The previous day’s exploration around the immediate vicinity of the castle had inspired in some of us a certain wanderlust, which grew inexorably until it eventually became so powerful as to compete with the other variety of lust. So it came to pass that after the morning’s kinky sex activities, many of the folks in the castle took it upon themselves to propose a trip to the nearby town of Chauvigny, which in addition to being surrounded by Outdoors also was allegedly was positively brimming with History.

That combination sometimes produces Neat Stuff To See, so when I was invited along, I said ‘yes.’

Now, it is a truism often repeated in many circles that kinky poly folks are as difficult to herd as a gaggle of cats. And, it must be said, there is sometimes some tiny grain of truth, however trivial or vanishingly small, to this perception.

We opted to take two cars into Chauvigny, which turned out to be something of an error. An unfortunate error in communication between the two drivers of these two cars sent us to entirely different rendezvous points, with the sort of comical results one might normally expect from a Hugh Grant movie.

We, meaning the folks in the car I was in and I, ended up at a rest stop just outside the town, adjacent to a small walled cemetery. French rest stops are fascinating things. Like their American counterparts, they have bathrooms. Unlike their American counterparts, the bathrooms are not segregated by sex. Oh, they look the same, more or less–plain concrete buildings with just enough room for a row of toilet stalls.

But in France, both sides are filled with stalls. The urinals are on the outside of the building, in plain view of the parking lot.

The cemeteries are weird, too. Everything is smaller in Europe, including the cemeteries themselves. The graves are packed in shoulder to shoulder, with scarcely any space between them.

While we waited (hopelessly, as it turned out) for the folks in the other car to arrive, we decided to take advantage of the location to shoot some pictures. I love the look on Emily’s face here.

I wonder if this is sacrilegious.

Eventually, phone calls were made, our mistake was realized, and we piled back into the car to go to the place where we were supposed to meet with the others, who had apparently been waiting for us for some time.

Along the way, we passed the ruins of Minas Tirith. I didn’t realize it was in France, though I suppose in hindsight the fall of its sister-city at Minas Ithil, later renamed Minas Morgul, makes more sense now.

Our path actually took us right past the ruins themselves. Look, you can see the spot where Denethor set fire to the keep, right before the Haradrim started their seige!

In 1775, a man who professed himself to be a doctor invented the word “nymphomania” to describe a condition of unnatural and pathological sexual desire in women, where “pathological” desire was thought, apparently, to mean any desire at all. The good Dr. Bienville, the gentleman in question (whose life could perhaps have benefitted from some greater sexual desire on his own part) wrote that there were many symptoms of this grave and indecent lust, including a fondness for chocolate and the reading of books.

If this is the case, Chauvigny is a very indecent city indeed, because if there’s one thing it has a lot of, it’s books. The history of Chauvigny is closely tied up with the history of printing. When news of Gutenberg’s new invention arrived in France, the citizens of Chauvigny, realizing that literacy was likely to be something big and that the printing of books is a profitable enterprise in a newfangled literate society, fell all over this printing thing like Dick Cheney on a taxpayer’s penny. Even today, the city is dominated by quaint little bookshops–rows of them, all along the narrow twisty streets.

The town pays tribute to this rich literary heritage with many displays of antique and modern printing equipment, that lines the roads and twisty little parks. Emily, who if I recall correctly is a librarian, particularly appreciated the old printing equipment, and asked me to take a picture of her next to some of it.

Chauvigny is a lovely town, with more charm than you can fit in a wheelbarrow. Besides the bookstores, they also have churches, two things one does not normally see in such close proximity.

And, down by the waterfront, tucked back from a narrow alleyway behind a grape-covered stone wall that forms a private courtyard, they have an English café. A real English café, featuring English tea and breakfast.

As we were by this point some hours from breakfast and with dinner still hours in our future, many of our party were beginning to suffer from tea withdrawal. So it was only natural that we should choose to feed our addictions sample their hospitality.

And oh, God, it was good.

The British take their tea very, very seriously, with the result that they are very, very good at it. This café served vey good tea indeed, and crumpets as well.

