Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany

RyanAir asks - would you stand for a free flight?

2009-07-11T22:02:00.002+01:00

In typical RyanAir headline-grabbing style I notice they put out a press announcement on Thursday to gauge whether customers will be prepared to literally 'stand up' on a short-haul flight (instead of sitting) if the fare was free, or if it was half that of the sitting passengers.

There's even a mock-up of what the "secure standing seats" might look like:

Given how cheap RyanAir tickets are anyway I couldn't see how a half-price standing-only seat could actually be any cheaper??

Further details of announement and a poll to see how interested customers are in this novel idea are over at RyanAir's press releases.

PS: Watch the RyanAir standing seats video on YouTube and you might realise that this announcement may not be entirely genuine ...

The(re)' s no (w) train running to the Alps this winter

2009-07-10T23:00:00.000+01:00

I received an email the other day announcing that the Snow Train wouldn't be running for the 2010 ski season - hence the Blog title.

Geddit?

There's no train running to the Alps this winter ..... the snow train running to the Alps this winter ...

It's a play on words.

Geddit?

Yes I know it's not really about Brittany, or running a Gite, but it is about France and I thought it was an amusing Blog title anyway!

Anyway, the news is that the Snow Train which has run for several years direct from London to the French Alps (via Eurotunnel of course) won't be running during the 2010 ski season as "due to the current economic climate and unfavourable exchange rates the service is not financially viable".

The promoters of the Snow Train say that they hope to be able to reinstate it again in future years "once economic conditions improve".

Despite the demise of the Snow Train there's still several other options to getting to the French Alps this winter, the key ones being:

Eurostar Direct Ski Train
There's two Eurostar Direct Ski trains that run weekly during the winter from London St Pancras or Ashford International stations direct to 3 stations in the French Alps (Moutiers, Aime La Plagne and Bourg-St-Maurice). Prices start from £149 return per person and the service runs from December 2009 through to April 2010 - one service on Friday night arriving Saturday morning and a second service travelling through the day on Saturday.

Alternatively

Take the Eurostar then a connecting TGV or overnight train to the Alps
There's many high-speed day and overnight trains from both Paris or Lille to the French Alps that operate throughout the Winter months. Overnight services have reclining seats or folding couchette-type bunk beds. We've taken this route ourselves to go skiing in the past and (apart from trekking with all your ski gear from one station to another across Paris) it's a great way to get to the Alps and enjoy a few beers along the way!

Further prices and tickets for either rail option are available from Rail Europe

Cheap ferry tickets hunt on moneysavingsexpert.com

2009-07-09T10:00:00.001+01:00

If you're a canny consumer like me (aka you're just tight with your money) then you may well have already come across Martin Lewis' MoneySavingsExpert website which offers a host of financial advice - articles on the best and cheapest credit cards, telephone providers, mortgage advice, how to take on the banks over unfair charges, custom search engines to find the cheapest airline tickets, etc, etc. I can highly recommended MSE.

And as well as the articles and weekly 'money tips e-mail newsletter' there's an active and vibrant forum where literally tens of thousands of people share their own money saving ideas and experiences.

Recently the forum website has run a Great "Cheap Ferry Tickets" hunt to poll readers advice as to how and where to get the cheapest ferry tickets and which ferry booking comparison sites are worth using or not.

The article started off by suggesting that aferry.co.uk and ferrysavers.com were a good starting point as aferry was the underlying search engine used by many other of the comparison sites. There then started off several rounds of debate from other forum posters as to whether they'd never found aferry to give a good price or were generally satisfied with aferry's prices.

After a couple of months and 70-odd comments and postings against the original article there's a lot of different people's opinions now as to which ferry operator and booking site they prefer.

So I thought I'd conclude with my own 2p worth as after 5 years of French Gite ownership we've pretty much tried all the ferry options now ....

We started off with joining Brittany Ferries Property Owners Club and used them quite a bit for the first couple of years on the Portsmouth/St Malo, Portsmouth/Caen and Portsmouth/Cherbourg routes until they just became too expensive for us to use regularly.
We then switched to SpeedFerries and their low cost Dover/Boulogne service was our mainstay for the next few years until they went bancrupt in late 2008.
And now we're a bit undecided.
We've tried NorfolkLine's Dover/Dunkerque service last year (and are travelling with them again in August this year), LDLines' Portsmouth/Le Havre route (for the return journey at Easter this year), and Condor Ferries Weymouth/St Malo (on the Easter outbound crossing).

One route that we haven't tried yet is LD Lines' new fast-cat from Dover to Boulogne, and as long as the prices are reasonable we will probably give them a go soon.

I've not exhaustively tried all the different ferry booking comparison engines because I've tended to find that they were no cheaper, and sometimes more expensive, than booking direct with the appropriate ferry company. We've therefore pretty much always cut out the middle man and booked direct. Having said that we did book our August crossing with NorfolkLine through ferrycheap.com because they had a special offer of £29 each-way crossings - even in peak season.

Turbo blogging - or making your website/blog load faster

2009-07-05T13:44:00.001+01:00

Even in these days of always on broadband and hyper-fast connectivity (well if the government get their way with Digital Britain that is), it's still worth taking a bit of time to make sure you've done the obvious things to make your website or Blog as quick as possible.

Over on Blogger's help pages I came across some how to make your Blog load faster tips from Google - and they should know!

I still find it amazing how many websites you see that have massive photos that haven't been properly resized from the multi-megabyte camera image.

I've also been using the Yahoo Yslow plugin for Firebug to analyse my websites for performance problems and whilst it gives some good pointers as to what to do the suggestions are a bit "cryptic" to say the least.

