Woke up this morning still had a migraine and still had Kaitlyn sleeping in our bed. After breakfast, I thought I could handle one last tourist attraction before hitting the road. Besides, I knew that the only thing waiting for me at home was cold.
Across the rivers from Avignon there’s a small town with a Carthusean monastery They’re the monks who make that horrible green liquor Chartreuse. I was so fascinated by my visit to the monastery here last fall with Bill’s sister that I really wanted to see this one.
I guess all the liquor money goes to the one here. Because the one there is pretty much just a shell of a series of buildings. The pope who started the order is interred there and he should be annoyed at the state of his surroundings… although they are slightly better than the state of the pope’s abandoned palace. The woman who sold me our tickets said there would be explanations of everything inside in English. What she meant was there are explanations of most of the stuff in English, but not everything. And some of it I wouldn’t have had any clue about at all if I hadn’t visited the monetary here complete with audio guide and, well, explanations. The one thing they had that I didn’t remember seeing before was the prison… where the bad monks were kept in solitary confinement. Which didn’t seem like much of a punishment because they pretty much spent all their time in a solitary cell anyway. I’ll have to take Bill to the one here. The restaurant at the monastery is only open in the summer and it looked like the only real interesting part of the whole place (we peeked in the door, it was open for the wine delivery man).
Outside, Bill looked at me and announced that I looked not very well (duh) and suggested we just get in the car and head toward home and just look for food along the way. I don’t know how far we’d driven when Bill pulled off at a big rest stop. Kaitlyn and I were both asleep. She’d gotten mad at me because I couldn’t help cut out princess outfits so she gave in to the urge to nap. I had closed my eyes to try to feel better. He went inside and came out with a couple of sandwiches, a package of ham for Kaitlyn, some fruit and some bags of chip sort of things.
At some point after eating her ham, Kaitlyn got bored with her new coloring book (yes, she convinced Bill to buy her something again today) and drew the face of an alien on her shirt. Now there is a big purple face on her new cream colored shirt. I was not happy. Bill thinks I over-reacted. Bill does not do the laundry.
About an hour from home we drove into a snowstorm. It was too warm for it to hit the ground as flakes, but it was definitely falling as big white clumps. The closer we got to home, the colder it got. The snow stopped falling but was coating the ground. Bill commented driving up our mountain that there didn’t seem to be as much snow as he expected. We have a little more than a half a foot of snow covering our yard. So you can imagine how cold it is inside the house… that hasn’t had heat since some time on Thursday. It’s too cold for the stove to work. The water is still cold, so the pile of dirty dishes is just growing bigger and bigger. Bill put the space heater in our room and tonight Kaitlyn was actually told she couldn’t sleep in her own room because it’s too cold in there. He’s been working to keep a fire going but now that he’s gone to bed, it’s about out and I may go poke a stick at it (literally, we don’t have fireplace tools so we’re using an old ski pole to poke at the wood) but I’m sure all I’ll do is extinguish it the rest of the way.
I’ve been sitting under blankets, wearing two pairs of socks, long underwear under my pants, a turtle neck and a fleece pullover. Kaitlyn put on a spring skirt and a t-shirt. The heating oil is supposed to be delivered tomorrow morning. A friend offered to pick Kaitlyn up and take her to school. She is supposed to go to someone else’s house for lunch… so I can hunker down and wait for warmth to get here.
Wonder what a monk has to do to be considered bad? Several more contemporary acts come to mind, pulled right from the headlines, but somehow monks back then…..hmmm……speaking out of turn??…..just plain speaking……