The night of the 27th there were big storms - or so we found out later. The rivers were flooding, something like 400,000 trees were knocked down, and hundreds of thousands of people in northern France were without power, but the only real hardship we experienced was that the English language cable in our hotel went out, so we were stuck watching old "Love Bug" movies dubbed into French.

Not really realizing the extent of the damage, we drove around on the 28th trying to tour the chateaux. We saw many lovely exteriors, but almost all of them were closed, either for the winter or the weather. Everywhere we went there were giant trees uprooted wholesale, and people up on their roofs replacing roof tiles and straightening chimneys.

When we finally found a chateau that was only closed for lunch, we eagerly returned and paid our admission without really reading the fine print below the word "Musée". It slowly dawned on us, as we walked through room after room of trophy heads and antique hunting permits, that it was an International Museum of Hunting. As appalling as all the staring dead animals were, it was worth the price of admission to see the collection of ferret muzzles and an 18th-century painting of an actual vicious poodle (J.B. Oudrey's "Chien Barbet avec Canards," for you Far Side fans).