For almost a year, I believed Fred and Ethel were the perfect French couple.

They lived among vineyards. They were always together. They dressed for dinner every night.

Then I discovered they were complete idiots.

I sat there performing open-heart surgery on a bird the size of a baseball while everyone else ate like they’d been doing this since birth.

Tonight’s story involves pheasants, French politics, six cheeses, a hostage-style goodbye ritual, and my growing concern about what Viggo might be destroying back at the house.

We’d been out looking at houses in the Languedoc for three days. By then I had a pretty simple system: no pool, no deal. No thick stone walls, no deal. What I didn’t have was any idea how long a “quick look” at a house was actually going to take.

When our French neighbor walked up the driveway and said “Horseball,” I had one question: what the hell is horseball? The answer involved horses, wine thermoses, and the perfect picnic.

Soon after we arrived in our small village in the Loire Valley, I decided it would be a good idea to introduce myself to the mayor. It sounded like the kind of thoughtful thing responsible people do. The problem was that I had absolutely no reason to be meeting with the mayor.