On the Move

By yesterday, Sunday, we'd started the process of sorting out what things we need for living, and what things we can store and forget (despite the fact that we tried to get rid of everything we didn't need when we moved out here). So I started the move to John and Lesley's house with the most important things first, the wine store.

Today, Monday, we were up early, to make sure that our things were out of the lounge. Cyrille had told us that we had a week before the floor disappeared, but...........by mid morning we had 2 men starting to rip up the lounge floor! It seems that the end part of the lounge floor has beams running at right angles to the rest of the floor, and these beams are sitting on the wall they want to knock down.

In the middle of all of this, JJ and Nadine finally finished getting all of their things in their car, the house shut up and they left for winter in Paris. So now we are all of the inhabitants of Mas de Bouye.

We have spent the rest of the day taking everything we think that we need for day to day living, down the road to our new 'holiday' home. Whilst all of this was happening, our girls (cats) were shut up in our bedrooms. They don't like all of this noise, dust and confusion. Sue has also been busy wrapping sheets around bannisters, over sofas, and trying to protect anything that looks like it could suffer from claw-damage.

By the end of the day the 'lounge' end of the house had been gutted. We are a bit shell-shocked as well.

However, the day also saw us broadening our experience of french cuisine. Knowing that it would be difficult this evening to organise a decent meal, Sue suggested that we went off at lunchtime to our local restaurant in St. Germain. So, in our working clothes, off we went and joined a restaurant full of workmen taking their statutary 2 hour 'proper' lunch. For starter we had a buffet selection from a huge range of cold dishes, although we subsequently realised that we could have helped ourselves to a bowl of soup first! A bottle of water and a small carafe of red wine (enough for 2 glasses each) was on the table, and we then had the most wonderful roast pork with garlic potatoes. We saw some people having cheese, and, when we were offered (but refused) the cheese, we realised that this was in addition to the puddings and not instead. Puddings were again 'help-yourself' and Sue saw some hungry workmen have 3 on one plate. All of this for 11.50 euros each. Absolutely unbelievable value for such good quality food. Sue started muttering that it wasn't worth the bother of shopping and cooking, at least whilst we are in the little cottage. I must admit that it won't be a hardship to go for lunch 2 or 3 times a week! But, there is one problem with this idea. You have to go back to carry on working in the afternoon; not easy with a very full stomach. Going to have to watch the waistline as well.