this is for Saturday Aug 29, 2015
We are due to dock at 8:15 locale time which is one hour later than England time. I cannot get my watch to change the time so I'll have to remember to add an hour every time Look at it. I have a lovely watch, really fancy. One of these days, I must read the instructions so I can use everything on it and also know how to change the time! We get up early enough to go up and have breakfast. We are supposed to be out of our cabin ½ hour before we dock and since why should we get up early on holidays, we just pack and take our bags with us to breakfast.
We get a table and there is a breakfast buffet sort of. If you want something cooked you can get it for extra. We just choose to go with the buffet and without anything cooked. We get coffee and get our breakfast. There are some cereals and cheese and lunch meats and such but nothing truly special and not really any wonderful French pastries.
After breakfast we stop at a toilet. No need to go into the duty free shop as we don’t need anything and then just walk down the stairs to our car floor. The door is open and some people have already gone to their cars so we go too. We stop at our lights to put on our Eurovision blinders. Cars coming from England have to put blinders on their headlights so that they are not aimed at people’s eyes. It is a requirement as well to have a triangle for emergencies, a big sign to put on the car to say you are from GB (although hubby says this isn’t necessary now because our license/registration plate says it but I put it on anyway). You must also have alcohol breathalyzers in the car for each person and a hi-vis vest per person. I open the car to turn on the lights for the blinders and accidentally honk the horn. It echoes throughout the car deck. Luckily not too many people are here yet. The instructions for the Eurovision blinders are specific per type and year and model of car. Still,it isn’t easy to figure out and we hope we put them on correctly. Then there is an announcement that decks 3and 4 must go to their cars and a lot more people are coming onto the floor to get into their cars.
We can tell we have docked and we can see that deck 3 is unloading but we are still sitting there for awhile before our gates open to our deck and we are pulling out. They pull us out in rows rather than columns. I had thought that the two inner columns would go first but we all went in rows so didn’t take us long to get out and then we are in the line for immigration. Everyone is going through immigration rather quickly as they just look at the passports, look inside the car and wave them on. But with our USA passports, he walks into his little shed and stamps our passports. Lucky us.
We have our GPS set for the postal code of my friend's house but we don’t have a street address and so I just have to guess when anything is not giving us a street address. So we are off and about 2 hours away. Maybe only 1½ hours depending on traffic and such. It is no problem driving on the right but the love of my life and I are in disagreement on how close I am to the middle of the road. As we are always in disagreement on this subject, we stop the car at different times on different roads to see where we are. I’m always OK but it still seems to him that I am not. As this becomes an issue later, it's possible that occasionally he is right. Still, I drive because he makes me nervous when he drives and then that makes him nervous and on and on and on.
We have the directions that our friend gave us so we are trying to follow those as well. We get confused when we get around Loheac and Pipriac. She says the store is in Pipriac but the GPS will take us through Loheac. We followed the signs to Pipriac and yep,kept trying to turn us around. Luckily we finally saw a sign for the Super U, the grocery store, and went there and stocked up on what we thought we might need. We only really got for about 3 days or so. Hoping to go out to dinner some.
Then back in the car and off to the house. We are close but it is hard to tell exactly what the instructions mean. I guess I was expecting a driveway and hoping also for a sign or something. We drove around La Macrais (the hamlet where the house is) about three times before we spotted the sign La Macrais and turned at that corner and then turned into the house that might be it. Hubby went to the area where the key is supposed to be kept. He was in there awhile so I went over and told him where she told me to look and he found the key. Guess it would have been helpful to give him that information before he started looking! So we are in the right place. We carry out stuff in and try to find the power. We finally read that it is in the cabinet next to the kitchen and find it. Then outside to the cement block where hubby has to get on his knees and stick his hand into the hole in the cement block in the ground with lots of spiders to turn on the water. We are good. Next we must haul the heavy gas canister out behind the house and screw it into the plug so that we will have gas for the stove and oven. Everything hooked up and house is ready.
We haul everything in and put away our groceries and look around the house. For all that it looks rather gloomy and possibly dilapidated on the outside, it is quite delightful on the inside with great old beams and a very modern kitchen and small bathroom downstairs. The windows are all modern Velux type with great blinds. We open up most of them and haul our suitcases upstairs. We spend the rest of the week swatting flies too. There are plastic covers over all the furniture so we take that off and stuff it in the closets. We have to make the bed and we use one of the duvets as an additional mattress underneath us and unpack into the chest of drawers. We have a baguette ham and cheese and salami sandwich for lunch. That becomes our standard French lunch. Always seems to be the standard French lunch. As many times as we have been to France and as many different locales in France, it still seems to be what we always have for lunch. I am not sure they have anything else to offer at lunch time.
As I am pretty tired of driving, we just sit and relax after we take out the picnic table from the garage. We get the best phone signal sitting at the picnic table. In the house, we can only get a signal if we stick our phone outside the upstairs bedroom window. My friend's French neighbor friend calls us and we make arrangements to go to her house on Monday to use the Internet. Later we have to call her back to get directions to her house. She is not in the same hamlet but in a neighboring hamlet. Hamlets seem to be about 3 to 8 houses in the middle of fields and maybe close to a village.
There is a TV and lots of old movies and DVD’s. The TV works with English channels but we cannot figure out how to get it on. The people here before us have been coming for years and they have kids who don’t know the TV works because it’s only been connected for a couple of years. Ha ha ha. later, My smart hubby figures out that he has to connect the TV cable to get it to work. Tonight we watch Star Wars. Lovely.
Finally we go to bed. No stars. Cloudy. Supposed to rain tomorrow. We do sleep fairly well though. Good enough and quiet out here and dark.
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