Foreign Perspectives

It’s important to keep on top of that transition as you can easily stock up on, say, butter only to find that you’re still sitting with the same box of butter a month later and have to throw it out when it reaches the expiry date. Non-perishables aren’t so bad really but we only finished off the soap we bought in mid-August last year almost exactly a year later.

Most noticeable perhaps are the French. We don’t get that many arriving ’til around July 15th when all of a sudden we’re pretty much full of them. They stop just as suddenly too around the Saturday nearest August 20th. Last year we turned away 12 separate couples on Saturday August 21st yet it was six weeks after that before we had any more French staying with us!

Just cutting out the almost daily restocking trips from the Summer frees up a substantial amount of time for us. No more do we spend over 7 hours a week just driving the sheets back and forth to the laundry, and that’s before you even consider that we don’t need to make up the rooms and tables every day. This year we’re actually fairly full for September with more in than we had July last year. However, we can get away with not “working” the rooms too hard and the longer stays typical of the Autumn make life considerably easier.

So what do we do with all this “spare time”?

Well, first off we need to catch up with administration that just doesn’t get done over the Summer. Then there’s the small matter of my upcoming Spanish exam which is coming up in less than 2 weeks. The combined effect of the Spanish plus the admin backlog means that we don’t really have free time ’til about mid-October.

At that point, we need to get going on running up our to-do list for the coming year as it’s very easy to find yourself in March with nothing done. We’ve not yet sat down and written it out in detail but broad objectives at the moment are:

– maintenance of the house side of things;

– review of the hotel rooms to see what needs doing;

– refresh of the hotel website (a never ending task);

– complete overhaul of the pyreneesthemes.com site: we started regrouping that last year but it needs to be organised more logically;

– integration of the villarenters.com and sales properties with ourgites.org and ourholidayrentalhomes.com;

– spot of marketing of the ourinns sites;

– tidy up of the foreignperspectives.com site.

Not to mention finishing off the Spanish books (though, surprisingly, I will be pretty close to doing that before the exam for a change). I’m also hoping to organise a residential for myself in Santiago next July. Next year will probably be different as I hope to be starting the English course in October which, hopefully, will be the final one of my BA (Hons) Modern Languages.

As well as the work-related things, we’re also hoping to get away for at least one short-break and hopefully more than that.