Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Mas Camps News’ Category

This place is something of a crossroads and is quite a convenient jumping off point for Toulouse, Montpellier and Barcelona.

Anyway, having exhausted the shops in Perpignan on Monday (it’s a pretty small place), we thought we’d try a little further afield. So, Tuesday it was off to Barcelona or rather we were aiming for Badalona which is a bit to the north of the city but didn’t make it (our navigation in Barcelona is rubbish). Still, we ended up in one of the many large shopping centres dotted around the city and picked up a nice little stereo for the hotel, a brilliant little electronic Spanish-English dictionary for my course next year (the DBE118: the equivalent of carrying round the Collins dictionary but weighing in at a couple of ounces instead of several pounds!) and a heap of shopping (we bought our first “proper” bread for months and months and proper baked beans at sensible prices too).

This is Wednesday, so it was Montpellier’s turn. Total writeoff I’m afraid as we’re just not familiar enough with the city to find what we were looking for. Still, we did the trip in a lot less time than expected and will likely be there again in late January for the hotel fair.

We don’t think we can face travelling to Toulouse tomorrow so it’s off to Auchan in Perpignan instead (it’s a massive supermarket that seems to have everything you could possibly want).

This’ll probably be the last newsletter before Christmas, so Merry Christmas one and all.

And seeing as it’ll likely be the last newsletter before the New Year (due to the imminent arrival of the French family on the 31st), Happy New Year too!!

If you cast your mind back to early October, you may recall me saying that I’d be back for the resit of the French exam next October. Well, yesterday those plans were thrown into disarray when I passed it! Not even the best that I was expecting October which was a just past the post 40% but a nice comfortable 60%!! Anyway, that means that I’ll be over in Belfast for the graduation instead (May 21st I think).

We’re in the midst of our winter upgrade of the rooms and facilities, or at least planning for it alongside the preparations for the end of year booking. Anyway, as part of that we made our very first technology installation in the rooms this afternoon: a clock/radio. Separately from that, we are hoping to install TVs and DVD players in the main rooms over the next couple of weeks as they’re on sale at the moment (69‚€ for the TV, 49‚€ or the DVD). We also managed to acquire a settee for the reading room which should be turning up on Saturday.

I’m still a bit staggered by the OU news.

The other week, it was the septic tank causing us problems, now it’s the turn of the well….

We own two water sources: a spring which was used up to two owners ago and a well which the last guy switched over to. It saves us having to pay the equivalent of the water rates but it’s not “free” as we need to maintain the pumping equipment etc. Normally, it’s fine apart from very busy days in the summer and also in september when the winery are using lots and lots of water; at those times, all that needs doing is to make sure the storage tank is full in the morning which we do by flicking the pump off and on (don’t know why, but it switches off after a while and before the tank is full).

Anyway, things were going fine ’til 2 or 3 days ago when every night we ran completely out of water (the first time ever!) and had to do the flicking thing. That time actually co-incided with the arrival of the grand-daughter of the guy who owned the place two owners ago (she’s the last person living who supposedly knows how the system works!). We thought that perhaps we’d turned a tap that she pointed out as we were walking round but we think we’ve undid all that we did then and still no water: it looks like we’ve emptied the well!

We’re in the process of getting ourselves onto our first American site: www.ownerdirect.com . Hopefully, it’s not typical of the American sites as they wanted so much information entered that it took hours to type it all in and we’ve still a couple of detailed things to do like measuring up the rooms. It’s another one of those guaranteed reservation places too so we’ll have to add it to our list of places for the January update (at the moment, we’ve listed more rooms in total than we actually have which is OK for the winter but, all being well, wouldn’t be OK for the summer so the plan is to sit down in January and make sure that the total is no more than our actual number of rooms).

While we were looking round for our 1-800 number, we found out that you can call American 800 numbers from abroad if you replace the 800 by 880 eg you can call us from outside the US by dialling 00 1 880 571 6392.

As we’re in “winter mode” at the moment, we’ve been plugging away with the backlog of administration that built up over the summer (we gotta be a bit more organised about it next year!). All being well, we will be up to date with the accounts by next week which is just as well as we got a tax return yesterday that needs completed by January 1st.

On other fronts, we’re getting moving on the fosse septique on a more laid back but still brisk pace. The mairie reckon (as we did) that it would be best to have the initial survey done in conjunction with our neighbours which will mean a) it’s cheaper and b) will be done quicker as they’re already in the system. We’ll talk to them about it tomorrow (I think it’s started to sink in with them that they don’t have enough land for it to be workable).

Separately, we have contacted the local fosse guy and buildersabroad who should be coming up with a quote in due course (we need the survey done first). But it’s looking like a completion date of the new fosse around March which is awfully close to the start of the tourist season.

The Hilton has one, the Waldorf has one and now Mas Camps has one. Yes, folks we have joined the bigtime with our very own toll free number, 1-800-571-6392 . Well, as of sometime tomorrow anyway.

More anon.

We’ve been having problems with our septic tank for the last month or two which have been getting progressively worse. So much so, that the guy next door has had to pump it out every week for nearly a month now. This in turn has prompted his brother-in-law (the soon to be new owner of the house attached to the winery) to order a new septic tank. That in turn has forced us to order a new one…

Neither of them are proper “country folk” and therefore they didn’t know a whole lot about what’s supposed to happen. OK, I’m not dyed-in-the-wool country folk either but I spent every summer at our country cottage for over twenty years and even watched my Dad install our own septic tank. Anyway, I figured that it filling up every week had nothing to do with it being knackerd (which was their thinking). Things eventually got so bad that they ended up calling in the grand-daughter of the owner before the guy I bought it off and she got to the root of the problem right away… seems that the bit of land across the road which I own is owned by me because that is where the runoff from the septic tank comes out. Now, bearing in mind that the previous owner knew nothing about the system it’s been quite some time since said outlet pipe was known about and in the intervening years (at least 5 we think) it’s become completely overgrown, hence complete blockage and we’ve now sorted the problem in the ten minutes it took to dig out all the stuff that’s grown over it in the meantime.

Aide from giving me a chance to practise a lot of French that you don’t use everyday, they’ve told me that we’re going to have to get a septic tank anyway as new regulations coming into force (they think) next year will require it.

Separately, we’ve also found out that what we thought was the newest part of the house is in fact the oldest, having been built around 1776 (it was completely renovated in her grandfather’s time). We’ll have to invite her round for dinner sometime to see if we can find out some more of the history.