Life in France

We are well into peak season now. Our occupancy rate across all 4 rooms for August is 98% after sitting at around 50% in May and June. September is currently at ~40% but increasing as bookings come in.

Once the nerves settled and our confidence grew during May, a good routine emerged through June and July with guests often arriving on Thursday or Friday for a long weekend and checking out on Sunday or Monday. With the rooms ‘turned’ and the house clean by the end of Monday, we found that Tuesday & Wednesday became our weekend before it all starts again on Thursday. 2 or 3 mornings without breakfast service or room changeovers allowed us to get out running in the morning before it got too hot or have a lie-in and just enjoy having the house and garden to ourselves for a little while.

As we moved into August however, it all changed. We’ve had several bookings for 5, 6 or 7-night stays. People are arriving and leaving throughout the weeks and the weekends. Whereas weddings were by far the biggest reason for staying with us for the first few months, now there are all sorts of reasons that people are staying in or passing through Eymet and I have to say, I am really enjoying meeting so many different people each with their own story to tell.

Whilst the B&B is more demanding / time consuming now, we have still managed to get out and enjoy the night markets, soirées gourmandes etc. that are so popular here during the summer. We’ve also had family to stay, some in our guest rooms and some in our accommodation, which has been a good excuse to draw a line under the business during the day and get out and enjoy ourselves. There were 12 of us staying in the house at one-point last week… it will feel very strange when it’s just back to Tom and I at the end of the season!

We also had our 3^rd heatwave of the summer last week with the temperature back up to 40C. I think that has been the most draining aspect for me so far. Guests are understanding of course, 40 degrees is supposed to be exceptional after all, but if this is going to be the new normal, I think we’re going to need to explore aircon options for rooms that we struggle to keep cool.So, here’s to being halfway through our busiest month and still smiling. There is an Oyster and White Wine festival in town today which I hope to make the most of. Vive La France!

I was chatting with a French friend over a drink the other day, and she asked me what I have noticed that is different here to living in England, so here are a few of my personal observations.

Sitting in the doctor’s waiting room waiting for my appointment, whenever someone new walked in, they said bonjour to the room and everyone in the room said bonjour back.

Most shops and business close between noon and 14:00 for lunch. Most cafés and restaurants only serve food during the day between noon and 14:00.

Leaving the fabric shop in Bergerac at just before noon, the sales assistant said Bon Appetite as I left as well as Au Revoir.

Leaning against the back of my car in a supermarket car park eating a sandwich because I had not managed to stop for lunch. A lady pushing her trolley by said ‘Bon Appetite Monsieur’ to me.

On the May Day Bank Holiday, La Fête du Muguet, the only things I could buy when I went out hunting for open shops were oysters, bread, and bouquets of Lily of the Valley.

Sitting outside Tortoni’s one Sunday afternoon, some of the local rugby club arrived singing and dancing celebrating their promotion following victory that day. To celebrate they ordered 2 bottles of Ricard to share around.

The fresh produce for sale on many of the market stalls on Thursday morning gradually changes week by week as different food comes in and goes out of season. In some cases, if it’s not in season, it’s not for sale.

Painting my garden gates on the street, as the kids from the middle school walked past on their way home from, a lot of them said ‘bonjour monsieur’ to me completely unprompted.

It is hard finding tradespeople who are available to take on work for you and building supplies are very expensive.

Don’t expect to get much done in August…

I previously mentioned two important milestones on our B&B project plan: open for bookings and open for business.

To be open for bookings we needed to be very confident we would be ready for guests by May, we also needed enough of the guest bedrooms and guest areas ready for photographs, and we needed to be online with our website and the booking platforms.

We had, of course, good weeks and bad weeks during the restoration, upgrading, painting and decorating, but overall we were doing really well and our confidence was increasing, so during February we went live for bookings. Tom did a fantastic job on getting all that set up, especially with our website – I had tried to get something good up and running a few times over the winter but failed. By this time, through word of mouth in the village we already had a few bookings for the summer which made it feel very real!

To help ensure we were ready for paying guests in May, we invited Tom’s side of the family over (there are quite a lot of them…) to fill the house for a week during early April. In my previous life I’d have called it a ‘Field Trial’ or ‘Operational Readiness Testing’. It was great to see all the guest rooms full, people making full use of the guest facilities in the house, the pool & garden, to try out our breakfasts and the other services we wanted to offer our guests. At times it got a bit stressy of course, but it was also a lot of fun, very helpful, and lovely to have the house full of family.

Having lived briefly in each of the guest rooms ourselves, we were pretty confident that we were ready with comfortable beds etc. but it was great to know, for example, that everyone could take a shower at the same time with no problems and there was plenty of hot water left for the rest of the day.

After everyone had left, we made the step change from ‘getting ready to open for business’ to being ‘open for business’. No more major projects (apart from getting the decking around the pool finished!) Just fine tuning and getting ready to welcome our first customers.

