We have some friends who come and visit us most years, and stay in various gites, chalets etc in the region. This is always interesting for us, because we get a chance to see the competition and pick up useful ideas. We also get to see the faults of places.
So here is a whistle-stop guide [...]
The gite booking season for 2008 is more or less finished now, and it’s time to turn your thoughts to 2009. Apparently bookings are down this year, and if the state of the economy is anything to go by next year will be no easier.
So now is a good time to make sure your holiday-rental [...]
Long-standing regular readers of this blog will know that during the three weeks of the Tour de France I seldom get to the computer, but I wonder how long that might continue.
In recent years the Tour de France has had many problems related to drug-enhanced-performance, and lots of big name cyclists have been lost along [...]
I understand that the flood of expats arriving in France from the UK has slowed down quite a lot recently in the face of falling house prices and an interminable number of TV programmes telling everyone what sad miserable lives we expats lead, battling against poverty, bureaucracy, and of course the French.
Ah well, not to [...]
Motivated by the Tour de France I went out for a long bike ride yesterday afternoon. Common sense would have told most people that cycling too far, too fast, in baking sunshine, was not the best idea but I am not most people and it seems I have no common sense.
So about an hour and [...]
I’ve admitted before that once you’re up and running with gites they are really not much like hard work - apart from Saturdays when they need cleaning of course.
Personally I manage to avoid that by claiming I need to cut the grass -coincidentally this mowing takes me exactly the same amount of time as Mrs [...]
Looking at the statistics for our gites in France section I can get a reasonably good idea of which regions of France people are looking at the most - which also tells us whether you are going to end up squeezed in a traffic jam and queueing an hour for an ice-cream…or whether you will [...]
Well, after years of resisting, and much good advice to the contrary, we have become a SARL. A SARL is a fully fledged French company with shares, proper accounts, and - so we are told - enormous associated expense and bureaucratic effort.
I can hardly wait.
I won’t trouble you with the reasons why we have embarked [...]