Surfin the web today I came across a Google announcing they've launched Page Speed, another Firebug plugin which does much the same thing, except (in my humble opinion), it's better.
So for example the three tips that Page Speed identifies I should apply to our holiday Gite homepage are to:

Set expiry dates on items (such as pictures) that don't change frequently so they get cached in the user's browser and thus don't need to be downloaded each time ... and PageSpeed gives me specific details of what should have the cache expiry date set

Enable gzip compression on the html and linked css files ... and I'm given details of precisely how many kb download this will save

And to use Minify to reduce Javascript files ... and again the savings I can gain are detailed

Great stuff!

It would be 'even better if' Page Speed gave me details (or a link) to precisely how to implement these suggestions, but the help given is much more specific than Yahoo's Yslow so Page Speed will be going in my Web kitbag and (when I get some time!) I'll be working through the suggestions made.

See the Google Page Speed download page for more details and to join in the community forum to share your own experiences and suggestions.

Follow these tips and do your bit to keep the 'web lean!!

Moncontour medieval festival - 2nd August 2009

2009-07-02T10:05:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately we're not going to be over in Brittany on 2nd August 2009 (we arrive a week later) so we're going to miss the Medieval Festival held bi-annually in the picturesque walled city of Moncontour which is about 30 minute drive from our holiday Gite.

We've only managed to get to the festival once, and that was four years ago in 2005. Last time it was on in 2007 we missed the event by one day, and this time we're going to miss it by a week.

If however you are over in Brittany then I can thoroughly recommend a trip there.

Further details of the festival, events, prices and a short video are on the Moncontour Medieval website, and there's some photos of our visit to the 2005 Medieval festival on this Blog.

Oh well, we'll have to wait until 2011 now !!

European mobile phone cap means it's cheaper to phone home

2009-07-01T21:51:00.004+01:00

It's been widely reported in the press today including a BBC news report on the cost of using a mobile in Europe has been capped from today, 1st July 2009.

It now costs a maximum of 9.4p to send a text if you're roaming abroad from the EU and costs nothing to receive a text - some providers used to charge 20p for that privilege in the past.

Making a call is capped at 37p a minute and receiving a call at 16p a minute.

All these prices are then plus VAT and as the capped price is in Euros and Cents it may fluctuate a bit with the exchange rate, but the overwhelming news is it's a lot cheaper than it used to be.

Of course some providers may charge less than these capped prices such as the recent article I wrote on Vodaphone abolishing roaming charges this summer.

All in all it's cheaper to 'phone home' ... remember the BT buzby bird (logo above) ?

French Magazine subscription offer

2009-06-28T12:23:00.004+01:00

French Magazine

Back in April I passed on details of a special subscription offer for France Magazine, this time it's the turn of French Magazine for a subscription offer.

And this time it really is a bargain subscription offer !

French Magazine retails at £3.99 in the shops and normally an annual subscription is £23.94, but courtesy of CA Britline and Norfolkline (who probably see this as cheap promotional advertising), you can subscribe to French Magazine for just £9.99.

That's 12 copies for £9.99 - or 83p per issue - a great price for French lovers everywhere.

Or, if like me your wedding anniversary is coming up next week, this'd make a perfect wedding anniversary present from your wife (big hint to Liz !!!)

BFenthusiasts.com - Brittany Ferries Enthusiasts

2009-06-24T19:28:00.001+01:00

Just come across the Brittany Ferries enthusiasts website, an unofficial website that in their own words was "created by ferry enthusiasts for other enthusiasts and travellers who have an interest in the day to day operations of Brittany Ferries".

There's quite a lot of information on the site about the different ferries that BF operate, the different routes, the company history and onboard facilities, etc, but the main energy and updates in the site goes on in the BFenthusiasts forum.

Browsing through the forum tonight I found articles musing on a sister ship for Mont St Michel, the savings to be had with the Brittany Ferries Owners Club and the cheapest time to buy a BF crossing ticket.

Personally after using them extensively for the first couple of years of owning our French holiday home we've now stopped using Brittany Ferries because the ticket prices were so high, but having said that I know other people who love their boats and cross with them to France every year. The summary on the enthusiasts site of the Brittany Ferries onboard accommodation sums it up quite well

Their ships can be described as cruise ferries offering facilities and standards of comfort expected of a cruise ship rather than a cross channel ferry. Facilities include shopping malls, cinemas, restaurants, bars, tourist offices and even swimming pools.

As with much in life you pays your money you takes your choice. But anyway, the BF enthusiasts site is worth a read and there's even a forum section on news and views about other ferry companies.

Euroferries - no sign of ferry service starting from Ramsgate to Boulogne

2009-06-22T22:36:00.004+01:00

Last time I blogged back in March 2009 there was no news of Euroferries launch despite their website announcing in was starting in Spring 2009 and then would 'commence imminently'.

June 2009 and no update on the Euroferries website.

There is speculation and counter refutation of any news following a recent announcement on This is Kent (news), photos apparently showing the boat recently painted in Euroferries colours, but the most discussion is on The Big Blog's Euroferries announcement posting where they are up to 250 comments to date.

Summary seems to be that the proposed boat the 'Bonanza Express' has been berthed at Las Palmas in Gran Canaria for the past 6 months and that the Port of Boulogne have confirmed that they're not in active discussions with Euroferries as to starting a service.

So don't hold your breath on this one ...

C'est La Folie - Book Review

2009-06-21T20:30:00.002+01:00

C'est La Folie

Amazingly despite seemingly working all hours possible I have actually found enough 'me' time to read a book. Normally I only get such luxuries when on holiday so perhaps I'm finally learning to manage my work/life balance or is that my work/work/work/life balance?

Anyway, onto the book review.

On reaching his thirties Michael Wright decides that there's more to life than his job as a theatre critic and together with his long suffering cat sets off moving from his comfortable existence in South London to start a new altogether grittier life in rural France.

