Booking.com... Booking.meh...!

So yesterday me and Mme MB left for our weekend in the Yvelines. It was a bit on the chilly side, but we stopped off in Limours to have a picnic on a park bench. Before heading south to Dourdan (which is actually in our region, the Essonne), to see the chateau there.
After that we headed west to Rambouillet, where my photo was taken, of another chateau after we wandered around the beautiful gardens. Lots of Autumn colours. 
I had a bit of a choice of photos to use from the places we stopped at, but I thought that it would be good to use this one of the chateau in Rambouillet. The filter makes me think of typical old French postcards.

Afterward we headed north to Dampierre, there is a chateau there too, but it was late afternoon and the dull dark weather made it pointless to take photos. So we decided to move on to the gite we had booked through booking.com

However... when we had booked the day before, although we had paid and our bank put the transaction through it's online security/validation, we never received a confirmation. The transaction didn't appear on our account either.
So we tried too contact the gite owner, but there was no telephone number on the entry on booking.com. In the end we decided to leave anyway for our weekend.

Mme MB had used the contact form to tell the gite owner we'd be there around 6pm. We arrived a bit early, at 5.15pm. Once we arrived in front of the house at the right address, we rang the bell at the gate. We saw a dog barking at the window, otherwise there was no sign of life.
After 30 mins we needed to answer the call of nature, as is usual in France, public toilets are not something you see very often out in the sticks. So we drove about 10 mins out into the countyside to do what was needed.
We then decided to try and contact booking.com by phone to ask about the lack of confirmation/transaction. It took us ages to find a number, which was in the UK. Then we were on hold for around 5 minutes before an operator answered. Who was apparently in Hong Kong. I left Mme MB to talk, but then she struggled with the accent of the person on the phone. So I took over. They eventually got the gist of why we called and suggested we go back to see if the gite owner was there. Apparently they called them and got an answerphone in French, which they couldn't understand.

We drove the 10 minutes back there, and tried ringing the bell again. By this time it was dark and it was obvious that no one was home. booking.com called us back, it was the same operator, who suggested they send us an email with the contact details (phone number) of the gite owner. That didn't come through, so we had to note down the details on a piece of paper. Then we suggested that it would be a good idea if they could give us a reference number for the call. Which they couldn't do, but the operator kindly gave us her personal email address, so we could follow it up with her and not with some new person (where we would have to explain everything all over again!)

Mme MB called the number we were given and lo and behold we got an answerphone message. So she left one explaining everything.

We decided to go over to Dampierre to find a restaurant, then go home. Once we got there, we couldn't find many open and those that were, were posh expensive places. So we came back to the Essonne and found a Buffalo Grill in Brétigny, about 10km from home.

By this time I had decided to keep quiet, as I was really annoyed and felt like I would lose my temper. I think the restaurant calmed me down a bit (even if the meal wasn't brilliant... re-heated jacket potato and some of the meat was a bit cold. A server told us that they sometimes reheat the jacket potatoes from lunchtime). The woman from booking.com emailed us from her personal address to ask if there was any progress. So I replied, that we'd had to leave a message with the gite owner.

Then we went home... Both of us knackered. I suppose I was annoyed as I work on Saturdays, so it'll be a while before we're able to do a weekend like this again (it had been very rare we went off on a weekend anyway). Next time we'll book a hotel (which I had suggested anyway). Ho...hum...

No news from the gite owner yet...