Another Fine weekend…

Flying Easyjet from Gatwick this week put me in La Rochelle at lunchtime on Friday which meant getting home by about 3:00pm Frenchtime, making for a relaxed start to the weekend.

Franca’s mum is still with us and an extra pair of hands for the garden or just entertaining Fleur is always welcome. The weather has finally turned summery with temperatures reaching 38 degrees on Saturday and Sunday in our sun trap, though I have to say it was a bit fresh this morning, which was a welcome break from the heat, as long as it only lasts a little while. In true Charentaise style, Monday is the worst day of the week according to the weather forecast. It happens so often that a fine weekend is followed by a breakdown of the weather Sunday night or Monday morning, and then it builds up again towards the following weekend.

The sun flowers are just starting to reach their peak about now with fields of yellow dotted amongst the vineyards and the newly harvested corn fields. The show only lasts about 6 weeks before they turn from the icon of the countryside into the eyesore of the countryside, as the sunflowers are left to dry out before harvesting. It’s a busy time in the French agricultural business, and that can be seen by the fact that the farmers are working 7 days a week, and all the daylight hours they can.

We had a nice easy weekend with our guests, Porte Bon Heur was occupied by a lovely Belgian couple who have friends in Sigogne, and so they basically used our house as a place to sleep, we did not even have to provide breakfast. Franca’s mum had Tournesol, and for one night only we had the guest from hell, who stayed out all night until 6:00am, Franca had said he could check out at 12:00 instead of the usual 11:00 but still he was late, when he finally appeared, wanting breakfast, it was 1:00pm, No chance, so he had a coffee and went back to his room to shower and was then on his grumbling and moaning way. This guy did not book, he just turned up on spec, and rule number 1 of running a B&B is not to take walk ins, i.e. people that have not booked in advance, so we have learnt our lesson on that one. Having said that our only other walk in were a charming French couple, so there is always an exception to every rule.

Building work this weekend was obviously curtailed slightly due to having guests in the house though I did manage, with Franca and Franca’s mums help, get the old scullery completely cleared, and one third of the ceiling removed to allow me to start to install the new, stronger floor joists to form the floor of the first floor bathroom/ceiling of the ground floor bathroom. It is not difficult work though it is pretty heavy work, so I only managed to install 2 new joists, with the delays caused by waiting for guests to leave, and me figuring the best way to do things, this was the first time I have done anything like this. So next weekend, I will try to get the other six joists installed, but that does depend if Bogdan has cleared the rest of the upstairs prospective bathroom, because he is using the other two thirds of the floor area as a storeroom. My summer task is to get the bathrooms ready for fitting out towards the end of September.

Back at La Rochelle airport this Monday morning for the return Easyjet flight to London Gatwick before heading up to Stansted to catch a flight to Ireland, hopefully there will be no repeat of my last visit to Ireland from France.

Where old meets new

14 Juillet; in our street

14th July....Bastille weekend celebrations!!

The 14th of July is probably the biggest day of the year in France as far as celebrations go, bigger than Christmas and New Year, celebrating or commemorating the start of the French Revolution, when 7 prisoners were freed from the Bastille in Paris.

This year in our village everything started on the 12^th of July. The village festival committee have been busy all year working on creating a two day extravaganza of eating, drinking, and dancing for the evenings, and during the day time there was a celebration of all things agricultural and mechanical from yesteryear.

There were demonstrations of harvesting wheat through the ages, from the time when wheat was harvested by hand to the latest in combine harvesters, and everything in between. We even had an old portable bakers oven from the 60's (it could have been earlier) to bake the bread. They have not worked out how to grind the grain into flour yet (but I'm sure they will) which would complete the process of ground to table and all done in one field, but otherwise they showed the whole process from beginning to end and they did a great job.

This was our second ‘Fete de Batages’ and it was every bit as good as the first, and since we are no longer strangers it was even more enjoyable. It is always interesting to see how different people celebrate, and it was good to be enjoying ourselves amongst friends, even though for the majority of the time I was struggling to understand what people were saying. It appears I have to go through this pain barrier when I learn a new language so maybe by next year I will be able to have a proper conversation.

It was also a weekend of firsts for Fleur, as she got a bit more freedom from her parents. We were not chasing after her every five minutes to find out where she was, though to be fair most of the time she was by our side any way. It was her first big party with adults, complete with a huge disco rig and dance floor, so once she got over her shyness you could not keep her off the dance floor.

More than 400 of us sat down on Saturday night to a 4 course meal of soup, ham, beans and salad, cheese and apple tart. Each course was interspersed with dancing, which started off with older style French music for the more senior diners, but as we progressed through the courses so, in each musical set the amount of more traditional music got less and the disco tracks increased, in quantity and volume. Once the desert had been consumed there was an exodus of the older members of the village seeking some peace and quiet, and, at it was past midnight, no doubt their beds as well. After the older folk made their exit there was a procession of mainly fathers carrying small sleeping children to their beds. We made it to 1:30, before it was our turn to take our, happy tired, but still awake little one to her bed, though I still had to carry her the length of the village, to get her home.