Michael plumps on moving to Limousin on the basis that it's far enough South that the cat'll notice the improvement in the weather and yet close enough to England that he can pop back to see his parents from time to time. Nearness to an Aerodrome is also an essential pre-requisite because Michael's also got to bring his aircraft, a yellow 1946 Luscombe Silvaire, over to France and his tale of searching to find a local aerodrome in the rain sets the tone with a wry sense of humour for the rest of the book:

The barman's moustache twitches as he slides a smoking coffee towards me.
'Il n'y a pas d'aerodrome ici, Monsieur.' He rolls his eyes at the other men in the bar as I repeat a scenario I have played out in countless bars and tabacs all over France, where aerodrome denial is rife.
'But what's this?' I ask, pointing to the little star beside the name Jolibois on my aeronautical chart.
'Ah, you mean the landing-strip that the pilots use?' he huffs, sulkily polishing a glass.
I nod.
'Well, why didn't you say so Monsieur?' he says. 'It's up the road, on the left-hand side.'

And so Michael settles on Jolibois and ends up buying La Folie, a dilapidated farmhouse in need of serious TLC. By his own admission Michael is no 'level 5' DIY expert so there's plenty of stories of waiting for local tradesmen to firstly come to the house, secondly waiting for them to provide a quote, and thirdly waiting for them to actually turn up to do the work!

Jolibois is a made-up name for the nearest town to La Folie but it could equally be any small rural town anywhere in France. Michael's told that it'll take 6 months before the locals welcome him as being "one of them" and as the chapters unfold you're taken through the transformation journey. Fortunately Michael has a couple of advantages over many other Brits relocating to France, firstly he took A level French and seems to have a pretty good grasp of the language beforehand - although there are a few 'mouth in foot' moments where he gets the wrong word or the wrong pronunciation - and secondly Michael can play the organ. Now playing the organ might not strike you as an obvious way of integrating with the local community but Michael jumps in feet first and volunteers to play in the local church, and despite not knowing anything about Catholic Mass and the incumbent organist playing everything from memory without any written music, he's soon trusted enough to play at Saturday's Midnight Mass.

The book's full of lovely little stories about the ups and downs of becoming a sheep and chicken owner, of taming the wilderness that is La Folie's garden, of bureaucracy at the local flying club in allocating space in the newly built hanger for Michael's beloved Luscombe, and of the search for a French soul-mate to share Michael's new life with him.

All in all this is a lovely and enjoyable book and one I can recommend even if you don't personally have the desire to up sticks and move permanently to France.

After enjoying reading C'est La Folie I've now found out that the story doesn't end there and the author's written a follow-on book,
Je t'aime a la Folie, where three years later Michael's settled down in his isolated French life with his cat, chickens and the sheep, and he's just about decided to stop his sometimes over-enthusiastic search for a woman to complete his life, when fate intervenes with a re-introduction to Alice, an old school friend, who unfortunately lives in America, in Baltimore.

And so the stage is set for part-deux, conducting a long-distance love affair. Unfortunately Je t'aime a la Folie isn't released yet so I'll just have to put it on my Amazon wish list.

SpeedOne sold for £8m and an update from SpeedFerries administrators

2009-06-15T09:04:00.005+01:00

When SpeedFerries was put into administration last year I became one of the creditors of 'SpeedFerries Limited (in Administration)' because they owed me for prepaid tickets that I'd not been able to use.

Back in January I learnt of the administrators plans and last week I received the latest, and perhaps final, update from the administrators on reducing the company's debt through selling and realising what few assets SpeedFerries had.

It's interesting to read what value was placed on SpeedFerries customer details as their customer database and various web domain names (except speedferries.com which is being retained by the administrators) was sold to LD Lines for £150,000.

Approval was given in the High Court in March for a Judicial Sale of SpeedOne to try to clear some of the £15m company debt, of which £12m was owed to Bank of Scotland and Incat for the SpeedOne ferry.

The administrators letter continued with details that sealed bids were submitted by 21st April 2009 for SpeedOne and the vessel was eventually purchased by a company called "Prospect Number 70 Limited" for £8m; most of which has already been distributed to the Bank of Scotland as primary secured lender. Prospect Number 70 Limited have now also bought the complete spares inventory for SpeedOne at an additional price of £60k.

The administrators themselves will be paid some £726k for their time and expenses in winding up the company and their letter finishes with 'The Joint Administrators do not anticipate the realisation of further assets in relation to the Company ... there will be insufficient funds to completely discharge the debts of BoS and as such there will be no funds available to discharge the debts of Incat (manufacturers for SpeedOne) .... and there will not be any amounts available to the non-preferential creditors of the Company' (i.e. ordinary customers like me).

And so that pretty much completes the story of SpeedFerries.

But who or what is 'Prospect Number 70 Limited' I wondered? And what do they plan to do with SpeedOne?

I've managed to find a bit of information on the public records held with Companies House (search for 'Prospect Number 70' then 'order information on this company') which are available for £1 for each company filing. Similar information is yielded (for £18 a pop) with a UK data search for Prospect Number 70.

The company was incorporated earlier this year and is currently registered at 25 Moorgate, London. There's three mortgages outstanding on the company, the company secretary is Taqi Ullah Mir, and the company directors are Nicholas James White, Anthony Michael Dean and John Gordon Davis. I did a bit of searching for these names on Google but couldn't find anything that seemed relevant.

So my guess is that SpeedOne has been bought by some kind of venture capitalist or opportunist company and they'll be selling the vessel on to another ferry company.

But who knows?

Toilets !

2009-06-08T17:00:00.000+01:00

Perhaps not the most exciting of topics but the subject of toilet flush mechanisms and the inequalities of UK and French plumbing price differences has been vexing me lately.

