Steve & Jill
Our French Adventure
France or Bust
Port of Dover
I guess it all began one evening when I was visiting my then girlfriend (who would eventually become my wife), she was living back at home with her mum, (having just separated from her husband).
We started having a conversation about France and how I would like to move abroad at some point in my life, and it turned out that Jill was very open to the idea of living in France, I hadn't realised that her mum had spent a few years at a boarding school in Vendee France, and had obviously passed her knowledge and language skills to her daughters, which would be very handy in the coming years :-)
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One little anecdote I remember, while sitting chatting about France, Jill's mum said "so how's your French Steve", well I said, I know: Le Hot-dog & Le Chips, to which she replied, "oh this should be fun" :-)
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Sadly, a year or so later Jill's mum passed away, not long after my dad passed away, at this point we decided that if we didn't go for it now, it would probably never happen. I had already given my job up to look after Jill's mum in her final months, and Jill gave her notice in to her company and we started making plans :-)
Now when I said make plans, that may have been a slight exaggeration, as we really didn't have much of a clue even where to begin.
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Jill's best friend "Gill" and her husband "Mark" had already purchased an old barn in France, just outside Rochechouart in Department 87, Haute Vienne, so we made arrangements to visit them when they next went over, I can't remember the exact date, I believe it was
September 2008.
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Mark went over a few weeks earlier to make a bedroom for us to stay, and I do mean make from scratch, remember I said this was a barn, and they hadn't really got very far with the conversion at that point, so Mark was quite literally levelling the floor with his digger and making some walls, and the putting in some basic's, like a bed... :-)
He worked like a Trojan to get this ready for us, and we were and still are very grateful.
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The first real part of our journey i guess was the view of the Ferry Terminal at Dover.
Once we arrived over in France we had roughly a 500 mile journey ahead of us, quite long but we were exited so we didn't care.
We decided to avoid the motorway toll roads (big mistake), and take the scenic route travelling via Le Mans & Tours etc, however after being stuck behind god knows how many caravans I said to Jill "Find me a bloody motorway", a journey that should have taken us about 8 hours eventually took us 14 hours, but our friends Gill & Mark had dinner and a cup of tea waiting, and I think they were amused at how long we had taken :-)
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From this point on we tried different routes, from choosing our channel crossing, to our route through France, and eventually we perfected it to the point we now advise others who are making the same mistakes that we did, the cost in tolls alone can vary immensely, we just recently saved on of Jill's workmates (who has a property about 30 minutes from us) around £200 in tolls and fuel.
