The Chateau hosts two different types of camps:
1. open registration for any woman or binary adult where the staff is creating and running workshops and determines the schedule alongside a “creative in residence” who has applied and been selected to share their art in a couple of workshops throughout the week. There are four scheduled for this summer and the first two were held the last two weeks.
2. collaborations where folks come onsite to lead their own agendas while the staff supports and fills in any scheduling holes (they usually provide yoga offerings). These are usually themed weeks around a certain group of people they are trying to attract.
The retreat this week was the second type, a collaboration with two writers and the theme was Read and Write. They encouraged participants to write their own pieces while here and provided them with feedback. They had each woman write or illustrate a segment of a story to co-write a story while they were together. And they set aside time in the schedule to read in the hammocks and shady spaces of the grounds. It was a lovely group and our first that was majority non-Americans! The facilitators were Scottish and French, the participants were Indian, Canadian/Korean, and there was one American from NYC.
My first pickups in town on Monday included the Operations Manager, Grace (who was the one that interviewed me) and then two more guests arrived Tuesday. And sadly, the South African volunteer contingent left us on Wednesday to go on their merry way to Paris. While running an errand I found an enormous (by European standards) hypermarket that I got very excited about. It has it’s own wine cave and sushi corner and I got another tank dress because I did NOT pack expecting recurring heat waves.
The best news of this retreat is that besides yoga, everyone got super into tarot cards and I got to do readings for the participants that wanted them. It was a lot of fun to do readings for two ladies that had not had their cards read in a decade and a first time reading for the 11 year old daughter of one of those ladies. This girl was a hoot! She was so self-possessed and self-aware and funny and smart. She took the cards seriously but we also had some laughs about it. In her note to me at the end of the retreat she said, “you made me laugh a lot (sometimes just in my head)”.
With only two days left in the retreat I started to feel low energy and have some stomach gurgles. By that night I had a fever. The Sunday that I was supposed to be driving everyone back to their trains I was sick in a way I hadn’t been in a very long time!! It was a good thing that Grace had arrived – she taught herself how to drive a manual on her last visit here. I mostly stayed quarantined, not knowing what I could possibly have or if I was contagious. Unfortunately, into my sick day 3, another volunteer started having symptoms. We reached for our covid tests (of course), and all tested negative. We still don’t know what it is/was and what the casualty count will ultimately be. I am in day 4 today and feeling pretty much back to normal except for my ability to climb three flights of stairs to my room without getting winded (which I only just managed to do last week before I was sick).
I am thankful that I am coming out the other side of this because I head for Bordeaux wine country tomorrow for my birthday weekend. I know you have all heard that the entirety of Bordeaux is on fire, but the region is roughly the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut (4,842 sq mi) or a bit larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, and I am not going anywhere near the fires. I emailed with the wine tour operator and she told me that they are still operating and not seeing any issues with the fires that are currently mostly contained. I have a rental car and will flee the area if necessary, but I have faith that the local folks are more in the know than the New York Times frightening article I read yesterday. Here at the Chateau we are far from any fires, but there was one day last week that the wind had shifted and a smoky haze surrounded us. We could smell the smoke and it was a day that we all ended up staying indoors to be safe, but it was from fires that were far away. As I look at the fire maps, we are in one of the only spots in the country that doesn’t have a fire.
Leave a Reply