A couple of weekends ago in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times, a cute little shack on a river in France was featured that is a summer home for the Parisian crowd. The pictures in the NYT were beautiful and they set the dreamy scene for the kind of summer party I want to be invited to. The shack had all the trimmings of a super-cool summer hangout including a treehouse, a picnic table draped with a beautiful French table-cloth and kayaks on the river. After closer inspection of the photos, I realized that the riverfront setting of this shack was on the very river that flows through our town (the Loing) and after reading the article, I realized that this shack was actually located in our town!
According to the Times, a super-cool Parisian couple who are well-known designers (to those people who know about well-know Parisian designers) decided that they needed an escape from the Parisian hipster scene so they bought this shack several years ago as a refuge. I showed the photos to Tim and jokingly told him we needed to meet these people with their super-cool hangout that I started calling “The Hipster Compound.” There’s probably nothing that hipster Parisians want to do more than hang out with real live Americans who eat at Buffalo Grill and whose kids who wear lice combs in their hair for fun, right?
The following Sunday, Tim said he was going out to take a walk in the woods while I was hanging out at home with the kids. The next thing I knew, Tim started sending me photos from his iPhone of cool shacks along the Loing River. It appeared that he was actively trying to track down the Hipster Compound and possibly the hipsters therein.
I should take a moment to tell you that there is nearly nothing that Tim likes to do more than trespass. He will trespass freely in any structure in the progress of being built or any land that appears to have no people on it at the moment – even pieces of land or buildings with big chains across the driveways and DO NOT ENTER signs strewn about. He is not deterred by the rules of society – he walks anywhere he wants until someone directly tells him to get out.
After a couple of hours tramping around on the banks of the Loing, Tim finally found the actual Hipster Compound and despite the chain across the road, he walked on to the property. Luckily for him, the hipsters weren’t out at their compound at the moment, but Tim got a good look around. Yes, it is a cool as it looked in the Times and no, we’re not friends with the fancy Parisian designers – yet. There is still time and much more trespassing to do, since it seems unlikely that we’ll run into the shack owners at Buffalo Grill.
I don’t want to include any pictures of the Hipster Compound in this post, just in case the photos would incriminate Tim and his trespassing self. Instead, I’ll leave you with this:
Francophile Update 