Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘France’ Category

We’re definitely planning on going somewhere this evening and as we’re going by car it needs to be within around three or perhaps four hours drive of here.

As of this morning, we have three places in the frame:

Valencia, the front runner from yesterday, has now dropped out as it’s supposed to be raining there tomorrow. No big problem though as we had it pencilled in for later in the year when it gets colder here yet is still quite warm there.

Albi, the former haunt of Toulouse-Lautrec and what looks to be quite a charming little village is also out as the weather is looking a little dodgy there too.

Which leaves Arles looking good. The weather forecast is fine for there and there’s quite a lot to see in the general area too. I’m not sure if we’ll have the time to see it but the Camargue nature reserve is supposed to be really good.

One thing that we hadn’t allowed for was that French style barbeques aim to cook the food French style ie very much undercooked from our point of view.

However, we sort-of assumed that they’d fire up the BBQ in the normal manner with food sizzling on the spit and so on. As usual, we assumed wrong and in fact at tonights BBQ they only had the temperature high enough to merely warm the food rather than actually cook it which, of course, means that we couldn’t cook it as thoroughly as we’d be happy with.

Sit down BBQ meals seem a little odd too.

Oh well, another custom that the French have sort-of taken up.

Whilst we had loads of housebuyers staying with us in 2004 and 2005, 2006 saw none of them at all.

Who knows why? The UK interest rates weren’t much higher than they were the year before nor did there seem to be a big difference in the UK house prices.

It’s the same this year too ie no big difference. Yet, we’re just into the main house-hunting season (usually October to March) and already we’ve had three separate house-buying families call in with us. Whether this is the sign of a major buying spree is a good question but at least it’s a sign of the start of a movement in the French market.

One of the problems with working in the tourist industry is that you’re really busy right through the main holiday season and therefore need to take your own holidays out of season.

That tends to rule out some types of holiday. For instance, many beach destinations are out as they’ll be closed down for the season by the time we’d be able to go. The weather isn’t so dependable out of the holiday season either so we need to take more care about the type of destination we consider.

At the moment, we’re looking into two quite different holidays for ourselves.

The first will probably be late October/early November and for that we’re aiming to do a mini-citybreak. Flight prices drop dramatically by then so we’ve quite a wide choice in principle though as it’s just a short break we don’t want to pay a fortune for the hotels at the other end (which ruled out Venice: the prices were unbelieveable) and also it’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to get a hotel at the airport so that knocks out flights leaving early in the morning.

The second is Christmas which may surprise you. In fact, we are usually empty over the Christmas period as the locals don’t “do” Christmas. Anyway, the net effect of that is that we have a window of around 7-10 days and we’re hoping to go somewhere “Christmasy” for it. Options for that one include Brussels (surprisingly cheap on the hotel front as the bureaucrats have, of course, left for their own holidays) and southern Germany. In principle, we’d have liked to do Edinburgh or London but the flight prices knocked both of them out of the running.

After that? Well, we’ll be full in early January but would like to get away somewhere warm sometime in the late January to early March period to break up the Winter for us.

You might think that the south of France would be ideal for walking holidays and it is, but the Summer months are just too hot for any kind of strenuous activity. There are some walkers around in the Summer of course but generally they have to severely curtail the range that they walk each day.

However, once we get into September it’s one of the best times of the year for it. The days are generally sunny right up until December although the majority of walking holidays are undertaken from around mid-September to the end of October. It’s still warm enough for walking after that but you need to consider the areas that you’ll be passing through as those at higher altitudes can have snow after October.

We’ve just said goodbye to our second party of walkers this week who have just started off on their walk towards Queribus with a view to stopping in Duillac this evening and hitting Peyrepertous tomorrow.