Reservations were starting to come in quite quickly by this time and before we knew it, we were welcoming our first guests. I have to say, I was feeling anxious about it all as we were waiting for them to arrive, but they were a lovely couple who have since been back to stay with us again and have now booked to come and stay for a 3^rd time later this month.

We certainly didn’t get everything right first time, and 3 months in we are still learning, but it was great to be up and running with some very positive feedback coming in…as well as some € 🙂

Like much of western Europe, we had a heatwave last week with temperatures up in the high thirties for much of the week, peaking at ~41 at the end of the weekend. With a house full of guests for a long weekend and a couple of mid-week stop overs, I was worried about people having an uncomfortable stay but we’ve got the hang of using the shutters to help keep the house as cool as possible and the guests seemed very happy. Once again, the pool was very popular!

I do quite a lot of running which is getting challenging with the heat. I’m never going to break any records, but it is something I really enjoy for so many reasons. When I’m busy or stressed it relaxes me, when I’m fed up or sad it lifts my mood, running alone is great ‘me-time’ and running with a group is great social time, I sleep better when I run, I listen to audiobooks, I keep fit…I could go on, but I know us runners are a boring lot once we get started.

Before we moved, I found a local running group here on Facebook which meets nearby on a Sat or Sun morning for a run. This meant that on my first proper Sunday morning here, I met a friendly group of like-minded people in Eymet village square at 8:30am and I spent a delightful hour running with them through the countryside followed by a coffee together at a local café. Tom joined us a couple of weeks later and since then we’ve only missed a couple of weekend-runs up until we opened the B&B in May this year. The group has been brilliant for us, so welcoming and friendly, we’ve met and become friends with people through it and I am very grateful for that.

I now regularly run with a friend who lives ~20 mins drive from here. There are a lot more trails around her house through woodlands and vineyards with some stunning scenery which seems to change week by week through the seasons. Tom and I try get a local run in together once a week, I try and get out on a long run on my own once a week and we run with the group whenever we can.

I realise now how spoilt I was with Ordinance Survey in the U.K. There is a good network of trails here, it’s nowhere near as easy to find or to follow them without my OS iPhone App but I’m learning.

During the winter months, it was so lovely to get out into the countryside in the sunshine. The fields and vineyards were bare, the tracks were muddy, and we had to be very careful off-road and be sure to wear bright clothing to avoid getting shot by la chasse.

During the summer months, it is often well into the 20s by 10am and still high 20s by dusk, so getting out early is almost essential. Breakfast service at the B&B means I can’t get out early, and on the rare mornings that we don’t have guests, I just want a lie-in until it is too hot to go out running…so I am feeling a bit deprived at the moment and need to find a routine that will allow me to get more miles in somehow…

There are a lot of organised trail races in the region, but with so much else going on, I’ve not signed up for any of them. I like to do run a marathon once a year, so I have signed up for the Cognac marathon in November this year and Paris next spring. I’m going to need to start increasing my mileage soon!

December 2021 saw a(nother) lifestyle step change. We were now the proud owners of a house with 6 ensuite double bedrooms upstairs, 4 large reception rooms, a big kitchen and utility room downstairs plus various other toilets etc. There was a lot of furniture and ‘stuff’ left by the previous owner, some of which we had agreed to stay, and quite a lot that we had to get rid of. There was also a lot of cleaning to do before we could move in properly.

My project plan had two big milestones for the B&B: open up reservations in February and open for customers from May, but before we could even start thinking about the B&B, we had to make our own accommodation clean and comfortable, so we threw ourselves into that all day, every day.

It was hard and dirty work, but we made good progress. The week before Christmas, Tom had to rush back to the UK unexpectedly, so I found myself on my own, in a freezing cold house with no central heating, still surrounded by packing cases and piles of stuff to sell / giveaway / recycle / dump etc. It wasn’t the happiest week of my life. But Tom made it back before Christmas by which time we (Clark) had the heating working and the house was starting to feel warm, clean and tidy. We gave ourselves a week off to celebrate Christmas and New Year in our new house and life felt good again.

The village was quieter by this time. The pre-christmas celebrations in the bars and restaurants resulted in a lot of the staff and customers catching COVID and most places closed for a month or so. With the winter weather upon us and little else to distract us we threw ourselves into decorating the guest bedrooms.

There were some lovely warm sunny days during the winter months and some VERY cold nights. I found it so strange that it could be minus 7 during the night and plus 17 during the afternoon. We did have a couple of weeks late Jan / early Feb where the fog rolled in, and the temperature barely got above freezing during the day. Up to our eyes in paint and plaster, most of the house was freezing cold, no sunshine, no social life…we were both getting fed up and questioning our decisions. But as February turned to March, the sun came out, temperatures went up, the village opened up, we were able to get out with our running group and sit in the sun with a drink after working on the house… we were feeling good again.

It was during those cold weeks that we booked ourselves a winter sunshine holiday for the following winter.  This coming weekend we’ll have been in France for a year. I’m sure the highs and lows will continue but one year in and I’m convinced it was one of the best decisions we have made.