October 2006 - Posts
It was at this point that serendipity stepped in. We arrived at lunchtime, and in idling round the now familiar streets of what we both agreed was a town far prettier than its description in various esteemed publications suggests, we happened upon an immo we hadn’t yet visited. We entered, described what we were after, and our budget, to Kevin, and he whisked us off to a maison mitoyenne in a village 20km or so south of St Girons, at 800+ metres of altitude, undoubtedly rural but one of five or six more-or-less vibrant hamlets on the same hillside.
Although the house had little in common with what we’d originally had in mind, it had long since become clear that we’d have to cut our cloth rather more frugally than we had originally hoped. It was, however, a very striking house with an attractive, tall, shuttered frontage, three levels, a layout naturally lending itself to our chambre d’hote plan, a good state of repair requiring barely more than a lick of paint, enough room in the small garden at the back for a vegetable patch and a useful tumbledown lean-to beyond the garden, to be converted into a multi-purpose workshop.
It was also very reasonably priced. Initially, it hadn’t sold, so Kevin had advised the Paris-based vendor to reduce the price fractionally, but apparently there is a French tendency to ignore such advice in the event of an initial failure to sell, and to go down to a pre-ordained base figure, seemingly unrelated to any market value, and it was at this price that we were offered the house. We saw no reason at all to question this unusual but entirely civilised practice, effortlessly embracing another cultural difference, as is our cosmopolitan, model modern European way.
The village itself, although tiny, boasts a higgledy-piggledy rough beauty the equal of many of the Lot and Dordogne honey pots, rambling on up the hillside, culminating in a huge old mansion where the village stops and the forested mountain backdrop to the north starts. Looking south from the house, the top bedroom overlooks the Spanish frontier, and the highest Ariegeois peaks. It is all perfectly beautiful, the upland effect completed by the constant sound of cowbells in the pasture below the village. I certainly can’t do it justice here.
We descended back to St Girons, as the sun set from a perfect blue sky, in unspoken agreement that this was a definite possible. Half an hour later, we left Kevin, promising to return to him with a decision the next morning, and so we did. We then left town, set for Luchon, Bagneres-de-Bigorre, Arreau, and the Haute Pyrenees, leaving our hearts in ‘our’ village, no longer able to focus practically on tramping from immo to immo in these towns, but nevertheless enjoying the scenery (and stealing a look at the Daily Express in a presse in Luchon to sadly discover a 2-1 defeat to the mighty Grimsby Town).
And that’s it really. All tolled, we spent a night in Payrac, three nights in St Girons, two in Tarascon on a campsite next to the Ariege, and one in Arreau in Haute Pyrenees. It was from here that we surprisingly managed to complete the journey back home all in one day, via Tarbes, Pau, Dax and Bordeaux, with a minor navigational glitch in Niort as tiredness set in, darkness fell, and signpost dyslexia took hold.
We therefore spent seven nights sleeping in the back of the Land Rover, and it was going to be eight until, upon reaching Bordeaux in good time on the journey back, we thought we may as well press on home, a decision vindicated by our relatively civilised 9pm arrival back in St Pierre, and the lovely feeling of crawling at last into a proper bed.
Since our return, we’ve been busy doing jobs around the house, designing websites and generally bracing ourselves for winter, and now with the arrival of broadband we can rejoin the 21st Century, which may or may not be a welcome development. We’re also working on what to holler at Carcassonne, Toulouse, Mirepoix and St Girons markets in order to best promote Squidge’s oil paintings to rich English people with impeccably good taste in fine art.
Finally, apropos of nothing, could someone tell me what niche Ecomarche fills in the Intermarche empire? After countless trips to France, and having discussed it at length across the campfire on this last trip (yes we are that interesting), we’re still none the wiser. It’s not economique, being if anything more expensive than Intermarche, and it doesn’t seem to offer anything different from its big brother, so what is it?
The first person to give the correct answer, ie one met with general consensus rather than the usual Living France forum scenario of having twenty ‘definitive’ and definitively different answers, wins a night out with Charlie the Tyre Expert.
Next blog entry to follow very much sooner than this one, now that we have the technology again, with some garbled nonsense on what it’s like to actually live full time in L’hexagone for the first time.
