Meet our friend Philippe

Tom & Kathy Corey,
Rock Eddy Bluff Farm, Dixon, Missouri

This is an introduction to Philippe Papadimitriou for those are not acquainted with him. We first met Philippe when he stayed a week with us one winter after he proposed an exchange:  We would stay at his gite in France in trade for time at our country getaway in Missouri. A year later we were with Philippe at L’Etoile (The Star).

You should know that we have become very fond of Philippe. We truly like him and have a high regard and respect for him.  We think you will too.

An adventurous spirit, integrity, intelligence are obvious qualities. But Philippe is also a comfortable person, easy to be with. He speaks good English with a strong French accent. His is an inquiring mind, free of dogmatic limitations.

Philippe will show you his true self and, I think, would ask the same of you if he is visiting in America. Be yourself and allow him the chance to see your life in a personal way. Show him what you do each day, who you have contact with. Introduce him to your friends. Allow him contact with ideas different than he normally deals with.

Philippe is an adventurous spirit. These events in his life illustrate the sort of fellow he is:

• Philippe left school at age fourteen in Brussels. He did poorly in school and asked his father for permission to quit. His father told him yes, but only if he could make high marks to show that he was able do the work. He then did well and was allowed to leave school
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• He worked on an organic farm for a few years. Then worked construction jobs in France and Belgium. Later he worked in Peru, Australia, Greece and the USA.
  
  
• He bicycled around France at 16 years old, rode from Brussels, Belgium to Athens, Greece at 17 years old, and biked around Scandinavia at 18 years old.
  
  
• Philippe decided to search for gold in California. He and his brother (knowing very little English) flew to New York and then hitch-hiked to Northern California. He learned a little English on the way. "When you are obliged to learn, you learn," says Philippe. Among the first phases he learned: "Hands up!" "When the police have a gun to your head you learn quickly," he notes. It seems a driver had picked them up on the highway in a car that had just been stolen. They spent the day in jail.
  
  
  He and his girlfriend, three horses and two dogs rode 1000 kilometers across France. It was on this trip that Philippe discovered the Hotel Ranc which was then for sale in La Bastide, Lozere. Though he had little money he declared there and then, "This is my gite!"

I asked Philippe why he made these choices in his life. "I do not chose," he replied, "life choses."

Here is a description of La Bastide and Philippe by an English writer who traversed Europe, walking on trails that took him past the door of L’Etoile:

"After the Second World War La Bastide faded back into the forests. For a while the village subsisted on the custom of workers from railrway and from local dam-building projects. Hotel Ranc became a holiday home for old soldiers who had served in Algeria. Now is was a gite d’etape run by the young and immensely tall Philippe Papadimitriou Demaitre Pausenberger Vanniesbecq, a Belgian-Greek whose grandfather once owned the Hotel de Paris in Cairo. After a series of occupations, from gold-panning in California to hod-carrying in Peru, Philippe had bought the Hotel Ranc, complete with contents, from bedspreads to the oak and chrome Frick refrigerators.

‘It was intuition, not science,’ Philippe laughed. ‘Voila!’

La Bastide was dying. The winter population was down to 183. In summer it swelled to 2,000, with the extra railway staff and the villa-owners from Marseilles, Ales, Nimes and Montpellier. Each year fewer residents stayed up for the winter. Philippe’s girlfriend, Catou, remembered comng up to La Bastide as a girl to collect mushrooms, from her home in Ales, before all the pits closed. The branch line to Mende was losing money and, if that closed, La Bastide might disappear from the map. There was pessimism in the village; one of the other hotels had closed recently; marriages were disintegrating.

But the gite was booming: the previous year Philippe had catered for 3,000 guests. Many were British, walking along the Allier in Stevenson’s footsteps. It was 23 November, Robert Louis Stevenson’s birthday. Philippe Cooked pied de mouton mushrooms from the forest and we played darts by the open fire.

"The gite is too much....sedentaire: I must do something where I move." Philippe stared into the flames. "We are good for something, but what....it is difficult to know."

From Clear Waters Rising:  A Mountain Walk Across Europe
by Nicholas Crane, Penquin Books, 1997

Visit our two websites:
Philippe's in France:    L'Etoile (The Star)
Tom & Kathy's in Missouri:  Rock Eddy Bluff Farm