Chambres D'Horrors...

I travel a lot with work and I've had to visit some weird and wonderful places over the years - a disused missile bunker and even an underwater hotel among them - but of all the places I've had to stay - a converted barn in France won hands down as the worst place I've ever encountered...

We'd been filming some lovely baby animals in France and had to drive 4 hours to get to our next location. It was late at night and we hadn't eaten when we finally reached the village we were supposed to be staying in. Usually we have quite detailed directions but for some reason these were left out so we were in the middle of a quiet spooky village with nothing but the sound of the clock tower to scare us. It struck at 10:03pm and then a further 8 times ?! I thought maybe it was some sort of "Lost in Space" type warning to alert the local folk to strangers being in town. Whatever it was - it certainly worked because shortly afterwards - 2 people snuck quietly out of their houses, locked their car doors and went back inside !!!!

There were 5 roads leaving the village and we didn't know which one to head down. I tried calling the B&B but the girl who answered didn't understand a word I was saying and I couldn't understand a word she was saying so I gave up. My french is pretty much non-existent but I plucked up enough courage to approach the 3 awkward looking teenagers sitting on the steps of the Clock Tower. In their best English (and lots of shoulder shrugging & sign language) they eventually got the message through that they had no idea where the place was !!

I then had the genius idea of getting my friend Lizzie (who had lived in France for a couple of years and spoke good French) to call the B&B for me to at least work out which general direction it was in. She rang back a few minutes later and the news was not good:

“ummmm, I spoke to a girl and basically if I’m understanding correctly, she doesn’t know where she is”
“how can she not know where she is?”
“she just kept saying that she’s not from around here & she doesn’t know how she got there”

Oh dear. Lizzie then got her mate Chris (who was actually born in France) to call in case there was something she'd missed. The only added bit of information he got was that the girl had been “led away from the amusement park” (!!??) By now I was convinced that this girl was some sort of Natascha Kampusch type kidnap victim and was determined to get there fast so we could save her from her evil captors (and if we managed to capture the whole thing on camera, it would make a great film!).

As a last resort and with nothing to lose (except being arrested perhaps) I approached a woman who was asleep in her car. She nearly jumped out of her skin when I knocked on her window but after my best “Bon soir excusez-moi je m'appelle Susan Parlez lentement aide aide aide!!!”? she opened her mouth to speak and I got the shock of my life. I’m not sure if dental care is covered by the French government, but it certainly wasn’t in these parts !!!!!!! I’ve never seen teeth like it in my entire life - they were disgusting, mangled and brown and looked like they could fall out at any minute...
I slowly backed away from the car and decided we'd be better off just taking our chances. We took the kidnapped girls advice, headed "away" from the amusement park and after half an hour of driving through dark cane fields - we found it !! It was pitch black, we were greeted by barking dogs and it looked like something straight out of a horror movie – the picks and other farming equipment on the walls didn’t exactly calm my already very high anxiety levels...
The kidnapped girl eventually came out to greet us and gave us some keys. I was so relieved to be there that I forgot about my plan to save her from her captors and just headed straight to my room. Ahhhhhh relief at last !

Exhausted after filming all day, chatting up teenage boys and seeing those scary teeth – I sat down on my bed to relax and, well, I think I’ll let the picture tell the end of the story…..