When we were over in Brittany at Easter I noticed that I could hear the sound of running water coming from the Gite's upstairs toilet.

'Not a problem' I thought, just need to adjust the ballcock which is probably out of alignment and causing the toilet to overfill slightly.

So I took the top off the toilet, found the polystyrene float, and bent down slightly the metal arm that connects the float to the incoming water valve.

Job done.

Or rather job not done. The next day I noticed that the toilet was only half full of water so I bent the arm up a bit and later on found the same problem with the toilet over-filling.

Thereafter I continued playing the same game of adjusting the arm up a bit, down a bit, pushing the polystyrene float up the arm, down the arm, round the arm, and all ultimately to no avail. It was only when the toilet was once again overfilling but yet the polystyrene float was fully submerged under the water level that I concluded that perhaps the problem was not the float at all but rather the valve that had worn inside and now wasn't shutting off properly.

So next day I went off to a big builders merchant in Loudeac that I've used a few times before. It's not the absolutely nearest builders merchant but its got a bigger range than the nearest one in La Trinite Porhoet and I figured the prices would be more reasonable than Mr Bricolage which is a sort of French equivalent to Homebase - i.e. lots of DIY stuff interspersed with pretty scatter cushions and attractive wall prints, and thus not the cheapest option.

I thought the builders merchant would be my most economical option - ha !

They didn't seem to have any ball valve type of float mechanism but instead had a nice range of valves that closed by means of a sort of inverted little cup. The cup is held upside down in the toilet cistern when as the water level rises the air trapped in the cup causes the cup to rise, pushing up a bar that then closes the valve. Looked simple and effective but came with an eye watering €25 price tag. Actually the price on the shelf edge said €24.80 but then they charged me less than that, added tax (TVA) and 'English DIYer supplement' (or whatever, I couldn't understand the printed invoice), and so I ended up paying slightly over €25.

Well at the time it seemed a bit steep, 25 quid or near enough for a toilet valve, but I needed one and I couldn't think that it would be all that much cheaper elsewhere so I stumped up, paid me money and took my new gadget back to the Gite.

10 minutes and a bit of PTFE tape around the toilet inlet pipe later the job was done. Water back on, no floods, and the toilet works a treat. The inverted cup mechanism seems to work beautifully and the new toilet flushes, fills and shuts off really silently.

When I got back to the UK I thought I'd investigate prices a bit further as I was sure £25 was a bit too high for what was a simple bit of plastic plumbing.

Looking on Screwfix's website who I've used quite a bit in the past for DIY materials (they started off as a trade mail order company with free P&P if you spend over £45 and now have a number of retail outlets across the UK), and a quick search of their website turned up a Torbeck side entry toilet cistern valve which looks identical to my French purchase except it costs just £5.77 including VAT.
Or for less than half the price of the Torbeck if could go for the 'old fashioned' side entry toilet cistern ball valve then this is just £2.28 plus 68p for the ball float that goes on the end of the arm.

As I thought at the time, my French plumbing purchase was expensive, but I hadn't figured on it being over 4 times the price of an equivalent British part! And of course the irony is that both toilet valves are probably made on some production line in China or the far East.

So next time you go to the toilet and flush, especially if you do stay in our Brittany Holiday Home, spare a thought to the expense that goes into running and renovating a French house!

Google Wave launched - with the potential to replace email, blogging and more

2009-06-07T09:00:00.000+01:00

Google Wave

Last week Google announced at their 'Google IO' developers conference something I'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot more over the next year, Google Wave.

How do I describe Google Wave?

It's basically a reinvention of how to electronically interact with other people and documents, done afresh from the ground up. It combines collaboration tools and document sharing and editing in what could well be the replacement for email, twittering, blogging, wiki's, teamsites, instant messaging and many other forms of disjointed communication.

You have to go and watch the Google Wave launch video, and although it runs to an hour and twenty minutes you'll soon realise why this could be the "next big thing".

Google have apparently been working on this for the last two years, and although the software is still in a pre-beta state it's still a fairly impressive demo.

Google say they will launch Google Wave later on this year but the Wave APIs and interface protocol have already been made freely available under an open source licence.

One to watch methinks ...

(and I'm not the only one to think this, I just noticed that there's already 3,200 RSS subscribers to the Google Wave Developer Blog)

Weak pound causing Brits to go home?

2009-06-06T00:07:00.000+01:00

I read an interesting article just now on StarNews online (an online newspaper from Wilmington, USA) entitled Crisis Stings Britons in France and Spain.

The article tells how the recent falling in value of the pound (or if you prefer, strengthening of the Euro) by some 30% over the last year has pushed up the cost of living and as a result is causing an outflow of British expats to return home from France and Spain.

The problem for many the article points out is that a stagnant housing market on both sides of the Channel is meaning many can't sell their overseas home and neither can buy in the UK and are thus stuck with dwindling finances, especially if they've taken retirement abroad and are finding that their pension doesn't go as far as it used to.

What do you think? If you're living overseas are you pushed into moving back or are you happy to ride out the storm? French house prices have been traditionally far more stable than their UK (and I believe Spanish) counterparts, most parts of France have seen steady year on year property price growth of around 5% rather than the boom or bust we've seen over here.

If not France then flying a Microlight to somewhere else over the sea ...

2009-06-05T16:00:00.001+01:00

A couple of days ago I wrote about my cancelled Microlight flight to France due to strong winds.

Afterwards I kicked my heels at home for a couple of days, moped about not doing very much, and got in my wife's way quite a bit. On Wednesday we went to the garden centre to buy some plants to fill in the gaps where the weeds used to be (Liz has been busy tackling the new garden), and when I got back I gave the Microlight centre a ring to see if anything was happening.