Now, here in America, we have these things we call “English muffins.” English muffins are to crumpets what a Segway is to a mint-condition Ferrari F430 Spider. A crumpet is an English muffin touched by the hand of God, and covered in sweet, sweet creamy butter straight from the loins of Aphrodite herself. It is an English muffin that has attained the transcendence of Nirvana and returned bearing the wisdom of Solomon, only with less proclamations about cutting babies in half and more warm melt-in-your-mouth goodness.

The café also had a friendly, playful black cat who immediately decided to adopt the whole lot of us. He was especially fond of seinneann_ceoil‘s long scarf, which he thought was absolutely the coolest thing he’d ever seen in the whole history of ever.

The view from the café was just stunning. I took this picture from my seat at the table:

Bizarrely, the café also featured this mannequin, complete with bunny ears, across from the cash register. I felt compelled to get a picture for emanix, who was feeling unwell and had not accompanied us.

Our unnatural thirst for English breakfast tea slaked, at least for the moment, we headed across the bridge to explore the cathedral (early Gothic, according to seinneann_ceoil) on the other side. The high vaulted ceilings and arched stained glass windows were quite beautiful, though my travels in Russia had led me to expect more in the way of over-the-top religious iconography and gold leaf.

The kneelers were pretty cool. As soon as she saw them, Emily had to try them out.

This picture makes me feel wrong in so many ways, I might not ever want to feel right again.

They’re everywhere. Don’t blink!

We left the church and walked around the small park adjacent to it. This is the view from behind the church.

Just a little ways farther down the river, and a bit to the right of the bridge, we could see the courtyard of the café where we’d had our tea and delicious, heavenly crumpets of heavenly heavenliness.

The flowers were in full bloom, everywhere we looked. As we wandered back toward the car, I found these growing on a bush near the café.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, like the last few crumbs of crumpet on the serving plate of destiny. We headed away from Chauvigny, that harlot, that nymphomaniac, that literate and wanton mistress in a far-off land, with her kneelers and her books and her crumpets topped by the goddess of love, and went back to our castle for an evening of…

…but this has gone on for quite long enough already, and I shan’t bore you further.

There are things to do in a Medieval castle located in rural southern France other than orgies, kinky group sex, and strap-on gang-bangs, as hard as that might be to believe.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s rural France! What else could there possibly be to do for entertainment? It’s not like you can go to Wal-Mart or turn on the television to see reruns of “Friends,” so that pretty much only leaves kinky group sex or fishing, right? And given that the van we arrived in lacked the space for fishing poles, that whittled down the pool of available options considerably, right?

As it turns out–and I wouldn’t have known this had I not been there–the south of France has “Outdoors,” and there are actually some interesting things there. So a few days into our stay, having exhausted (temporarily) my appetite for kinky group sex and looked out the window long enough to realize that the invention of Outdoors had skipped across the pond and made it to Europe, where the French had adopted it enthusiastically, I opted to go poking around it.

Just, you know, to see what it was all about. I didn’t expect that the Europeans could make Outdoors to compete with the famed Outdoors factories of the Pacific Northwest, which manufacture such popular classics as Stunning Basalt Cliffs Which Fall Off Dramatically Into The Sea…but I was curious anyway.

The walls of the castle were covered with ivy vines, which I gather are something of a requirement for quaint picturesque castles in rustic rural settings.

The vines were covered with lovely blue flowers that bloomed for about three or four hours in the early afternoon and then closed up again.

There was a path through the woods that partly surrounded the castle, which led down to the water’s edge and also to the old ice house built in the side of an outcropping of rock. The old ice house was home to a single solitary fruit insect-eating bat, which I tried to get a picture of but sadly failed.

The ice house itself was kind of interesting. I was surprised to observe it was not stocked with cheap beer of inferior quality; my media and advertising overlords had led me to believe that that’s what icehouses are for.

