On The Road - Chapter 3
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