Home (but which one)

Tuesday 29th December

The trip is over, both the 17 days I was away, and the actual journey back.  And you know that old song “It’s oh so nice to go travelling, but so much nicer to come home”, ah, how true that is. But no regrets – it was lovely to see everyone again; and we brought so much stuff back in the car it was well worth it.  The journey itself was a bit tedious, or at least I as a passenger found it so.  We had packed sandwiches and fruit and nuts and figs and apricots and all sort of soft drinks and two thermos flasks and tea bags, but by half-way we were truly sick of it all and resorted to eating sweets and chocolates.  We hit a couple of traffic jams both inside and just out of Paris, and at one point I never thought we would ever get here, but 9.30 in the evening French time and we were rolling into Eymet.  Mind you we had been up at three in the morning and crossed on the tunnel at 6, so a long long day.

The house soon warmed up but this morning we discovered that we had no hot water.  It is on a separate electric immersion heater and it was working before we left.  We suspect an electrical fault, and hopefully it will be easily fixed.  So for a while it will be back to the old house for showers, and boiling water for everything else.  We are having the whole placed re-wired in a couple of weeks time, as it hasn’t been updated since 1968 when the house was built; there are hardly any sockets anywhere, and the circuit board looks positively dangerous.

I spent a couple of hours emptying the car this morning (Monday) and my wife ran the café; quite quiet as we expected, but it was nice to crank up the machine again.  The sun was streaming onto our new balcony and it felt just like spring – hopefully we can skip Winter this year, hahaha.  We neither of us can sit around doing nothing; and this new house will certainly keep me occupied for many months.