Champagne, a backyard camp-out get-away

"Paris would be great if it weren't for the Parisians." It's a phrase regularly tossed around among tourists and expat circles. So you'd think that August would be a dream: the annual exodus of the Parisians, yet this month sadly forces us into a tacit acknowledgement of our need for the grumps who regularly clog the streets and the public transport. The truth is, when the Parisians leave, Paris shuts down.

Fermé: closed. A storefront sign Parisians stuck in town in August know all too well.

Parisians take shockingly long summer holidays, time one can only imagine they use to exercise once a year all the atrophying muscles required for smiling or any other expression of joy. Signs on storefronts very matter-of-factly announce three-, four-, and even five-week closures. At a certain point, if you live in Paris and don't take a summer vaccation, you start to feel you're doing something wrong. Or if you've fallen deeper into the rabbit hole, you feel you aren't exercising your rights. (After all, even my PhD contract ensures me the state-mandated minimum of five weeks annual vacation.)

If there's one day of the year when Paris falls most silent, it's August 15, a holiday mid-summer holidays month, when possibly everything comes to a halt. And falling on a Thursday as it did this year, it became an automatic four-day weekend. It is standard practice in France to turn any Tuesday or Thursday holiday into a four-day weekend, a ritual act called faire le pont, "to make the bridge."

Even my mice in lab were feeling the strain of summer, whether by heat or reduced staffing in the animal house. Their stress levels had skyrocketed, resulting in an equally downward plummet in my rate of data collection. So I took a hint and got to "making my bridge."

My Pasteur lunch gang was planning to spend a few days of the long weekend out by the lakes in Champagne, and at the final headcount, I hopped on board and even dragged Peter out of the office to join us, though he had to catch us on the last train Thursday night after only securing one day off. The rest of the gang all managed to wake up in the morning and make it out to the suburbs on time to hop in to Lucie's family's cars. In the end, Lucie saved the day when we couldn't find any cars nor a campground to reserve at such short notice. It turned out that her family had a couple of cars to spare and her dad has a home by Lac du Der in Champagne which was to be "nothing particularly nice," in Lucie's words. (We actually drove straight past the house and had to put the car in reverse when we spotted the number. Let's say it exceeded expectations.)

Lucie's dad's understated home in Châtillon-sur-Broué, Champagne, near the Lac du Der

It felt like a place of dreams, a world apart. The view out the window was of a sleepy country road rather than a major international metropolis. (No, I'm not complaining about waking up to a view of the Eiffel Tower, but sometimes a change of pace is nice.) The town where we stayed, Châtillon-sur-Broué, was so small that it didn't even have a bakery. I didn't know that could happen in France!

Lucie's dad's country house even had a woodshed and a field with cows out back. Peter and I got a new tent for the occasion and set up camp alongside Katha and Felix in the backyard.

Together we cooked, drank, swam, read, and sunbathed on the beach. We kayaked, stargazed, and stayed up late just for fun.

Cliché as it may be, in that house surrounded by some of my favorite people from my life in Paris, I just wanted to freeze the moment, to bottle it so that I could taste it again on days when things are particularly dark and cold and stressful back in Paris. Out there, I didn't have a PhD with rapidly approaching deadlines and experiments that just won't work. We'd left our research in our labs, and everything was so peaceful.

Some of the gang, very far from our respective labs.

Please don't take me back home... I felt silly when Peter snapped the picture, so my expression may not properly show how very nice it felt to be on that beach.

For a brief time, we were free.