BON voyage
YOU DON’T ALWAYS NEED TO LEAVE HOME TO BROADEN YOUR HORIZONS
Ihave just waved goodbye to two beautiful young people who are heading off in a camper van to tour New Zealand. I miss them already and yet we only met by a stroke of fate.
Tom and I visited Saint-Malo for a weekend when we were in France two years ago, and met Morgan, who worked in a really cool bar in the walled city.
It’s a fascinating and beautiful place – well worth visiting. Saint-Malo was founded in the sixth century and its position on the coast of Brittany was a perfect strategic home for pirates in the 17th century.
We really enjoyed chatting to Morgan, who said he was coming out to New Zealand at the end of the year. He’s a keen surfer and was looking forward to travelling around our country’s surf beaches.
I gave him my email address and told him to get in touch if he needed a place to stay for the night or any information about the country – and that was that. I heard nothing, and nor did I really expect to.
And then out of the blue, a few weeks ago, I received an email from Morgan. He hadn’t been able to make the trip to New Zealand in 2018 but he and his girlfriend were coming over this year, in a couple of weeks, to spend a year in New Zealand.
It would be lovely, he said, to meet up for a drink, and get a feel for where they should go and what they should do.
He was staying just around the road from where we live so, once they arrived, I arranged to meet in our local pub. It was a lovely evening. The two kids were still shattered from the long flight – they’d come via Dubai – but they were so excited to be here and couldn’t wait to pick up the camper van they’d arranged to buy off a Dutch tourist.
They were picking up the camper in a few days and were a bit stuck for a place to stay as U2 were in town and accommodation in Auckland was booked out. We have a spare front room and they were two kids needing a place to stay, so I asked if they’d like to stay with us for a few nights.
And that’s how we came to have two gorgeous young people brightening up our lives for a few days. They borrowed our old station wagon and went out to the west coast to go surfing for the weekend, then came back into town to collect the camper. It needed a bit of work done on it, so they stayed with us while they got it ready for the big tour of the country.
They couldn’t have been lovelier. Lou, an archetypal beautiful Frenchwoman who doesn’t wear a skerrick of make-up, made us crêpes one night, and I cooked whitebait fritters for them the next. They worked on making their van their home – painting the cupboards, putting stick-on lino on the floor, buying new linen for the pull-out bed.
When the time came for them to go, I bought them a wee wooden sign to hang over the door that said “Aroha” and we hugged and double-kissed and told ourselves that it was “au revoir” not “goodbye”.
And then off they went – impossibly young and beautiful and brave and excited and thrilled to be here. (The Grace Millane case was going on while they were here, so I think I was extra protective of them because of that.)
And now I have to kiss, bless and release them.
They have perfectly good parents who love them to bits and pieces and they don’t need another two.
But, thanks to a chance encounter in a bar in France two years ago, we’ve just had the loveliest week with two very special people – and isn’t that what travel is all about?