Road tripping through France

A quick note from vacation

Bon jour mes amis!

A week ago today we left a cool and windy Ireland and headed east. Crossing two seas, with our dogs and one 13 year old boy in tow, we have now travelled over a thousand kilometres and we find ourselves among the sun-drenched vineyards of Bordeaux.

I have an almost permanent case of wanderlust. I have a gypsy soul. My mother tells me my first word was “go!”. Trains, planes, automobiles, boats and even by foot. I don’t mind the mode of travel, as long as I can go.

As I travel, I find my brain switches off and I can just be. It’s like the outside movement allows my inner self to be still. I am always surprised when a person tells me they don’t like to travel — what do you do with your spare time and your hard-earned money if you just stay in one place?

I will be using this time — a whole month! — to fill up again: to read non-political books and look out the window as my husband drives, paying only scant attention to world events as the world becomes ever-crazier. I just finished reading Patti Smith’s book about her long relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. It’s a moving and incredibly insightful work about the many forms love can take. (As an aside, I’m also reading Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s memoir of her time in the White House — which I think pretty much sums up my eclectic, even promiscuous, interests. Patti Smith’s book is way better, in case you were wondering.)

A few days ago we were in Le Mans, a city known mostly for its 24 hour motor race circuit. But it also has a stunning Medieval town centre and a cathedral in which King Henry II was baptised. It’s been a while since I stepped into such a space — sacred and ancient. I was very moved by the experience. It made me want to become a Catholic. Not so much out of a sense of devotion to God but rather devotion to our ancestors whose lives were as real and as vivid as ours are today, and whose toil and sacrifice we never even think about, much less acknowledge. We should do more — I should do more — to honour them.

The Cathedral of Saint Julien, Le Mans, France.

Speaking of ancestors, our first stop in France was the fields of Picardie, where we visited the Somme. My great-grandfather, a horse-carriage driver from Portadown, County Armagh, was in the battle, carrying armaments back and forth from the front in a horse-driven cart. He was injured by a shell that landed on his horse, throwing him out of the driver’s seat. I often think that that shell, landing as it did to injure him and thus take him out of action for the rest of that massacre, is the reason I exist today. I thought of him, William Holland, as I watched my son play with the dogs among the headstones of the war dead, and gave him a silent word of thanks.

One of the many graveyards in Picardie of Commonwealth soldiers killed in WW1