larder full there are certainly more hours in the day than we know what to do with. So we go shopping! Antique shopping to be specific. A big Château will need a lot of items to fill it up, and we have to be careful in how much we spend. We are exploring the antique shops of the region and have journeyed up to a couple of hours from home base, slowly mapping our way across the south of France one antique shop at a time. I feel an HGTV moment coming on… here’s a great tip - When we are in an antique shop we photograph items that we might have interest in and then ask for a business card. We photograph the business card so that it follows the items from that particular shop. No more hunting around for cards or trying to remember which shop what was in… we will be back right after the commercial.
At this point we are looking at furnishings and lighting in general. As we have yet to cross the bridge of spending a lot of time in the Château have yet to develop a design direction. We have purchased a few items simply because they were super unusual and really great (like a three foot tall industrial can opener from the turn of the last century - big kitchens need big toys!), or because the price was too good to be true, (a fabulous gas ceiling fixture that I am referring to as Parisien Bordello!) but not very many items… yet!
Below is a selection of pieces we have seen that we love. We are lucky in that we are shopping for BIG items, and big items seem to be less expensive than their smaller counterparts!
As we visit all of these shops we will slowly be able to put together an antique road map. A literal paper, or digital map with all of the Antique stores, Brocantes, and Trocs (all versions of antique dealers) marked as to location and eventually days and hours of operation in preparation for our Antiquing in France events! Days of lounging around the Château, dining on fine food, drinking lovely French wine, exploring French antique stores, and finishing each day with Armagnac made in Gascony… Priceless!