At the edge of the river, the path snaked along the riverbank for a while until it met an ancient stone wall, part of some long-forgotten fortification or battlement or something, I reckon. It was interesting to think that this wall was built, stone by stone, by people who lived and died centuries before I existed, ad about whom I know absolutely nothing.

When I discovered the wall, I was joined by a lovely young lady named Emily who was part of the group staying in the castle. She thought that the wall and the river nearby would be a great place for a quick photo shoot, and I agreed.

The result is probably not safe for work, unless you work at Tantus or something.

Clicky this link only if you're not in a place where nekkidness in a picturesque setting in southern France will get you in trouble!

The first thing I noticed about her was the fact that she spins poi.

No, wait, I take that back. The first thing I noticed about her, now that I look back on it, was that she is filled with joy. She radiates happiness in a way that’s very appealing and shiny; she’s a bright spark of joy in human form. The second thing I noticed about her is that she spins poi.

And fire, too, though I didn’t get a chance to witness that.

I didn’t bring my poi with me to Europe, which in hindsight was rather silly. She brought several pair, though, so we spun together at the castle, which was fun. She’s rather better at it than I am, truth be told. In fact, she’s rather better at it than most of the spinners I know.

And she struck me as being a deeply, profoundly happy person, which gets me every time.

Her name is L. Well, her name isn’t L, but that’s what I’ll call her here. She arrived at the castle after the rest of us did, and left before we did, which was really a damn shame.

Now, had someone told me on the first day we met that she would by the following day be doing obscene things to me with a strap-on, I probably would have said something like “I find that highly unlikely.” I don’t, as a general rule, often find myself in bed with someone I’ve only just met, even in Medieval castles with lots of kinky folks who are all part of the same poly netwo–well, maybe I shouldn’t say that, since I appear to be batting a thousand on that one. Every time I’ve been in a Medieval castle with lots of kinky folks who are all part of the same poly network, I have found myself having kinky adventures with a person I’ve only just met. Perhaps some recalibration of my internal model of self is necessary. Hmm. I will ponder this more.

In all seriousness, though, I feel tremendously thankful for the opportunities I had during the trip to France, and privileged to have met the people I did.

And I’m not just talking about the slinky hex. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an enthusiastic fan of slinky hex in all its many forms, and it was a lot of fun, no doubt about it. But a lot of the things that have stuck with me from the trip were less about that then they were about getting the opportunity to look at things from a different perspective. seinneann_ceoil, L, and I spent a good deal of time on several occasions talking about privilege in all its forms, for instance, and applying those ideas to a place where they aren’t often applied, polyamorous relationships. (I have a very long post brewing about polyamory and privilege that I’m working on with seinneann_ceoil and zaiah, which I’ll likely be writing soon; I have just under a thousand words of notes on the subject, and it’s turning out to be fairly difficult to write.)

And did I mention joy?

There’s something about happiness that really does it for me. She is a very happy person, at least in my experience of her, and that’s incredibly shiny. I really, really dig happiness. Combine it with smart and introspective and confident and expressive, and…yeah. It’s…yeah. I mean, seriously, do you see those socks? Those are very happy socks.

One of the nice things about joy is that it’s a bit like ebola: extremely infectious and hard to defend against. I am very happy that she made the trip just a bit more joyful.

emanix‘s home is known on multiple continents as the House of Joy.

At six o’clock in the morning, when about twelve people or so are packing all their belongings into a white van and squeezing in themselves, it might more accurately be called the House of Where Is My Tea And Please Don’t Sit On That, or perhaps the House of Uuuungh What The Hell Time Is It Again?

The goal of this not inconsiderable jiggery-pokery with suitcases, tea, and rental vans was to travel to France, where, I was told, a castle had been rented for our enjoyment for the week. This journey, I was told, would probably require about eight hours, not including the time it took to pass through customs at the English Channel.

When we set off, I had the distinct impression that my views and opinions were not well-respected by the rest of the group. I had proposed a number of entertaining diversions to keep us all occupied on the trip, including singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” repeatedly or punching other passengers when cars of a certain color drove by. These gentle diversions were of incalculable value on long trips during my formative years, and yet they were all shot down without so much as a by-your-leave.

