Blake and Deborah in Europe: Gonfaron, Provence

Gonfaron lies in the Provence region, the famed area in the southeast corner of France that borders the Mediterranean and Italy. It is also home to the French Riviera, including the famous playgrounds of the rich and famous like Cannes, Nice, and St. Tropez. Gonfaron is a decidedly more modest location up in the hills a good 40km from the coast.

John and Jill's place is an 18^th century stone bastide (farm house) which they have been renovating for the past five years. The pace of reconstruction slowed considerably two years ago with the birth of twins Camille and Celeste. It was just this past summer that they started bringing in HelpX workers such as ourselves to help with renovation, landscaping, and looking after the little ones. Simon, a nice young lad from Liverpool is here at the same time as us to help out in this ongoing project.

Our host John is a retired Air Force helicopter pilot who now works for a Russian billionaire who has his fleet of choppers stationed at various locations around Europe and elsewhere, including Cannes, where John works. He is generally on call for three weeks at a time and home for three weeks. And when he's home, he's working on the house. Jill was a graphic designer but now concentrates on mom duty and, in her few moments of free time, works on the house as well.

The house, naturally, is a combination of tastefully restored rooms and those still awaiting their transformation. Deborah got to try out one of the unrestored bathrooms shortly after our arrival and confronted an embarrassingly disfunctional toilet. We have since discovered that a vigorous clockwise swirl with the toilet brush is at least somewhat effective in creating the necessary siphon action. Or, perhaps more easily, we just use the newly renovated powder room, which is both aesthetically pleasing and fully functional.

I'll describe our work here in the next post.