A bientot, Mark
Next day, after another surprisingly luxurious night’s sleep in the back of the car (we were blessed all week with balmy weather, night and day), we started work on the househunting, departing the campsite, parking in town and searching out ‘AriegeImmo’ in time for our 10am appointment. We spent the rest of the morning with Nicky, who took us out into the mountains to look at two houses, one at the very end of the very last hamlet on a very remote lane off the main road running through the Val de Bellongue, west of St Girons, the other down in the valley itself. Neither were what we wanted; the first was a pretty house, indescribably well located in terms of its beautiful surroundings, if not its accessibility (although not as beautifully located, or indeed inaccessible, as a later one), but in need of a total overhaul inside. The selling price alone was over our budget, so when factoring in the cost of renovation, it was far too expensive, and even if we’d been able to afford it, it wasn’t quite right.
The second was huge: six bedrooms, three storeys, enough land to hide a horse (who appeared from his hiding place rather too promptly for comfort as we were wandering round the grounds) and a view from the balcony to surpass that of the first house. But again, it was expensive, bordering on derelict, and clearly not ‘the one’.
We ended the day with another immo, who was this time French, which allowed all parties to practice their French/English where appropriate whilst he drove us to the third house (prompting a mercenary Squidge to realise the possibility of a cheap touring holiday courtesy of a series of immos and their cars, on the pretence of searching for a house). By the time we arrived, it was 6pm, we were at 1000 metres, and the sun was setting over Mont Valier, one of the highest peaks in the Ariege, but nevertheless seemingly in the back garden. The proximity of the house to the highest peaks, the soaring raptors and proper wilderness, as well as its ample size, totally renovated state, impressive frontage and affordable price tag, was utterly seductive, to the extent that we temporarily overlooked the fact that it had no road access (3-4 minute walk from a barely metalled lane), and that no-one else lived within 200 metres of its altitude full time, with the rest of the hamlet consisting solely of maisons secondaires, visited in summer by the city dwellers of Toulouse. It sounds ludicrous now, but it was so stunningly beautiful that we suspended all logic and practicality and temporarily looked upon it favourably as a possibility.
Luckily, over an ironically sobering glass of wine that evening, we figured out why it was so cheap, and the next morning politely told Jean the immo that it was trop haut, at least for a couple of English mountain-living virgins.
So, three seen, none worth offering on, and next day we chugged over two high passes in an ever more dependable Land Rover, who was finally coming into his own on terrain he seemed to revel in, climbing up to 1500m like an ‘assisted’ cyclist, via Seix and Aulus-les-Bains, heading east to Tarascon-sur-Ariege. Having driven through mist, then fog, then steady drizzle, then summer sunshine, then fog worse than the previous fog, or indeed any fog ever delivered from above in the history of fog, and then sunshine again as we came out of the high mountains, we were welcomed into the Val de Vicdessos by a golden eagle chasing something soon-to-perish, flying maybe three to five metres above and in front of our windscreen, its shadow vivid on the tarmac below.
At that point, I forgot about the househunting and was delightedly distracted by the experience for the rest of the day, a state I was able to sustain into the next day, as that next day was Sunday, which would be as likely to see an open immobilier as the city of Manchester would be to see a United supporter. In other words, we had a free day, which we used to read and research in the sun next to the Ariege river, before taking a break from our hitherto exclusively bread, cheese and water diet (and ok a drop of that sobering wine) by treating ourselves to a pizza from a bizarre shed outlet in the Super U car park - high rolling indeed.
Next day, back to work. Tarascon boasts two immobiliers, each within a few doors of the other. We visited both, and by 10am had shrewdly come out of the second without securing a viewing of anything in the area from either. Unfortunately, the town’s relative proximity to Toulouse, and the improvement of the road south of Foix, had recently driven prices up, signalling something of a disparity between the market and our budget.
Thus, having scheduled the day for viewings, we had no reason to stay, and therefore returned to St Girons, with a view to using it as an overnight stopping off point before fruitlessly leaving Ariege and starting the Haute Pyrenees leg of the hunt.
Jack Kerouac eat your heart out.
We’ve been back in the Vendee for a few weeks now after our househunting trip down in the mountains, but I haven’t been able to post this blog entry as soon as intended as we’ve been waiting for the broadband man to sort us out, so apologies for the delay.
To do things a little backwards by summarising at the start, we’ve found a house and had an offer accepted on it, we’ve signed the compromis, and we’re now counting the weeks until we’re invited back down to sign the acte, which should be sometime early next year, so good news indeed, as long as we can figure out how to get snow chains on our hired removal van. Anyway, this is how it all happened….
We’d packed a good deal of celebrating into our last week at work, and had a lovely time with Squidge’s family the following weekend. But by the time we’d driven to St Pierre from St Malo on the following Monday, we were totally shattered, all the while struggling with a full Land Rover, thinking that it would let us down at any moment (at least I thought that).