My faith in my traveling companions thus restored, we travelled through Britain (which is a bit like Iowa except that the buildings are older and they drive on the wrong side of the road) until we arrived at the Channel.

The tunnel under the English Channel is quite an engineering feat. Vehicles aren’t permitted to drive through; instead, they pack all the vehicles onto gigantic double-decker train cars, and send ’em through on that.

There’s a passport checkpoint on each side of the Channel. Outbound, we passed through French passport control, who looked at a van packed to the gills with people and luggage and just waved us through without even stopping us. The French, you see, who have a history of being invaded, are a lot more relaxed about these things than the British, who don’t.

I don’t have any pictures of the trains or the tunnel complex, which is filled with weird, loopy overpasses designed to straighten out the fact that the French and the English can’t agree on which side of the road to drive on, nor for that matter which side of the train to load on. Signs warned in dire language of all manner of unfortunate calamities to be visited on anyone who dared to take pictures, and I opted not to test their veracity.

Once beneath the channel, we headed out on the roads in France, which is a bit like Kansas only even more rural and desolate. The promised eight hour trip actually turned into something more like eleven, with not so much as a single round of 99 Bottles to be sung.

The trip was pleasant enough in spite of because of that, or at least as pleasant as such a trip can be.

The destination, however, proved more than worth the whole lot of it, up to and including the early morning departure:

This was our home for the week.

And what a home it was.

The group of us, about 20 or so people who were all part in one way or another of the same extended poly network, took over the place. seinneann_ceoil and I scored the room at the top of one of the turrets, the one on the left in this picture:

It was, as we later figured out, built sometime around the 14th century. The castle is located on the edge of the tiny town of Ciron, in the south of France.

Our room, which was to become the epicenter of much debauchery, was just gorgeous:

As it turns out, retrofitting a 15th-century stone building with modern amenities is a nontrivial task. The place did have electricity, and indoor plumbing, both added after the fact at great difficulty and expense.

Internet access was another issue.

There was a wi-fi network within the castle, at least in theory, which was allegedly connected to one of the many tubes leading to the Interwebnet. Sort of.

That tube was more like a sippy straw, like the kind you get with those little drink pouches that are made of the weird silver plastic and that you stab repeatedly with the pointy bit of the straw in a modern ritual of liquid refreshment whose hideous origin of using bamboo slivers to drain the blood from captive peasants on the darkest night of the year is now lost to antiquity.

I once made quite a tidy sum, when I went with my high-school class on a trip to Washington, DC to spend a few days visiting the Smithsonian. I had two cartons of those weird little juice bladders, see, and the bus trip was rather lengthy, and nobody else had thought to bring any drinks along for the ride. So I did what any good capitalist would do, and sold my juice bladders for a nice profit. Had I been a Libertarian, I would have collected the empty juice bladders, filled them with pee, and then re-sold them as juice, and when my customers complained, I would have said “caveat emptor shall be the whole of the law”…but I digress.

Anyway, the Sippy Straw of Internet Access at the castle was in the form of a direct line-of-sight microwave dish in the front of the grounds, which talked to another microwave dish on another building some miles away. It worked just fine, unless the weather was bad, or someone walked in front of the dish, or there was a lot of traffic on any nearby roads, or the name of the day ended in the letter “y,” or…

Complicating things further was the router, which was sore in need of a firmware update and which tended to crash on a regular basis. The router was locked in a storeroom to which we had no access, so the only way to reboot it after one of its frequent crashes was to reboot the entire castle by killing power to the whole building. As the circuit breakers were near the ceiling, this necessitated standing on a chair and flipping them with a cane.

Rebooting the castle became a several-times-per-day ritual.

You may be wondering why a group of twenty-plus sex-positive, kinky, poly folks would even bother with Internet access in the first place, but the answer is obvious: even good sex only lasts for nine or ten hours, and after that, you have to tweet about it!

The top room in the second turret was quickly turned into an enormous playspace, in part because it looked like this.