Sunday saw the procession of tractors around the village lead by 2 shire horses pulling a tradition hay wane, being a farming community it is only natural that the celebrate their past, and for those of us who are new comers it is very interesting, though the hour long presentation of the qualities and history of each of more than 40 tractors was rather too long, especially if you don’t understand the jokes. In one form or another this celebration was repeated all over France on what is the biggest party weekend of the year for the French.

Today is the 14^th July its self and I am back at Bordeaux airport to go to work while the French nation sleep off their collective hangovers. Though I did see a large group of dedicated athletes getting ready to ‘run’ the Jarnac 10K although I guessing at the 10K bit, its not the Jarnac marathon because that happens at the end of October or the beginning of November. It was good to see I was not the only one up early on a Bank Holiday.

One wierd foot note to the weekend was an advert I heard on the French radio station as I drove to the airport, in English for a shopping centre in Bordeaux which was going to be open on the bank holiday, what an enditement on the English way of life. The advert was then repeated in French so I guess they are starting to catch us up, heaven forbid....

We are family...

Having survived my planes trains and automobiles day on Monday and worked the rest of the week in Ireland, on Friday I headed for Dublin airport to Fly to Holland for what turned out to be a busy round of visiting and meeting friends in Franca’s home city, Rotterdam. I arrived from Ireland during the afteroon without incident, apart from forgetting to collect my luggage from the carrousel, luckily I was still at the airport when I remembered. I got to Rotterdam early enough to walk with Franca’s mum to the station to meet Franca and Fleur who came up from France by train, an 8 hour journey on 3 trains, one taxi and a lift from a friend.

No time for a lay in though as Saturday morning was shopping morning for the party we were giving on Sunday afternoon for our Dutch friends.

Saturday afternoon was an exciting afternoon for Franca, as we went to see a half brother that she did not know she had until very recently. After an odd, getting to know you, hour or so it turned in a lovely afternoon and evening, discovering parts of Franca’s family that we were previously not aware of. I think as things stand Franca’s ‘new’ brother and his family will be firm friends… indeed just like family. Franca's brother turns out to be a good cook and in fact went to hotel school, before embarking on another career, so he could probably teach us a thing or two about our business, and he will no doubt have an opportunity to do so before the end of the year work permitting.

On Sunday afternoon we had a little party at Franca’s mums house for our Dutch friends, many of whom have already been to see us in France, and have even helped us working on the house, so that was good fun catching up with people we had not seen for ages, and as is the Dutch tradition we, and Fleur in particular, got lots of lovely presents, which made the suitcases somewhat heavier on the return trip to France.

On Sunday evening we went out to dinner with the witnesses to our wedding, they are the equivalent of best man/chief bridesmaid in English terms. We went to a Spanish tapas bar/restaurant, which was great fun with live music from a strolling trio, making for a lovely atmosphere, and a fun evening.

I am more or less convinced that as far as the food goes I am unimpressed with the Spanish tapas, not a patch on a Greek meze, but then that is probably just down to my taste, after all you can’t like everything. When you go to Spain the food tastes completely different, this from the man who has not got further than Santander, but they cook a mean paella there.

Then on Monday morning at 5:00am I was back in the car to drive to Amsterdam airport to catch a flight back to London to go to work…

My trains planes and automobiles moment…

So what was I trying to do, get from my home in SW France to Limerick in Ireland. The plan was to get the TGV Train from Angouleme to Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, the fly to Dublin in Ireland and drive to Limerick.

All started well enough and my wife and daughter got me to the station at Angouleme in plenty of time to for the for 6:38 TGV departure and the train duly departed on time. The first hint of trouble was when a school party got on the train, they must have been coming from or going on a very long trip as they had more luggage than I have ever seen before. However the train arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport on time and by some miracle I got off the train before the school party.

So I took out my internet booking for my flight to find out where I have to go to check in, as there are three terminals at Charles de Gaulle. There was nothing on my print out, in fact all it said was Paris to Dublin, so was I even at the right airport? I quickly found an information desk and they pointed me to Terminal 1 Now I was in Terminal 2 and for those that do not know CDG airport, Terminal 1 is at the opposite end of the airport, infact you must pass through Terminal 3 to get to Terminal 1. This meant a 5 minute trip on the transit. So a quick dash to the transit, but no problem we should still make it on time. However when I got to the transit the platform was heaving, and more people were being taken off of a train that was in the platform, and what looked like the fire service were checking the train over. So having got down to platform level I had to wait about 20 minutes before I could even get on a transit. Now I knew it was going to be tight, I had given myself 25 minutes to get to the check in desk, it was tight but that was the best I could do without leaving home the day before.

