Lounging in the Loire valley

After Norway, I flew down to France to spend a few days in my friend's family's chateau in the Loire valley. Two of our other friends, Russ and Julie, joined us there as well.  The house is just beautiful. Best of all, my friend's father has a fantastic and absolutely huge wine cellar.  In addition to drinking wine (and eating cheese and grilled sardines and blood sausage), we tooled around visiting castles and wineries.  It was lovely.   

One of the first nights in the chateau, a hornet the size of my fist (OK, I'm exaggerating a little, but not by much) got into my room.  I heard this tremendously loud buzzing sound as I was getting ready for bed, and thought it was some kind of machinery noise.  I didn't realize it was a hornet until it whizzed past my head.  I took one look at the thing and knew there was no way that it and I could co-exist in the same room for a night.  However, I wasn't quite sure what to do about it.  For one, it was buzzing around the ceiling, which was about 15 feet high, and for another, I was absolutely terrified of it.  Luckily my friends had not yet gone to bed, so I went down the hall to confer with them.  They all came in and we stood silently watching the thing buzz around for a minute or two.  Finally, Julie said, "Can't you just ignore it and go to sleep?"  Russ, her husband, said, "Honey, I wouldn't be able to sleep with that thing in the room."  But what to do?  Hitting it with a newspaper would just piss it off (hitting it with a cannonball would probably just piss it off).    

Finally, my friend Virginia, whose parents owned the chateau, recalled that this had happened once before, and they'd used a long vacuum hose to suck the thing up while keeping a safe distance. We located the vacuum, but frankly, I was too terrified to go near the damn hornet, and so was my friend Virginia.  So Virginia and I hid behind various pieces of furniture, screaming every time the hornet swooped down in our direction, while Julie and Russ chased after the hornet with the vacuum.  All of us were laughing and screeching so much it was a bit of a miracle they got him, but at last they did, and Russ sprayed a bit of bug killer down the hose for good measure.