If those walls could talk, they’d probably say “Hey, are you going to eat that? Because if not, I’d like some too.”

The main living portion of the castle was three stories, not including the underground cellar and dungeon, which we sadly weren’t given access to. (Not that that stopped some of the more enterprising among us, mind, but I sadly wasn’t there for that.)

Now, one might expect a five or six hundred year old building to have certain…structural difficulties, and indeed that proved to be the case. One structural difficulty, anyway. And a doozy at that.

This is what you see when you walk in the kitchen entrance. Nothing too frightening, right? The steps are the foot of the only staircase to the second and third stories, made of a handsome deep red hardwood of some sort or other.

Don’t let this placid, even mundane, image fool you. Those are no ordinary steps! They are, in fact, part of the Stairy Scarecase of DOOM.

The stairway up is a cantilever, with the steps anchored to the wall on one end and floating free on the other.

And like all cantilevers, including such famous examples as Frank Lloyd Wright’s cantilevered house-over-a-stream known as Falling Down Falling Water, it’s subject to considerable stress on the anchored end.

The stairs, which in one place had pulled from their mounts and were about an inch from the wall, wobbled precariously when anyone walked up or down them. The bottoms of the steps showed significant buckling where the mounts had been damaged.

Apparently, according to some folks who’d talked to the property owner, the stairs had recently been inspected by a structural engineer, who (if I got the story right) said something like “Ayup, could last another five years, could go at any time,” only in French.

Which made the staircase off-limits for kinky sex, at the very least. And also for running on. Or walking on, or climbing, or descending, or…

I spent some time, as I previously mentioned, wandering the grounds taking pictures. There was a small balcony tucked off the recreation room, where the lord and lady of the house once amused themselves by cutting off the heads of heretics or whatever the hell it is French nobility did during the Middle Ages but had since been turned into an entertainment center with a flat-screen TV and a Nintendo Wii, that looked something like this:

The castle was surrounded by the most astonishing quantity and variety of foliage. I have no idea what these berries are, and not wanting to run the risk of hallucinating my dead grandmother locked in mortal combat with Hillary Clinton in a pink tutu, I neglected to experiment.

The groundskeeper for the castle lived in these outbuildings on the grounds. I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this myself, only with better Internet access and less, you know, rural France.

The one place I was most disappointed we couldn’t get, other than the dungeon, was the quarters of the lord and lady of the manor. The apartment of the castle’s reigning aristocracy was on the upper level, between the turrets. It had its own private, semi-enclosed balcony, but I couldn’t see what the chambers within looked like; apparently, it had not been renovated and was considered unsafe for occupation. Seen from the window of the playroom, it looked like this.

I was game for finding a plank of wood and trying to build a ramp over there, but as with my suggestions for travel entertainment in the van, I was overruled. Probably for the best, I’m sure.

The Palace of Westminster, where the British parliament meets to do whatever it is the government of a First World European nation does when it isn’t following the fading star of the United States, sits right across the river from the London Eye, where commoners can spend money to ride the ferris wheel and keep an eye on their government.

The clock tower at the end of the palace looms ominously over the Thames, mechanically playing its chimes every fifteen minutes as it marks down the time until the inevitable machine uprising, when we will all be cast into slavery by our shiny new robotic overlords. There is a poetic symmetry in the fact that human hands built this enoumous mechanical time-keeping automaton, which ticks away the hours to our doom.

A lot of folks refer to this clock tower as Big Ben. Technically, that’s not true; Big Ben is a bell inside the clock tower. Wikipedia claims that referring to the whole thing as Big Ben is now acceptable, but in this, Wikipedia is wrong. The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit frequently cant figure out whether celebrities and politicos are alive or dead, so its proclamations in matters of gigantic mechanical apparatuses clearly are not to be trusted.

After taking pictures of the Egyptian artifacts, I headed back along the Thames toward the Palace of Westminster. Even someone with so poor a sense of direction as I, in a city I’ve never seen before, can scarcely get lost in this part of London; the palace and its clock tower loom over the landscape like some sort of hulking giant monster in a Michael Bay movie.

