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Welcome to
'Our
French Adventures'
The first episode
of our new page on which we will try to give you a taste of our life in
France. |
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As many of our
regular customers will now know we are now in France. We arrived in late March,
complete with the children, a van, the everyday car and our 1952 Riley RME, affectionately known as Roxy. |
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At the end of
April we had packed all our belongings onto the back of a huge
articulated lorry, we started at 9am and were confident of being
finished by early afternoon. This was to be our first experience of the
way things work in France as it was not long before the lorry driver
announced that there was no rush, after all we had all day. We were
still packing in the dark at 9pm! The loading was exhausting but in the
main went well. |
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Last to go on was
Roxy, we had decided to ship her on the back of the lorry as the company
we chose had removable ramps to load and unload cars.
At the time
of booking they hadn't told us that it would take about an hour to fix,
and afterwards detach, the ramps. I finally took my position inside Roxy
in order to drive her up the ramps, there were initially some concerns
about whether a car of 50+ years of age would make it up the ramps as a
nearly new Fiat Punto had recently failed and had to be pushed up!
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The gearing in
older cars is much different from modern cars and Roxy ambled up with no
problem at all - except that when nearly at the top, with two people
carefully watching to check that the wings and running boards didn't
ground the new exhaust caught on the ramp and was ripped apart (I've
still got to fix that). Aside from that the trip down was not
uneventful: I broke the crown on one of my teeth when we stopped for
lunch (I still haven't had that fixed), the van wouldn't re-start when
we stopped for diesel on the motorway - no problem I said we have RAC
European cover... a phone call later the RAC said ah, yes but it only
covers the car and not the van in Europe. |
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The filling
station assistant suggested call the gendarmerie to help however, after
towing it around the car park a few times we managed to re-start it. We
just made it to our destination, several hours later without running out
of fuel although the van threatened to over heat a couple of times and
since our arrival has totally refused to start whether towed or
otherwise (another job). |
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The last couple of
months have been a frantic mix of house hunting, form-filling and
producing copious amounts of documents for everything ....I'm sure one
day we will be asked for our passports, birth certificates, marriage
certificate and bank statements before we are allowed to use the public
conveniences!!!! The French do love their paperwork, in fact for the
first couple of weeks we spent nearly as many hours in our new bank as
we did at home - and that was just to open a bank account, we were even
locked in - twice. In fact on the last occasion the lady with whom we
had the appointment had forgotten her keys, the bank was closed and
everyone had gone for lunch - she had to telephone the bank manager to
come and let us out! |
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Things are now
beginning to assume some form of normality, the children have finally
started school and despite all our worries came out at the end of the
first day and announced they didn't want to come home. They had stood in
front of the class getting them to repeat words in English, gone to the
local gymnasium to play basketball as well as a few of the more mundane
lessons. We had initially tried to enrol the children in their new
school at the Mairie (the Mayor's office) only to be told that in our
local town you have to enrol at the school.....finally after a tour of
the school, a trip to the headmasters office (I remember those days) and
the production of numerous documents, the children were enrolled at
last. We enquired about the school lunches...ah yes, you have to buy
tickets for that....at the Mairie! School lunches comprise three
courses, to give you an idea yesterday was a salad to start, followed by
veal steaks with salsify and lots of bread of course and then a creme
caramel. Today it was cold meats to start, then hake with a prawn sauce
followed by Ile flottant (soft meringues floating on a creme anglaise
sauce) - I wish I could buy lunch tickets! |
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Check back soon to
read more of our adventures in France...the brocante's, the
boulangerie's, some eventful house hunting trips and more......a bientot. |
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