Squidge’s momentous falling-off-the-veggie-bandwagon, which we’d planned for ages for the ferry, with her choosing the entrecote from the menu, was undoubtedly fun and interesting, as we both anticipated the outcome of each mouthful, but the lustre of the occasion may have been dulled somewhat by our tiredness. To date, incidentally, she doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects from her return to a carnivorous diet.
So all in all, it was a bit stressful, and in hindsight we probably tried to do too much in too short a period of time, but we got here safe and sound and unloaded a very grateful Landy, after which we had a whole day to unpack, take stock, and REST!
However, once again, after an all too brief break, but this time unladen other than with bedding, we headed south, taking lunch on the first day just north of Bellac. The first night was slightly complicated by the fact that, not long after parking at our initial campsite next to the Dordogne in Souillac, and just as we were about to open a bottle, we were told we couldn’t stay there as it was closed for winter. Fortunately, I’d already managed to take a shower (lovely warm water for a closed campsite), so although it was an inconvenience I felt relatively refreshed as we upped sticks and travelled the short distance south to Payrac in a downpour, where, after seeking advice from its friendly, if incomprehensibly heavily-patoised boulanger, we found a small campsite run by a Dutch couple, and settled in the back of the motor for the night under our blankets, amid the trees under a clearing sky.
The next morning, we planned to lunch somewhere just north of Toulouse, as part of what we thought would be a nice easy day, arriving in St Girons at 4ish. This confident assertion was predicated on a growing confidence in the reliability of our lovely Land Rover, and thus we left the campsite, with me actually settling back into the driving seat rather than being hunched over the steering wheel gripping it in readiness for one of any number of perceived imminent motoring disasters.
And then, a whole eight kilometres down the road to Cahors, we heard what sounded like a helicopter approaching and flying very low right over us, but of course it wasn’t - it was a flapping, flipping punctured front pneu.
OK, we thought, a minor inconvenience that won’t cost us any money, we’ll just jack the boy up, fetch the spanner and socket set from the back, replace the wheel and get a new tyre when we get back to the Vendee. However, having searched among the various layers of bedding, it became apparent that the spanner and socket set was back at the farmhouse, and as warm and cosy as our bedding was, it was entirely useless at removing the nuts from our stricken wheel.
It was at this point that our luck changed, and held, for the rest of the day. A couple of those orange local authority vehicles were crawling along the other side of the road, seemingly assessing whether the hedges needed trimming or not. Having realised that we were in le merde to an extent, I flagged them down without really knowing how they could help, but they stopped, listened to our predicament and sympathetically nodded and hmm’ed when they could easily have laughed out loud at our stupidity. Then, after they’d each enthusiastically, manfully and, in one case womanfully, had a bash at removing the wheel with their singularly inappropriate hedge-styling equipment, the senior hedge-height assessor leapt into his van and drove off to the local garage to fetch the mechanic.
After a convoluted and slightly surreal passing-the-time-while-waiting-for-the-mechanic conversation about McDonalds vs French cuisine, Northampton, English beer and the engine size of the Land Rover with the residual hedge assessors (one of whom spoke the same impenetrable Midi-langue as the boulanger), a BMW screeched to a halt next to us. Ah, the mechanic, we thought, although we were surprised by the mode of transport. But no, it was Charlie (name changed to protect the bumptious), an Englishman abroad, scarily keen to help his countryman and woman, especially as he had crossed Australia in a Land Rover a few years back, replacing something like 857 tyres in the process. Confused by Charlie’s arrival and the developing situation, the hedge assessors departed, slowly, down the road, replaced in moments by the mechanic, who was equally nonplussed by Charlie’s role in the whole scenario, especially when l’anglais leapt underneath Landy and alongside the mechanic as he jacked it up, bellowing at us from his prone position about the benefits of inflatable jacks.
After a while, as Charlie, the car and the baffled-yet-heroically-stoic mechanic consummated their ménage a trois, the flat was replaced with the spare, and we drove off to the garage for a new inner tube in convoy: us and Landy, the mechanic in his little Suzuki, and Charlie, bringing up the rear in his BMW, anxious to impart advice upon arrival at the garage, and keen to keep a close eye on the shifty Frenchies, lest we were ripped off, poor young innocents that we were.
This soap opera was acted out over the course of the morning, so that on arrival at the garage, all work stopped for midday and lunch. The mechanic sloped off home, Charlie, with a screech of tyres, departed, ironically for the Pyrenees and Pau, and we were left with two hours to kill in the middle of nowhere.
But by 2.30pm, we were back on the road, five hours delayed, several euros lighter, but undoubtedly richer for the experience, and after a blissfully uneventful remainder of the day, we arrived in St Girons well before dusk.