Our European saga was nearly half-over by the time we arrived in the little village of Rouvenac, deep in the countryside of western Languedoc-Roussillon (now part of the recently created Occitanie region), and close to the foothills of the Pyrenees. Up till then, we had experienced big-city living in Lyon, spent six weeks exploring Provence, passed six glorious days on the Italian Riviera, cat-sat in Montpellier, and had another enjoyable week overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Spain’s Costa Brava. Each experience was different in its own way and we were beginning to get a better idea of what it was we were searching for; we certainly had found out what we didn’t want, though as you continue to read our story you may begin to wonder if even that is true! [See my post “On finding somewhere to build a new nest . . .” published May 30, 2017]
Whilst making the initial grandiose plans for this voyage of discovery, we had quickly realised that to be able to travel so extensively involved either unlimited finances or more judicious planning and, in the absence of the former option, researching the latter had led us to discover two new worlds, those of the house-sitter and of the home-exchanger. Our initiation into house-sitting, looking after a cat named Mr Darcy, had been a great success, and is certainly something we would be very happy to do again; it just requires finding the right host in the right place at the right time, and Montpellier had proved ideal. Now, in Rouvenac, we were about to experience our first entry into the world of exchanging homes, having met on Home-Exchange.com, Barbara and Michael, a pair of artists originally from England who had a yen to go and visit California at just about the same time as we wanted to be near to our sister, Dagmara, in their remote corner of France. The process was simple; we interviewed each other on Skype, came to the conclusion that we were compatible and sufficiently honest to trust each other with our homes and all our possessions, and finally met in the flesh the day before they started their journey westwards. We knew very little about Rouvenac, except that, to an Englishman’s way of thinking, it was no bigger than a small hamlet, and that it was a short ten-minute drive from Antugnac where Dagmara lived with her family. Our new temporary home overlooked the village square and after getting the Cook’s tour of the house from our hosts we quickly settled into this very different life.
Winter was approaching, cool winds whistled along the valley and through the village, and we were very glad of the large wood-burning stove in the living-room, along with the ample supply of firewood that had been left for us, and we soon learned the necessity to stock up on kindling during each walk into the surrounding countryside.
My long-stated interest in living in a small French village was definitely being put to the test!
It’s difficult to know how we would have reacted to this new life if we didn’t have family living so close by, but with the holiday season fast approaching we found our days well-filled with visits to each other’s homes, as well as numerous forays together into the countryside and visiting the local towns and villages. We also had our eyes opened by experiencing a bit of the alternative life-style that is the reason so many ex-pats move to these quieter parts of the world [see my recent post, “It takes all types! An alternative view of the other South of France.” published January 4 2018].
Although we were deep in the countryside, there were many fine places to visit within a day’s drive. One day we visited Celine’s niece Martynka, in Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city and in spite of it’s size and being the centre of the European aerospace industry, we enjoyed walking around the partially pedestrianised city centre, which, like Montpellier, is very student oriented. The main church in the city is the enormous Basilica of Saint-Sernin; constructed at the end of the eleventh century, it is the largest remaining Romanesque building in Europe and has lots of superb sculpture of that era.
A very different city is Carcassone, famous for its medieval hilltop citadel, La Cité de Carcassonne, with its many towers and walled fortifications that watch over the newer city on the other side of the river. The Cité was extensively restored in 1853 by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, whose fanciful designs and slate roofed towers are sometimes criticised for their lack of authenticity to the original structure. The new town was full of Christmas markets and amusements when we visited but we weren’t overly impressed.
The small market town of Espéraza was our main shopping venue, with a gas station, a decent supermarket, a very good Bio store and a couple of boulangeries that well satisfied your scribe’s needs for tasty carbs. It is also the home of an interesting museum, Musée de la Chapellerie, that celebrates the town’s past connections with the millinery trade.