France was still off but they'd decided to go to the Isle of Wight for the day if I was interested - absolutely! - and I had to get down to the centre that evening to plan the route.

And so all of a sudden it was action stations again, hurrah.

The route down to the Isle of Wight was (on paper) reasonably straight forward, I would fly the first leg down to Popham (near Basingstoke), another student would then fly to the Isle of Wight and I'd get a lift with another experienced pilot, then we'd swap over, I'd fly along the coast to The Needles and to Clench Common (near Marlborough), then swap around again and the other student would fly the final return leg to Sandy. We spent hours pouring over the maps, marking the key waypoints and things we expected to fly over like railway lines, motorway junctions, high-voltage cables and big towns, etc.

Microlights ready to fly

Next morning I was at the airfield at an unreasonably early 6:30am to the sight of almost complete cloud cover at 2,000 feet. Occasionally it briefly cleared a bit until the next wave of cloud came in.

Nevertheless off we set off on our adventure into the wild blue (well grey) yonder.

All the route and map planning and preparation obviously paid off as I was very successful in following the pre-prepared route. My navigation was pretty much spot on as we marked off waypoint after waypoint, flying along just under the bottom of the clouds with occasional drops a bit lower when the clouds descended. Flying over the Chiltern's and opening up over the M40 cutting (as seen in the opening credits for 'Vicar of Dibley') was especially great as the ground rises up considerably and with low cloud and a tall radio transmission mast to get past it all got a bit interesting!

With the low cloudbase we weren't able to fly high enough over Aylesbury, Reading and Basingstoke as planned so I had to skirt round them. And then right in front of me was Popham airfield as expected. One circuit round overhead, a call on the radio to the control tower who couldn't hear us even though we could hear them OK, then I was on finals, turning past the petrol station to land with a bit of a bump on the long grass runway.

Not the gentlest of landings but quite safe. I taxied the plane up to the refuelling point and as I turned the engine off I was surprised to see that the Microlight behind me had been caught by a gust of wind on landing and had turned over on its side. Fortunately neither the experienced pilot or his passenger were hurt but the plane took a bit of damage and has had to go off for some rather expensive repairs.

I found out afterwards that not only had my instructor let me fly and land all the way on my own but he'd also been sitting on his map so had been totally reliant on my navigation skills!

Portsmouth docks and Isle of Wight

After the obligatory coffee and bacon sandwich break we took off again due South towards Portsmouth, the Solent and the Isle of Wight.

This time I was sitting in the back as passenger so was able to take some photos of the journey as we flew down the A33, over Portsmouth, past the naval docks and Spinnaker Tower, and over the Solent. Flying over Ryde we soon arrived at Sandown airport.

More coffee, bacon sandwiches, some chilling out in the sun, some of the group went to Sandown itself but unfortunately we didn't get time to make sandcastles on the beach!

Another Microlight flying alongside

By the afternoon we were running out of time so had to change route plans, opting instead for the direct route back home stopping off at Popham again for fuel. This time I flew over the Solent up to Popham and was the passenger for the return leg from Popham to Sandy, flying over Leighton Buzzard, Woburn Park and past the mighty airship hangers at Cardington.

All together I flew the Microlight for over 115 miles in one day so it was a well deserved beer when we finally landed back at Sandy at 8pm.

The next day I was absolutely exhausted and got up very late so it was a good job I didn't have to go to work !

I've filed a few more photos from my Microlight trip to Popham and the Isle of Wight over on Flickr.

Strong winds prevented a French flying break

2009-06-02T08:27:00.003+01:00

I've mentioned before on this Blog that I have been learning to fly a Microlight aircraft over the last year or so.

Admittedly I've not really written all that much about my new-found weekend pastime, partly because I do try (at least occasionally) to keep this Blog on-message (i.e. keep my ramblings focussed on 'running a French holiday Gite in Rural Brittany'), and partly my lack of postings on this subject has been because I've not had much interesting or exciting to write about.

Until last week that is.

So far my Microlight flying has been proceeding fairly well and I'm at the "circuit bashing" stage of practising flying circuits around the airfield. The take-off's are fine, the flying round in the prescribed rectangular route on a straight and level attitude is fine, but the tricky bit is the landings! Basically I just need more practice to get them consistent. And boy have I been practising flying circuits and in particular the landings for some time now.

Last week though was different as my Microlight Club had organised a trip to France.

My previous flying excursions have been limited to bits of Bedfordshire in and around where we live so I tend to have at least some familiarity with the area, and one cross-country journey of some 40 miles or so up to Deenethorpe airfield in Northamptonshire where it has to be said that I got somewhat lost and it was by more luck (and the instructor in the back of the Microlight) that we got there and back at all.

Flying to France was to be on a whole different league - of getting lost on a really advanced scale if nothing else!

We were all due to fly out on Tuesday morning, down to Headcorn in Kent, refuel there then continue on to Folkestone, fly straight over the channel to Cap Gris-Nez, round the back of Le Touquet, and then on to Abbeville where we'd land and stay over at the airfield. All going well we would do some local flying in France, perhaps up and down the French coast, then fly back to the UK on either Wednesday or Thursday.

As I'm not qualified yet I was taking an instructor with me and was planning to swap over at the different way points with another student who was travelling with an experienced pilot.

All in all I was really really looking forward to it, it was to be quite an adventure. Everything was ready for the trip, I'd bought a couple of brand new life-jackets off ebay as apparently there's a 15 minute or so 'bit in the middle' of the channel where if you have an engine failure in the Microlight you're too far out to glide down to a dry landing (ulp); I'd bought a 2 man tent from a car boot sale; I'd packed the absolute minimum needed for the journey and we were all set to go.

Unfortunately the weather didn't play ball and it was clear from the Met Office forecast that it was going to be high winds with 30mph gusts for our designated departure day.

