The Vendée gîte : cette foutue poutre

If there were one thing that I could change about the Vendée gîte we stayed in, it would be this low beam at the top of the stairs that lead up to the bedrooms and bathroom. No matter how careful I tried to be, I banged my head on it 4 or 5 times over the course of the week we stayed there.

The beam runs across two rooms and the hallway. One of the  rooms is the second bedroom, where you surely noticed the low beam over the head of the bed in the photo I posted a couple of days ago. In the photo above, taken from the hallway, you can see through the stair rails down into the kitchen — those are the stairs. The beam is not much more than 5 feet — shoulder height to me — above the floor. The little yellow plastic tag hanging by a string off the beam helped me remember to duck, but if I got distracted... well, bang on the noggin.

And the beam ran across the bathroom, right in front of the shower area, at that same height. I'm not sure I hit my head on it more than twice, but the last one was on the last morning we were there as I was packing toiletry articles up for the trip home. I must have leaned over the pick up the two shower gel/shampoo bottles off the steps leading down into the shower, and when I stood back up I nearly knocked myself out cold.

It's too bad about the beam, because other than that hazard, the house was very pleasant to live in. It was quiet, spacious, and well furnished. Overall, we enjoyed being there (except for my aching head). The dog was welcome to stay with us. Above you see the stairs down from the upstairs hallway into the kitchen. The owner of the gîte is a very nice young guy who was very helpful in giving us information about the principal sights to see in the area. (He's also a major fan of U.S. football and watches a lot of games on TV.)

Finally, here's a Google Maps aerial view of the property, which is called Les Gîtes de Brillac. If you enlarge the image, you'll see my labels. That's the Vendée river, with its river walks, at the top of the photo, We stayed in La Petite Maison. The other gîte, called L'Etable ("The Stable"), was also occupied while we were there, by a French family from Toulouse. If we were to go back to Brillac, I'd definitely want to try staying in that gîte.