Somewhat further afield was Limoux, famous for the vineyard that produced the world’s first sparkling wine known as Blanquette de Limoux, originally made by the monks at the nearby abbey in Saint-Hilaire; it might not be champagne but it’s a pretty good, economical substitute! Limoux was also where we found a very accommodating young dentist who, finally, satisfactorily resolved the nagging toothache that had plagued me on and off since our stay in Lorgues; and he did the work at short notice and provided all the necessary prescriptions at a fraction of the price I would have paid back home in California.
Always wanting to see the seaside, one day we took ourselves down to the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border, for a return visit to the little towns of Banyuls-sur-Mer and Collioure.
It was a grey day with rain threatening but we still found Collioure in particular to be every bit as attractive as we remembered from our visit three years earlier. Not as quaint as Calella de Palafrugell, seventy miles south on the Spanish Costa Brava where we had spent a wonderful week in early December, it nevertheless appeared to be a much more liveable town, quite busy with locals on the streets, in the shops and dining out even at that time of the year; Calella had been virtually shut down for winter with 75% of it’s homes occupied only during “the season”.
The foothills of the Pyrenees make for some very attractive countryside in and around Rouvenac and we visited many beautiful villages; some, such as Ginoles, Quillan and Puivert, nestled like Rouvenac at the bottom of valleys, and others, such as Rennes-le-Chateau, were perched on top of one of the many hills with beautiful views of mountains and valleys in the distance. One never lacks somewhere to go a for a strenuous hike, or a gentle amble in nature.
For ski-bunnies, the slopes are not far away either, and another day Celine, Martynka and I had a fairytale drive along the Vallée de l’Aude, among frosty snow-covered woods, alongside the partly frozen river Aude which has cut itself a rocky ravine as it tumbles down from the mountains, up to Formigueres and thence higher again to Les Angles. We stopped for a picnic on the edge of the village, enjoying what little warmth the January sun still had at that altitude, the snow-covered slopes above us, a grassy plateau and a lake below us, the high Pyrenees in the distance and cars with ski racks everywhere.
In many ways the Languedoc is a magical environment, well removed from big-city life, full of eye-appeal, and well capable of satisfying your scribe’s desire to lead a quiet life close to nature. Real estate is very affordable, all the services one requires to ensure one’s comfort into old age are reasonably close at hand and we would even have family close by. It was a great experience for two newbie home-exchangers and we have nothing but good things to say of our hosts, Barbara and Michael, and their interesting artists’ pad in the boonies. But the lifestyle we led there, lacks most of the attractions of big city life, offers few, if any, cultural activities and requires a high degree of self-sufficiency that doesn’t suit everybody. So Celine and I realise that it is most probably not an option for future nest-building if we are to both be equally happy, which is a prime requisite to be satisfied by this long-term search we are on.
After six weeks or more of this rural life, we were eager to experience another region we had read so much about. January was two-thirds gone when we picked up sticks, packed our life back into the car, and drove off in a westerly direction, keeping the peaks of the Pyrénées to our left. The morning drive to Foix can only be described as glorious, the countryside steaming gently in the morning sunshine. The route got even better as we climbed higher beyond Foix and continued to follow the sun till the countryside flattened out and we passed through lots of fertile farmland until we finally reached the city of Pau, and our first taste of French Basque life. That city is in a beautiful setting with the ever-present Pyrénées as its backdrop, some fine architecture and a very walkable city centre, the Boulevard des Pyrénées leading past elegant hotels and apartment buildings of an earlier era and up to the castle of Château de Pau.
We still had a long way to drive to our destination near Bilbao across the border for our second excursion into Spain, and we were only had enough time to get a cursory glimpse of what the city had to offer. This was a shame as Pau had been on our bucket list for a long time and deserved a closer look. (And to add insult to injury, every single photograph that we took of Pau disappeared in the hard disc drive disaster – see my earlier post of October 30 2017, “Mense horribilis!!” Or “I wish I had backed up my photos earlier!!”) Thus, after a necessary pit-stop at one of the many cafés, we strolled back down to our car parked alongside the river in the shadow of the castle, and, as the sun sank behind the distant mountains, (armed only with our mental photographic memories) we drove towards our next, very different home-exchange experience in the small town of Gatika, in the province of Biscay, in the autonomous community of Basque Country.
