An international evening

Another first for me in commuting terms, I am sitting at La Rochelle airport and it its 8:45 on a Sunday morning and I’m once again waiting Mr O Leary’s air-bus back to Stansted. August is definitely a strange travel month, and I’m at La Rochelle now trying to keep the price of my weekends down a bit, so I am saving about €150.00 by taking this flight instead of the Sunday evening flight from La Rochelle to Stansted.

I arrived in Sigogne on Thursday evening so I still had 2 full days here, its just that one day was a full work day, for my weekday job as opposed to my weekend job. Friday evening ‘after work’, we had some visitors and what started out as a reasonably quiet weekend for the B&B turned into quite a busy one. Our visitors were a Belgian couple and their two dogs who had ‘discovered’ us via Franca’s blog, they don’t live that far from us, in French terms at least, so they came over for an aperitif. At the same time we had guests from Paris coming to stay with us for the weekend having booked at the last minute. They had asked if they could come early to drop off their things, but in the end they did not arrive until about 7:00pm, we thought maybe we had a no show on our hands, but luckily not. So whilst we sat chatting with Jan and Simonne the Parisiens arrived, so they joined us for an aperitif, then Franca got a phone call from another B&B, asking if we had a room for guests they could not accommodate, and so 20 minutes late a car with Italian plates arrived with a very nice Italian family, then 5 minutes later their friends came too (though not to stay). So suddenly Jan remarked just how international this gathering was. When we looked at it, we had Belgians, Dutch, French, English and Italians in the garden. This was amazing because, to us, this is what running the B&B is all about. It only lasted a moment as all the guests then dispersed for their evening meals and left just the Belgians Dutch & English to carry on chatting.

Jan and Simonne are a lovely couple, they have two dogs which are equally lovely, and well behaved, though because they were a bit big, and one was particularly bouncy it took Fleur a while to get used to them. She is still wary (scared is the wrong word) of young bouncy dogs as they do things unpredictably, but in the end she was walking the oldest one around the garden, and asking us again if she could have a dog. So it was a lovely evening, even though I have to admit to struggling to understand Jan and Simonne's Belgian accent at times, and I believe we have an invitation to a barbeque in September at their house, to look forward to. I have to say thanks also for the very original presents too, which we will be tucking into soon.

With guests in the house it is difficult to get work done, especially as I was in charge of our quick change around on Saturday morning, in charge is a big word, Franca said I should clean the room the Italians were using, because I can do it faster. We were due to receive a family who had asked to check in at 11:00 as they had a family lunch to go to. All went well and the Italians left on time giving me 45 minutes to get the room ready for the next guests, so no problems there. In the afternoon I had planned to put up the main support for the joists for the new floor in the garage, I thought this would take a couple of hours to do because I didn’t know until I started drilling, what the wall was made of. In the event the wall was solid and the support went up in half an hour, so I also managed to install 6 of the eight joists, so for once I am a bit ahead of schedule.

Saturday night was a nice lazy evening, no cooking to do as all our guests were eating out, and so we just have some standard food, with the luxury of sitting down together, just the three of us, and after dinner we just played some games with Fleur and listened to some music, and were generally lazy, it was nice to do , a change from the hustle and bustle we have been going through recently.

Well the plane has arrived so time to join the boarding scrum….