Alençon Rehab and Decompression

Waking up in a room full of empty beds doesn’t feel quite right. I also don’t feel like I was subjected to strange tests in my sleep, so I guess I’m fine with the desolate bedroom. After everyone is up, we return to the festival grounds for breakfast because we were told to do so the night before. Of course once we’re there, they cobble together some sentences and tell us they weren’t expecting us. As I’ve said a over and over again, I don’t know French, so I’m not complaining, but we have our funniest lost in translation moments at this fest. It’s clear that the staff only know so many phrases in English and a handful of what replies to those phrases might be. Everything else is, well, barbarian talk to them.

Flustered but amused, we retreat back to our home away from home, Alençon. It’s not exactly close to where we need to end up, but it’s a space we feel relaxed an comfortable, in, which hopefully means we’ll get some work done there over our next couple days off. There’s an album to write, after all.

Highlights of our work week:

-Slept in

-Pushed the trip thus far past 10,000 kilometers

-Ate T’Nealle-made cake for breakfast

-Sat down for a couple hours to organize my music folder

-Made Horchata

-Zach found his biological father on Facebook

-Made pizza from scratch

-Discover British music publications are convinced T’Nealle is a man

-Made bread pudding out of a package of pita bread that James did his best to waste

-Find out British bum poison comes packaged like action figures

-Find a bike I can ride around the hinterlands

-Find gunpoweder flavored tea

Lowlights:

-Organized music folder FAIL

-Stopped paying attention to what I was doing and burnt the hell out of my bread pudding while trying to caramelize the top with the broiler blazing on full

-Hayfever has everyone sniffling/sneezing their faces off. Too many trips to the store for toilet paper

-Always waited until I was over-hungry before making it to the grocery store, which renders me unable to make a decision as I pace furiously through the aisles.

-Discover the town is surrounded by highways with no shoulders to bike on. I have the Frogger courage in me to run across highways full of speeding cars, but not the utter disregard for my life to bike along them with no shoulder and no helmet.