And for once the man from the Met was right the weather was lousy and so instead of an enjoyable flight across the channel and an evening enjoying French wine and food I kicked my heels around at home, bored and very despondent. After all the build-up and excitement of the trip this was a mega-anticlimax.

Couldn't face doing any more unpacking at home (still 8 months after our house move there's plenty to unpack still) so I grumpily turned on my laptop and got on with doing some work.

Grumble grumble

Low cost inkjet cartridges - recommended filling service

2009-05-26T09:54:00.000+01:00

Last month I wrote about the panic I had with my son's expired passport that eventually required three trips to the Peterborough passport office as the photoshop editing caused the passport pictures to be rejected. All sorted in the end but at the time it was a bit stressful not knowing if we'd get a passport issued in time.

In amongst all the problems I had was the colour cartridge on my HP inkjet printer running out - passport photos in magenta and black would definitely not be accepted by the Passport Office!

Once we got back from France I needed to get a replacement ink cartridge. HP make excellent photo quality printers but they charge a fortune for their ink cartridges - circa £25 is not uncommon for the colour cartridge.

Looking in Tesco soon afterwards I saw that they were selling "refurbished" cartridges at 2 for £30 - better but still not good enough so I decided to turn to ebay.

After wading through the plenitude of options I eventually settled on an inkjet cartridge filling service. I'd never tried one of these before but the seller had a good feedback rating and offered a 100% guarantee so I thought I'd give it a go.

Magazine articles I've read have said that filling your own cartridges is the cheapest way of running an inkjet printer but equally tales of blocked nozzles, ink stains on your hands and leaking cartridges have put me off the idea myself. Paying someone else for their expertise seems a small price to pay.

I have to report being very pleased with the service and re-filled cartridge which appears to work as good as a brand new one from HP.

In total it cost me £6.55 for the replacement cartridge (£3.25 for the item off ebay, £2 for the return postage and £1.30 for me to send the cartridge off) - roughly half what it would have cost in the shops.

I'm more than happy therefore to recommend Compatible Imaging Technologists' inkjet filling service.

Vodaphone cuts the cost of calls from abroad with its summer Passport scheme

2009-05-22T15:00:00.001+01:00

Vodaphone passport

Using your mobile phone from abroad both for making and receiving has always been fiendishly expensive with charges of £1 a minute or more not being uncommon.

Fortunately due to EU regulation the charges have been coming down over the last few years, and now it looks like Vodaphone have been the first to abolish them completely.

Vodaphone announced last week that they are reducing roaming charges and abolishing them until September 2009. So it now will cost just the same to call from (say) France as it would be to call from Frimley!

All you have to do is register for Vodaphone's Passport scheme by texting the word ‘Passport’ to 97888 if you're on a monthly contract, or text to 2345 if you're a Pay as you go customer.

If you're not with Vodaphone then pickup a free
Vodaphone PAYG sim card, pop it into your handset (which must be unlocked), and away you go.

A Taste of France from Lidl

2009-05-19T11:20:00.001+01:00

If you can't wait until your next French holiday then I noticed that Lidl's are running a Taste of France promotion from Monday next week (25th May 2009).

There's a range of different typical French produce on sale, both food and drink, and as usual with Lidl are all at cheap prices and with a no-frills service.

I can personally recommend the 'Pineau des Charentes' which I've never seen on sale in the UK before, it's made from the 'left-over' bits of grape from when wine is made, with added Cognac to give it a bit of zing! Very nice, I've enjoyed more than a bottle or two of it in the past and have brought some back home to give to my Dad as well!

Very last minute guests - coincidence or good marketing?

2009-05-09T22:53:00.002+01:00

Yesterday evening I wrote a brief blog entry about P&O Ferries current ticket offer, concluding with a passing comment about our Gite being available in May and short breaks were an option. I never expected to get a result quite as quick as I did do!

This morning at a far-too-early 8:30am I was woken up by the phone ringing, with a customer who'd been looking at the Gite website and wanted confirmation that we did do part week bookings on a pro-rata price basis.

I said we did, and when was he interested in booking the Gite for, to which he replied that he wanted to book the Gite for 5 nights from tonight until Thursday next week, which was perfect for me as we have some American guests arriving Thursday evening.

He went on to ask if those dates were OK with me as he next needed to book the ferry over to Calais !

I said it was fine, found a pen and wrote down his email address and phone number, and we agreed the rental price there and then.

After I got off the phone I used paypal to send a money request for the Gite rental (normally I much prefer customers to pay by cheque as I object to the size of the fees paypal charge, but for emergencies like this, it's perfect), and then emailed our new guests with travel directions for how to get to the Gite.

Next was a call through to our Brittany agents, Cherril and Alan, to ask if they could prepare the Gite for the guests, and fortunately Cherril was in - phew!

And that was that. We've had some short-notice bookings before, but never one for a customer wanting to arrive that night.

P&O Ferries - 5 day sale - ends May 12th

2009-05-08T12:51:00.002+01:00

A quick-blog update with news that P&O Ferries are holding a 5 day sale from today so if you're quick you can pick up a bargain ferry crossing to La Belle Francais.

All crossings are via P&O's frequent Dover/Calais route (75 minute crossing time) and there's three different deals on offer:

If you fancy a day trip out, maybe for a bit of fine French food (or topup on cheap wine at a hypermarket), then a one day return to Calais with car and up to 9 people is just £19;
Or alternatively stay longer, and enjoy more time in France with a 2 day return crossing for just £29;
Or max-it-out with a 3 day return crossing for £39!

As ever P&O say this is a limited offer, there's "just" 50,000 tickets available, all bookings have to be made by 10pm on Tuesday 12th May, and your sailing taken before 15th July 2009.

