We’ve Moved to France

As you may or may have noticed I’ve been terribly behind in my travel postings, mostly because we were busy preparing for our move to the South of France. Last November I wrote about finding a rental property and now the day has finally come. We woke this morning to the quiet of the French countryside in an area known as the Peach Valley (yes there are peach orchards right outside our bedroom window) just 20 miles north of the Pyrenees and the Spanish border.

And although the wisteria blooming on the side of the house is gorgeous,  our first day, in typical French fashion, has been trying. First, with a short connection in London we hurried through Heathrow (as much as you can hurry at Heathrow – It still took 45 minutes to get to our gate) and boarded our flight to Toulouse, only to sit on the tarmac for the next three hours waiting for our time slot to enter French airspace. It seems the air traffic controllers in France were on strike.

Next, when we finally arrived in Toulouse only one of our four bags had made the flight with us. After several calls to the British Airlines Baggage Contact Centre we have been told that they finally arrived in Toulouse and will be delivered tomorrow, provided that the driver can find our house.

And third, (yes trouble comes in threes or rather trois in France, too) the internet and phone lines were not working yesterday evening making it that much more difficult to track down our missing bags. Thankfully that has now been resolved. Literally, the gray skies we arrive to have started to clear.

So now begins our adventure in France. I’ll be writing about our time here – the travails of learning French, exploring the food and wine, and travels in France and abroad. But first, I have a couple of more posts to finish in Ecuador, namely the Galapagos Islands.

For links to all the posts in this series see the French Pyrenees page.