The palace itself is enormous–eight acres, I’m told, and well over a thousand rooms. If that’s true, I could quite likely get lost within that building far more easily than within this part of London itself. The Palace of Westminster is large enough to house the entire British apparatus of government, with enough room left over for fifteen rugby teams, two dance troupes, the 22nd Infantry Regiment, the administrative offices of Cirque du Soleil, all three branches of Sarah Palin’s ego, and an Olympic archery team.

I’d love to know how many of those thousand-plus rooms are disused broom closets. For that matter, I’d love to know how many are disused, period.

The architecture of the place is…umm, interesting is a word. Yeah, we’ll use that. Interesting.

I don’t know who the dude on the horse is. Probably just some dude who rode around on a horse making speeches and killing lots of people; those generally seem to be the sorts of folks who end up immortalized in statues atop horses.

The Palace of Westminster was commissioned by King William IV, who had wanted to unload the property onto Parliament but who did not succeed in doing so even though he offered them the place for free. So he commissioned a new palace to be built there, in a conversation that went something like this:

Architect of the Board of Works: Your Majesty, I would like to present to you my proposal for the construction of a new palace.
King William IV: Yes, er, well…
Architect of the Board of Works: Sire?
King William IV: It’s nice and all, but it seems a little…er, how to say this? Frumpy.
Architect of the Board of Works: Frumpy, sire?
King William IV: It’s not very…ornate. It needs more decorations.
Architect of the Board of Works: Begging Your Majesty’s pardon, but it is covered with decorations!
King William IV: Well, yes, I’m sure it is. But the decorations themselves don’t have decorations on them!
Architect of the Board of Works: Of course, sire. And let me say that the magnificence of His Majesty’s taste is exceeded only by the tenacity of His Majesty’s formidable grasp on the obvious. I shall rectify this oversight forthwith.
(The ARCHITECT OF THE BOARD revises his draft of the PLANS FOR THE PALACE)
Architect of the Board of Works: Your Majesty, I would like to present to you my revised proposal for the construction of a new palace.
King William IV: Well, um, yes, err… It’s still a bit dowdy-looking, don’t you think?
Architect of the Board of Works: Dowdy, sire? But even the decorations have decorations!
King William IV: Yes, err, well…the decorations on the decorations don’t have decorations on THEM, now, do they?
Architect of the Board of Works: I think I see where this is going. I shall revise the plans at once, highness.

Eventually, the Architect of the Board of Works produced a set of plans that met with William IV’s approval, and construction began. When the palace was completed, they celebrated in the conventional British way by shooting off fireworks and chopping off people’s heads, and everyone was happy. Well, except for the people whose heads were chopped off, but they didn’t count because their heads were off.

There’s a huge park adjacent to the palace, whose sole reason for existing appears to be framing the palace in dramatic and exciting ways.

That, and sitting on the green eating picnic lunches or making out, which were two of the most popular activities I witnessed. sadly, as seinneann_ceoil was still occupied with her meeting, I didn’t have the opportunity for the latter, and I was ill-equipped for the former, so I had to content myself with taking photos that I could later use to write snarky commentary about the British royalty.

On my lengthy loop back around the park and down along the Thames toward the London Eye, I passed this sign.

Now, I do quite like the British people, in spite of the snarky things I write about British royalty, so in the spirit of international friendship, I would like to offer my services as an ambassador of goodwill between our people. Don’t believe this sign. In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar: “It’s a trap!”

Trust me on this. They’re playing a trick on you. The taste of the Deep South is rubbish. It tastes of cheap fried chicken, poverty, country fairs, anti-intellectualism, racism, and deep-fried Twinkies…all for £3.59 for a limited time only.

It’s how they get you. It starts with a chicken sandwich for £3.59, and the next thing you know it’s Brown v. the Board of Education all over again.

On the way back across the river, I saw this building.

I have no idea what it is. Probably the summer cottage of some wealthy British lord or duke or baron or something, I reckon.