So having waited 20 minutes to get on the transit I only had 5 minutes left to reach the check in, this train seemed to know I was in a hurry and at each stop the doors closed after only being open for about 20 seconds which was not long enough for those wanting to get on and off so lots shouting and stopping the train from proceeding to allow families friends and luggage to be re united meant that instead of taking 4 minutes to get to Terminal 1 it took 10 minutes, I was now in trouble. Sure enough my fears were confirmed, the check in desk had closed and all the personnel teleported elsewhere so no way to blag my way to getting checked in. This is the first time I have ever missed a flight, so what to do now.

I decided to go to the Gard du Nord and take the Eurostar to London where I would have several options to catch up with myself from various London airports. The Eurostar journey was great, on time departure and on time arrival, I even made it to a meeting in person in London that I was due to teleconference into from Ireland. After the meeting I got onto the internet and found a flight to Shannon leaving at 18:10 from Stansted, as it was only 15:30 I thought that flight would be easy to make so I headed over to Liverpool Street station to get the train to Stansted. First of all after they got us all onto the train they changed the platform so we had to make the dash to the new train, so already late leaving Liverpool Street, then as we reached Tottenham Hale we were told the train in front of us had broken down and once they had off loaded the passengers at the next station, we could proceed, but we had to pick up those passengers and stop at an extra station on the way to Stansted. So in the end I arrived at Stansted on train that took an hour and 10 minutes to do a 45 minute journey, but no problem I still got to the check in with 10 minutes to spare. Then I discover the horrible truth that I had pushed the wrong button on my computer when making my internet booking. Instead of booking a flight for the 30th June (my inteneded day of travel), I had booked it for the 30th July, so I had to go and get the ticket changed, and of course once I had to do that there was no way I would get that flight.

Not a big problem as there is a later flight, so at the ticket desk I got my ticket changed for the later flight, rearranged my car hire and phoned the hotel to say I would be a late arrival. I then went off to get something to eat drink and read for my 3 hour wait before the check in opened for the last flight to Shannon at 21:45. I was so engrossed in my book that I did not see the check in desk open so I joined the queue to check in and after 15 minutes it was my turn to check in, and you guessed it another problem. This time when I changed my ticket at the ticket desk they only changed the time of the flight not the date! and the price to change the ticket to the correct day was more than £200.00, so expensive that it was not worth doing. So I hired a car and drove back to my parents for the night and booked myself very carefully on to the 1st flight from Stansted to Shannon the next morning for £35.00, so even with the car hire charge of £42.00 it was still cheaper than changing the ticket. Once again I re arranged the car hire and called the hotel to tell them I would not be arriving until the next day.

So that was my Trains planes and automobiles day, I tried and failed to get onto 3 flights, was delayed by 2 local trains which all led to 1 frustrating day.

I have to say thanks to Avis for being so patient as I kept ringing up and changing my booking as the day unfolded and also to the Kilmurray Hotel in Limerick who said I did not have to pay for my missed night, and credit to the TGV & Eurostar for on time journeys. Just one foot note regarding the TGV I still do not understand their seat booking policy, in theory you cannot get on unless you have a booked seat, but there are never enough seats to go round, and in fact on one journey my seat did not exist, so perhaps that’s the way they do it.

I am now sitting on a plane to Shannon and will be arriving in Ireland in time to start work at 9:30 in Limerick, what a difference a day makes…

Fun in the Sun

Well last weekend was amazing, wall to wall sunshine the whole way from the moment I arrived to the moment I left. It was the hottest day of the year so far and we basically stayed outside for the whole weekend only going inside to sleep.

We got the small pool out for Fleur and filled it up and within 2 hours the water was nice and warm, warm enough for mum and dad to play in the pool as well, though not enough room for three so we took it in turns, and of course Fleur loved it, and we actually managed to wear her out, and ourselves too.

I managed to get sun burned, as us Brits do, even Franca was red towards the end of the day and she never burns. The weekend before we went out and bought a small barbeque so we were able to cook and eat outside on Saturday night, so all in all a wonderful day, and I did not do any work on the house. This is one of the reasons why we came to live here, you could say we got a good glimpse of the dream we are working towards.

On Sunday, which was even hotter than Saturday, I had to stay out of the sun due to my sunburn, and so I started to tackle the plumbing in the new laundry room first by cutting the hole in an old work top we had laying around and fitting a new sink in, then working on the pipe work. As usual it took longer than I thought so by then time I was forced to stop work by my daughter I had only managed to plumb in the waste, and even there I have under estimated how much pipe work was required, so that has to be finished on my next visit.