More details as well as regular ferry crossing prices to France are over on P&O's ferry website.

And of course if you fancy staying in a nice French Gite, I know of a nice one which still has some available dates in May and June .... (and yes, we will do short breaks at a very good price if you're interested).

301 rewrite broke the website

2009-05-07T00:19:00.003+01:00

I admit it, I'm a muppet.

We tell the kids (especially Jack, our youngest) that they're "a Muppet" when they do something stupid.

I can now confirm, as suspected for a long time, that the kids must get their Muppet genes from me as I managed to completely break the holiday gite website for a week as the Google Analytics graph above all too clearly shows.

Back in January 2009 I wrote about the "extreme website trickery" of using .htaccess and rewriterule to auto-magically transform requests for web pages such as http://giteinbrittany.com/gite.html to http://www.giteinbrittany.com/gite.html.

I concluded with noting that I still had some work to do with ensuring that http://www.giteinbrittany.com (i.e. the default home page) and http://www.giteinbrittany.com/index.html (i.e. the actual home page contents) were appropriately dealt as a single indexed page (in Google and the other search engines) to maximise my page rank opportunity.

Well with some on and off fiddling of the way that the website menu structures were automatically generated I managed to change all the internal home page references from /index.html to just / so this did most of what I needed to do.

All that remained was to do some fiddling with the .htaccess file to return 301 (permanently moved) for any direct page requests to index.html and the job was done.

Although of course 'it ain't never that simple' with me!

I remembered that over the years I had moved around a few of the website pages and I was concious that there were links "out there" on the web that still pointed to the old website pages that were now broken and returning an unfriendly HTML 404 'page not found' error.

Easy I thought, I'll use a bit of .htaccess trickery to return a 301 response code and redirect any 'old page' requests to the shiny 'new page', page rank will improve, broken links will be banished and customer experience will be improved as a result, and all will be well with the world!

In my travels to work out how to decipher the intricacies of page redirection I'd come across an article by Steven Hargrove on redirecting moved web pages which simply said to include an additional line in the .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /old/old.html http://www.you.com/new.html

So that's what I did, I added a new line like this:

Redirect 301 /test/index_lytebox_mod.html http://www.giteinbrittany.com/test/lytebox/index.html

Job done, I uploaded the new .htaccess file, and left the website to it.

You'd think that after 22 years working in the IT Industry I would know better and remember to actually test any changes I make - especially those that are as 'deep rooted' as this in the webserver config file.

Well, Mr Muppet didn't bother testing this config change at all, and purely by chance a week or so later I went onto the website to check whether a particular week was available or not and found that EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE REQUEST was returning a HTML 500 error - "fatal server error". I hadn't just managed to break requests to the page that had moved on the website, I'd broken everything.

Google's Webmaster console was full of error messages about unreachable pages and most telling of all was the Google Analytics report of visitor details (above), graphically showing how I caused us to "drop off the internet" for nearly a week.

Commenting out the offending line of the .htaccess file immediately fixed the problem, but finding a working solution to redirecting moved pages has taken me considerably more time as all the examples I found were variations on a theme and everything I tried continued to break the website.

Cutting the story short, and pointing out yet more Muppetry on my part, in the end I found out that the problem was that I had an unprintable character in the .htaccess file and as a result whilst 'http://www.giteinbrittany.com/' and 'test/lytebox/index.html' appeared to be contiguous text when editing the .htaccess in Notepad, actually they were separated by another (invisible) character and as a result the Apache server was barfing on the unrecognised 'extra' text.

Along the way I did an awful lot of research and tried lots of different approaches, none of which worked, until I found the actual root cause problem.

I'll point out a couple of things I did find though, the 'redirect to' URL has to be a full URL (i.e. http://www.blahblah/newpath/filename), it can't be a relative path such as /newpath/filename - at least one site I visited suggested that this was the case.

I can also recommend the htaccess elite forum on using redirect and rewrite for other troubled .htaccess users like me, and then a series of posting by 'produke' on sample redirect statements and a full explanation of how to use the redirect directive in .htaccess.

In the latter article I noticed that the server response code, 301 (permanently redirected), was optional and only introduced from Apache 1.2 onwards. All the examples I'd ever seen had included this response code, so if you have redirect problems then check the webserver version (or take omit the response code).

I'm glad to say now that removing the errant unprintable character cured all my redirect woes and so as a result I have a .htaccess file that prevents directory browsing, redirects requests for non www. pages to the www. version and also now redirects requests for moved pages to their new home.

Putting it all together the .htaccess looks like this:

<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
IndexIgnore */*

### redirect any moved pages that still have old links to them
Redirect 301 /test/index_lytebox_mod.html http://www.giteinbrittany.com/test/lytebox/index.html

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

### re-direct non-www to www
rewritecond %{http_host} ^giteinbrittany.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.giteinbrittany.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Moral of the story therefore, test things before you put them live and look for the obvious (or perhaps non-obvious) typing errors!

Nationwide drops its no fee policy for overseas card transactions

2009-04-29T08:00:00.001+01:00

Nationwide overseas card charges

I've written a few times about different aspects of Banking in France, like the shock of having to pay bank account charges in France, using Moneybookers to transfer money to my French bank account and trying to work out whether it's cheaper to use paypal or visa to pay an overseas bill.

I haven't blogged though about my other favourite French Financial trick, my Nationwide FlexAccount debit card.

When we were over in France at Easter I realised that we were imminently going to run out of oil in the central heating tank and despite having used Moneybookers to transfer over a load of money before the holiday, I could see we weren't going to have enough Euros to pay to fill the tank up.

