The train ride to Macon was beautiful. My host was waiting for me in the train platform underpass. I wasn’t sure if it was polite or creepy. He gave me a hug right away. That was the beginning of the overly touchy behavior. In the summer he runs a B&B but he told me there was no guests and that’s why he wanted companionship. Well, that story changed quite quickly when he picked me up. Suddenly we were rushing away while he’s rapidly telling me about the sudden influx of guests coming to the property and all of the work we have to do to tidy the place. I was in such a daze from the full day of travel, I did not have my wits with me to ask what the hell he was talking about. How could he have lied? Did all of these guests really just reserve within the last hour? No warning at all?

When I got to the house, we scrubbed the bathroom and changed sheets. When the guests arrived, I was asked to schlep their luggage up a few flights of stairs. I did not mind the manual labor. It was that I hated the communication failure. He said he wanted companionship and immediately after a full day of travel, I was put to work. The property was a one hour drive deep in the countryside away from any sort of public transportation. I was trapped. I figured I’d see how the next few days would be before deciding to jump ship.

The experience was filled with ups and downs. The property was gorgeous with views of rolling hills and a small town in the distant with the church tower. He had a quite a few animals running around the property. I met two local expat friends at the pool one day. We had wine together and shared all of our meals. I listened to all of his stories intently. I cleaned all of the dishes for us and any guests staying in the house or visitors that stopped by. He asked that my main manual labor task be to scrub way the small black specs of fly crap on each of the window panes in the entire manor house, both interior and exterior. Of course, at first he said he just wanted me to clean the windows with Windex and paper towels. However, after asking him if there was something specific he was looking for, he pointed out the fly crap and showed me that you have to scrape it off with your fingernails. I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me originally. So, this seemingly simple task of spraying Windex became a 6 hour OCD fingernail-scraping spree. I spent 3 hours over two days scraping window panes (the first and third day). I estimate that I scraped 150-200 window panes. On the second day, he said we would not be working that day so that we could just hang out by the pool. However, his wifi was broken and I spent 3 hours diagnosing and fixing his wifi. If you take into account the companionship for each meal he had originally asked for, plus my 3 hours of work over three days, I believe I worked 5 hours a day. Believe me, listening to his stories during our meals was absolutely work. I would have much rather eaten by myself.

Most of his stories were about previous Workawayers who stayed at his property who were simply awful and could not complete a single task and were just bad, bad, bad. At this point, I knew the guy was weird and had some communication issues but I couldn’t believe that all of his Workawayers sucked this badly. He explained how they did know how to wash a dish or pull weeds and would mope around and do nothing. His profile had such good reviews too! He explained that he would write good reviews for these Workawayers so that they would write good reviews for him. I discovered that the references for my Workaway experience were now completely false.

Throughout all of this there were awful overly touchy moments. When I rejected his offer to sleep with him one night, the next morning he lost it on me. I had just finished scraping my final set of window panes for three hours (going up and down ladders and reaching all of the high windows). He said I could then continue with the window panes for the basement. I said I was done with windows for now and I’d be glad to do something else or take a break. Oh boy. That was a trigger. He asked how many more days I was staying and then did some quick, faulty math. He said that if I wanted to stay for seven days, I would have to do 25 hours of work over 5 days and it had already been 3 days and I had done absolutely no work at all. I’m glad he explained his logic because I knew it would not be worth my time to argue with him. He pretended like I did not scrub all of his window panes with my finger nails. That’s fine! I responded quickly while looking at the train schedule on my cell phone and I asked him to take me to the train station so I could catch the next train out of town.

Suddenly he was very apologetic and very worried about me being upset. He said if I was upset he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night! He wanted to touch me more and demanded that I have a final meal with him and give him a hug. Of course, it was terribly, terribly awkward. I think we talked about Brexit. Who knows.

The car ride back to Macon train station was insane. The guy was driving like a maniac. I could not wait to get out of the car. I was realizing how much danger I put myself in by staying in the remote countryside with a complete stranger. Even though he was listed on a public web site and I would definitely be filing an abuse complaint with Workaway, Workaway was not about to come and save me at the end of the day. When I got out of the car he wanted to hug me again. I told him, “No more touching” and walked away. He yelled back at me, “Wow! Real nice! I hope you didn’t steal anything from the house!”

That’s the end of my Burgundy experience. I sat in the train station for more than an hour in a complete daze. I couldn’t believe what I endured. It wasn’t torture, it was just abuse. I was in such a daze that I completely missed my train. I booked a ticket to Lyon where I saw they had a HI hostel on top of the hill overlooking the city. I was in Lyon a year earlier and felt comfortable there. My friend Andrew, visiting from Australia, happened to be in Lyon at the same time and I originally told him we would not be able to meet because I’d be working in the countryside. Now, I would be able to see a familiar face. I just knew it would help cure me from the creepy Burgundy experience.