La Rentrée is the term the French use for going back to school at the start of a new school year, and I am heading back to the UK to re-start work as Fleur begins her new school year.
My three weeks are up and I have actually already made the long trek back to the UK, giving myself a day to adjust to the idea of being back in the UK and going to work. Setting off at 5:30 I managed to reach Calais at 11:45. The roads were empty so without pushing it I made good time with one stop for re-fuelling. It was surprisingly busy on the roads around Sigogne at 5:30 in the morning, I thought I would be the only car on the road, it being a Saturday, but no, it was quite busy. Luckily the motorways were very quiet, mainly full of British cars heading back for the start of the new school year in the UK. I did notice there were still a lot of British and Dutch cars heading south, as one friend said, its time for the wrinklies to come out. September can often have the best weather of the summer, the days are still long but the seering heat has now retreated south over the Mediterranean sea, leaving us with pleasant warmth to get out and about in, its a good month to visit France, he says giving tourist industry a plug, and of course coming to stay at Au Bellefleur.
Looking back at the three weeks we have not achieved everything we wanted to do, and we have done some things we did not expect to do so I am pretty pleased with progress so far. We are ready for the next phase of building to begin on the 10th of September and I should have the wall stripped by the time they come to start on room 3 sometime in October. Our Dutch builder Peter is back in the saddle though still not 100% yet but he will be working with Christian and Jean-Luc on room 2 whilst he builds his strength back up, then hopefully he will be ready to take on the double bathroom build in October when we reach room 3.
The pain of me leaving for the UK has been lessened by the arrival of Fleur's Oma (Franca's mother) from Rotterdam for a couple of weeks. Her arrival has coincided with the 4 day Frairie festival in Sigogne which starts on Thursday 6th September, what is going to take place we are not really sure as this is our first year, but there is going to be a brocante, live music and dancing, food, wine pressing demonstrations (the old fashioned way with your feet) and many other things, so when we have recovered we will let you know what it was all about. Sunday also sees horse racing in Jarnac so being a bit of a fan of the turf we will take a break from the festivities in Sigogne to go and see how many euros we can win... or loose.
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