So all I did was to go to the nearest cash dispenser (which happens to be in the pretty floral town of La Cheze, just 2 miles from the Gite), and withdraw a few hundred Euros, then pay the withdrawn cash into my French bank account at the post office (which seems to involve an awful lot of form filling in for what is a simple task, but that's French bureaucracy for you!)

With pretty much any other bank or building society you'd be slapped with an overseas card handling charge for withdrawing cash from a UK bank account whilst overseas. And heaven help you if you make a cash withdrawal with a UK credit card because as well as the overseas handling fee you'll get charged a cash withdrawal fee and interest from the day you take the cash out.

Fortunately up until now Nationwide with its 'proud to be different' motto has absorbed any charges that the overseas bank or Visa may have levied and all you pay is the transaction amount converted to Sterling - and the conversion rate is usually pretty good as well - certainly much better than you would get if you went to a travel agent. So the Nationwide FlexAccount debit card has been long recommended by financial websites for overseas spending.

But all that's changing and from the 6th May 2009 Nationwide will start passing on the Visa overseas transaction fees it pays, at the rate of 0.84%, but rising to 1% in July 2009.

There are some exceptions though, and the first and most important is that for European card transactions there's no change - whether you withdraw cash in a Spanish ATM or pay for a romantic hotel booking in Italy with your FlexAccount card you still don't pay any additional fee. And so of course for me therefore there's no charge for French cash dispenser withdrawals (phew).

Secondly, if you have a Nationwide cash card (not debit card) then there's also no overseas charge as these cards are issued by MasterCard, but don't hold your breath as it's likely that these will also start incurring a fee soon as well.

There's more details of the overseas fee and precisely which countries Visa (and hence Nationwide) charge an overseas transaction fee on the Nationwide website along with more general advice about using your Nationwide card abroad.

All is not lost however and despite these fees for non-European withdrawals the Nationwide card still comes out significantly cheaper than many of the rival banking providers. There's further details and a comparison of overseas ATM withdrawal costs on the Lovemoney (ex Motley Fool) website.

Treated the swimming pool to a new cover and a new pump

2009-04-24T07:10:00.001+01:00

Our Swimming Pool with new 'hat'

When we were over at Easter we treated the 15 foot frame swimming pool at our french vacation rental home to a new pool cover.

It may sound like a really minor thing, the swimming pool cover, but with us not living onsite in France all the time it's amazing how these little things can become an organisational "challenge".

Some time ago I bought a cover for our Intex swimming pool to keep the leaves out when not in use but mistakenly I'd bought a 'Bestway' cover and despite my struggling it just wouldn't fit - seems not all "15 foot frame pool covers are the same" !

Courtesy of ebay I bought a proper Intex one which fits a treat and doesn't the pool look happy as a result !!

When we arrived at the Gite we found that the pool pump wasn't working and there was a bit of green slime in the pool along with quite a few leaves from the non-fitting cover.

I chucked some Chlorine Shock and Granular Flocculant into the pool, replaced the filter in the pool pump with a new one, kick-started the pump and left it running overnight to see what would happen.

If you're not into swimming pools (as I wasn't when we first bought one) the world of swimming pool treatment can be quite complicated with different chemicals to raise PH, lower PH, chlorinate the water, purify it, testing kits, etc. Took a bit of reading up to understand the process and then write up some instructions for the guests to follow.

Here's details of a couple of links to Wikipedia on how Chlorine is used to purify and kill bugs in the pool water and Flocculant to clean the water by causing suspended particles to clump together so they can be filtered out.

Next morning the pool was looking a bit clearer and by the morning after that it was all looking good again. Quite a relief as water's expensive in France and the thought of emptying out 15 cubic metres of water from the pool, cleaning the pool, and then refilling it all again wasn't something that sounded a fun way to spend the holiday and would be costly too.

We did however spend most of the rest of the holiday periodically going to the pool and fishing out more leaves from the bottom of the pool. It was actually quite therapeutic pooling the depths with the pool net!

Unfortunately I had less success with the swimming pool pump.

Recalling back to the Blog article I wrote in October 2008 about the faulty pool pump that kept tripping out the main house electrics, Alan had to put a new pump on the pool in August 2008 and just 7 months later I found that the new pump kept on stopping unexpectedly. Fiddled with it a bit but in the end I had to swap it with the replacement pump we had just taken over, and I guess I'll be buying a new pump off ebay again unless I can find out why it keeps on stopping.

The kids as usual loved the swimming pool and despite it being mid April and the water registering a cool 12 degrees C on the thermometer they made frequent use of it, jumping in and out and splashing around. Me, I'll wait until our August holiday when the temperature's warmed up a bit more.

So all's well with the pool now and we're set for this summers guests. I've left it with the pump on a timeswitch set to come on every night for an hour to keep the water clean and the new cover works a treat.

France Magazine - special subscription offer

2009-04-22T07:29:00.001+01:00

France Magazine

As a reader of our blog and someone who's interested in France I thought I'd pass on a top-tip of a special subscription offer to France Magazine of just £24, saving 50% off the regular price.

"Spectacular scenery, vibrant cities and charming villages, FRANCE magazine brings you the very best of France. Featuring inspiring articles on weekend getaways, destinations and holiday ideas, an intriguing food and wine section for French foodies as well as articles steeped in history and culture it really is the next best thing to being there!"

In future issues there's lots of interesting articles; for June the magazine commemorates the 65th anniversary of D-Day with a visit to the key sites in Normandy as well as a tour of parks and gardens in the Auvergne; and in July the Boating Special features canal boating in southern France and a trip around the Marais Poitevin - France's Green Venice.

Normally a UK subscription to France Magazine will cost £41.50, by phoning 01858 438788 and quoting code FCE1, or using this France Magazine subscription link, it'll cost just £23.94.

NB: This offer is valid for new subscriptions taken before the 30th June 2009.