The Great Escape – châteaux, champagne and big fat French wedding

After months of wishing we were here, there, or anywhere that wasn’t our own homes, travel is back. This bi-weekly travel essay will follow the adventures of our writers as they finally make their escape from England and take a much-needed holiday.

Over the last year, expired passports, a changing traffic light system, suddenly imposed quarantine rules, and endless expensive tests have meant foreign travel was largely off the cards.

In the absence of travelling abroad, I have tried “real staycations” (staying in London, exploring my own city as a tourist), “typical staycations” (trips to Devon and Somerset for the weekend) and a city break. But nothing quite compares to the feeling of being aggressively confronted by a blast of hot air as you step off an aeroplane or wandering down the cobbled stone streets of a European city, ice cream in hand. So when the invite to a wedding near Paris dropped through my letterbox earlier in the summer, I was determined to finally make an escape to the château this September. 

My enthusiasm for the trip was briefly dampened by the revelation of the dress code. As an adult, I have more often worked behind the bar of a wedding than attended one (let alone a French one), and I was perturbed to see women would be expected to wear fascinators and men would wear morning suits before changing into black tie for the evening (cue googling: “what is a morning suit”).

With the assistance of eBay, a fascinator became a small price to pay for the chance to travel abroad. Flights to Paris were inexpensive, but the wedding venue’s remote location made things more complicated: When the offer to hitch a ride with a fellow wedding guest arose, we jumped at the cost-effective and environmentally sound means of getting there. 

The chosen means of travel, however, was a slow five-hour ferry from Portsmouth to Caen, presenting a slight spanner in our working day on Friday. The definition of “working from home” was stretched to its limit as we made a quiet area of the ship our office for the day. 

A few questionable plates of food at the ferry self-service restaurant later, we arrived in Caen and embarked on the two-hour drive east, heading towards Paris. 

Driving through the rural French countryside, the freeing feeling of being somewhere new dawned on me slowly as the large expanses of agricultural land stretched out in front of us.

The next day, having settled into our rental house in the sleepy village of Boury-en-Vexin, we put on our fascinators and suits and headed to the nearby Château de Serans for the ceremony. An hour and a half later, we emerged from the beautiful Church, a little muddled from trying to follow the French sermon but ready for the champagne and oysters waiting for us at the reception. 

The night wore on with enough champagne to feed an army and a three-course dinner to sober everyone up. As the bride and groom entered the reception hall, we enthusiastically joined the other guests in waving our serviettes above our heads as a bass-heavy French song played out. We initially assumed this was a typical, if quirky, part of a French wedding but were later told this was a song more often played in clubs than at weddings and not something to repeat at any future French weddings (without prior instruction). 

The party continued till the early morning hours with an Eiffel Tower of profiteroles brought out shortly after midnight and chips served later for the 4 am stragglers still on the dance floor.

The next day, with heavy heads from all the champagne, we dragged ourselves into the local town of Gisors to take the mandatory Covid test to allow re-entry into the UK. Having a swab stuck down your throat is probably one of the less recommended activities with a hangover, but our mood was quickly lifted when the pharmacist told us we weren’t required to pay for the test. Thank you, France!

Before we knew it, we were back on the ferry, making slow progress towards Portsmouth. It was a short but sweet trip that awoke a dormant feeling of wanderlust. 

Let’s hope those traffic lights keep turning green, and the opportunity to travel becomes regular once more.