Okay, the rest of the photos from week one are here as well.
Sitting at the kids’ play area finishing this off, watching Steve & Joe play ping pong while Abbie plays some girl/boy gang game with other children! Anna’s reading in the tent …
I have yet to find out what Puy du Fou actually means so if someone out there could enlighten me I would be very grateful.
Anyway, we were up and out early to drive the hour down to le Grand Parc, which turned out to be well worth it as we had a great day. It is like a historical theme park, only there aren’t any stomach-churning rides, and it’s only loosely historical – the points of reference are just there as hooks to hang shows on. So the park mainly consists of various ‘spectacles’ to see, which are truly spectacular for one reason and another! Photos and more description will follow on flickr but this will do for now.
We started with the Viking show. The storyline was relatively easy to understand: setting the scene in a pleasant little village, the lord and lady of the manor get married. Then word comes from some monks downriver that the Vikings are on their way. First surreal moment there, the monks have a golden coffin on their barge, some saint or other – this is where my French fails me and I can’t understand any more as the story becomes more convoluted. The Vikings arrive (in a boat, down a hill and over a path) and pillage the town, in spectacular style, setting fire to and pulling down buildings. Another viking longboat rises out of the water 
Then, utterly bizarrely, a saint appeared out of the coffin, with a baby in his arms. Walks on water across to the lord and lady (who nearly got her head chopped off by a viking but managed to be saved at the last minute of course), gives the baby to the lady, and then all the Vikings seemingly experience an instant conversion and become friends with the villagers. And then, on leading the saint across the bridge, the saint disappears into a puff of smoke. There ends the story.
After that it was nearly lunchtime; we wasted some time looking around the Medieval Village then sat and ate our picnic while waiting for the magician’s show to start – that was just 15 minutes of typical medievally styled trickery but the kids enjoyed it.
Then it was time to queue for the Colosseum, the highlight for most of us I think. Steve worked out that it must have seated around ten thousand people so you can imagine what the queue was like. This was a fantastic show, and the story was fairly easy to understand. Christians come and draw fish symbols in the amphitheatre, then get caught and the ringleader (who also happens to be in the Roman army) gets challenged to prove himself in the arena. So we had a parade around, first, with all sorts of different animals etc., and then the Gladiator games, followed by chariot races. Of course the Christian Roman is the hero, but of course the Roman Emperor didn’t set him free. Instead he was locked up in a cage, and his girlfriend fed to the lions. Only the lions didn’t want to eat her, probably because she was a Christian and they taste bad 
So then they set the tiger on her as well, but the tiger wouldn’t eat her either. Anyway eventually they managed to overthrow the Emperor and put him in the arena as well, where he was chased out of the ring by a hyena. Then the hero and his girlfriend climbed onto the thing in the middle of the arena which then rose up with lots of smoke and loud music … just because they could. This became the mantra for the rest of the day, ‘just because they can’ as it seemed that every show/story became more outrageous than the last, with music / smoke / special effects / amazing moving and changing set pieces all trying to outdo one another! All incredibly well executed though, I must admit, and fantastic entertainment value.
When we managed to get out of the Colosseum, Rog dashed off to watch a band, while the rest of us queued for hours for ice creams, dodged showers, then met up again and went to see another display, called The Phantom Birds’ Dance. Otherwise known as a very impressive falconry display, seamlessly set into a ridiculous fairy story, complete with woman in a bed that rose up from an old castle, some other random characters on horseback, and then the amazing woman on a flagpole. I really lost the plot with this story and don’t have a clue what it was about! The falconry was excellent though, as were the falconers Haven’t ever seen such an impressive display, especially with all the music/effects going on at the same time. We did notice a rogue bird not quite doing what it was supposed to at one point, but otherwise it was just fabulous.
From there we ran to see Richelieu’s Musketeers, in a colossal theatre the other side of the park. I was hoping for some more men in tights and some good swordplay but there was only a bit of that. Steve and I took the opportunity of being in a darkened theatre to take a little nap, but when we woke up we hadn’t missed much. Again the story was pretty tricky to follow; lots of historical characters involved but only any good if your knowledge of French History is, um, better than mine. Still – the sword fighting that we did see was good, then the story descended into something else that involved the stage getting full of water, presumably to create reflections, dancers and horses prancing around in the water, the set was transformed into a Versailles look-a-like, but I really don’t know what was going on. Not sure that I would have known even if I hadn’t been half asleep through most of it! As before though, even though it seemed completely surreal to me, it was flawlessly executed and the quality of what they were doing was outstanding.
After that, dinner. We’d booked some set menu thing which turned out to be little more than junk food but it filled a hole, and we escaped the wasps without any stings! After that we had a nice hour wandering around, we visited a sixteenth century village with a strange chiming clock – it had bells but all the chimes seemed to come out of speakers, so that was a bit strange. Then we saw some animals and Riona got electrocuted by the fence. Then the most bizarre, tunnels full of stuffed badgers, weasels, stoats, foxes etc. Stuff that you would *never* see in the UK!
Then came the evening ‘Battle of the Keep’. Queued for a while for that too! They opened the gates an hour before the start of the show and there was a band who entertained those that could understand them with some strange local ‘call and response’ type of songs – utterly weird. There was a jester too, who was very funny, at the expense of a few members of the audience (thank goodness none of us were one of them!). His funniest moment was in playing the safety announcements in lots of different languages and taking off typical characteristics of each country along the way. The actual show itself again had a convoluted storyline during which we saw all sorts of fantastic horsemanship, then at the end of course an impressive looking battle with lots of buildings spouting fire, and then the main castle moved forward and rotated by 180 degrees – just because it could
Phew. And then we drove home. My one comment to Steve would have been that they should have provided a story synopsis to read, for each show, in different languages, so that you could at least keep up with what was going on. To be fair, they did provide translator things but I hate having them going on in my ear all the time and no-one else seemed to want one either. My French is reasonable but I couldn’t keep up with it all and was usually in such fits of laughter that I didn’t care anyway and was making up alternative commentary for whichever child was sitting next to me!
Still think it was well worth the money we paid to go in and do it all, we all really enjoyed it, so it comes with a recommendation from us.
We have spent the entire day following lounging around the campsite as a result though! It’s rained on and off today; Rog and Ruth did a supermarket run … and the kids amused themselves. By 4pm we needed to do *something* so Ruth cycled into Angers and the rest of her family drove in to meet her later, while we went off for a geocache walk nearby. Ironically found a UK Geocoin in it!