Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany

An update on Save5 - please consider joining the organ donor register

2013-04-10T21:52:00.000+01:00

Gosh it was over a year and a half ago that I wrote on this blog about the inspirational Save5 campaign to get 10,000 more people to join the UK Organ donor register. Please do follow the link to the previous article to read more about the campaign.

'T' Sandeman-Charles had started a personal campaign to make a significant difference to the lives of other people by asking 10,000 people if they would be willing through her Save 5 campaign to join the UK Organ donor register and potentially save up to 5 other people's lives.

At the time of writing my blog article in September 2011, T had succeeded in getting 2,700 people to join the register and as of today (April 2013) the total now stands at 6,168 - only 3,832 to go to reach the target.

T has now made a video posting on YouTube describing the Save 5 campaign, the reasons she started it, and asking people to join the campaign.

I've enclosed her video below and I do encourage you to watch it, and like my wife Liz and I, to potentially make a real difference to someone else's life by joining the donor register:

Thank you, Geoffrey

We're talking about money, money

2013-03-24T21:20:00.001Z

Musical introduction
Paraphrasing the lyrics from "Money's Too Tight To Mention" from the great Mick Hucknall of Simply Red (who my wife Liz has a real crush on -- I think its the red hair), "We're talking about money, money", or to be more accurate, "We're talking about money transfers, money transfers", but since this doesn't have quite the same rhythmic structure to it, I doubt that anyone has written a song about transferring money from one country to another.

Moneybookers the story so far
I wrote in 2007 about the benefits of Moneybookers for easy (and cheap) foreign currency transfers, giving step by step instructions as to how to use their service and I've used them now for many years to transfer money from the UK to my French bank account, and I've stayed with them when Moneybookers increased their transaction fees in 2008 as they were still cheaper than the high street banking alternatives.

But I think its now time to change allegiance.

The internet world moves on and Moneybookers rebranded themselves a couple of years ago as Skrill, but the domain name and the service all remained the same so all was good.

However in February 2012 Skrill/Moneybookers wrote to me to advise of changes to their terms and conditions. Most significant of which is that they've introduced an 'inactivity fee' of €1 per month if you haven't logged in or made a transaction using your Skrill account within the previous 18 months. This inactivity period was then reduced from 18 to 12 months in December 2012 so I can see the trend happening here ...

OK, so I have to regularly login to my Skrill account to avoid the inactivity service fee, but is it still good value for money?
Last month I needed to transfer £1000 to my French bank account so I thought I'd review whether I was still making the best choice for my foreign currency transfer.

First up, I bank with Nationwide Building society, so I thought I'd see what Nationwide would charge for an overseas Swift transfer, but the website didn't actually tell me, and I had to phone up to find out what the interest rate applied would be!

Nationwide would charge £25 for the transfer and offered me a transfer rate of 1.191, meaning I'd get €1161.23 paid into my French bank account from my £1000.

Next I looked at Moneybookers/Skrill, Skrill offer the wholesale exchange rate minus 2.49% and then charge £1.48 on top to withdraw funds into a Euro account.

I had to do a bit of math to convert the Skrill exchange rate from Pounds per Euro into the reverse Euros per Pound, take off the 2.49% exchange rate loading, and the withdrawal fee and I worked out I'd get €1192.14 for the same £1000 - i.e. €31 more.

Better, but can I improve on this exchange rate?

The new big thing in the world of money transfers is peer to peer
The principles of peer to peer money transfers are dead simple, instead of using a bank to transfer your money from one currency to another, you find someone who wants to transfer money in the reverse direction (from Euros to Pounds in my case), and just like you might do in and old fashioned marketplace you swap the money between yourselves. In truth this is no different to how the financial institutions emerged from the Coffee houses of 200 years ago, but now accomplished using the internet to bring buyers and sellers together to swap money between themselves.

There's an article explaining how peer to peer money transfers work over on the Quidco blog, but since the article is written by TransferWise who offer a peer to peer service, you can also read a less biased report on 5 ways to transfer money abroad on LoveMoney.com.

So trying them out for real, I looked in more depth at CurrencyFair and TransferWise, both of which offer a very similar service.

TransferWise is the simplest, you enter how much of what currency you want to convert, the recipient bank account details to transfer the money into, you're given an indicative exchange rate, and if you accept it your conversion is 'booked'.
You then transfer the money from your bank account into your transferwise account, and once your money arrives the transaction is done.

Last year I tried TransferWise for the first time and it worked pretty well. There was a slight hiccup because when the money was transferred from my UK account into my TransferWise account they couldn't associate the deposit with my account because my transferwise account had been created in my name whereas our bank account is in joint names. I guess its due to money laundering regulations that they check that the account names match, but a quick email giving the full names on all the accounts sorted the problem out and the transfer was done.

TransferWise now accept debit cards for payment so it's now even easier to transfer money in just one step.

For £1000 TransferWise offered me an exchange rate of 1.2146, there was a fee of £4.48 to transfer the money into my French bank account, so in total I'd receive €1209.16 - an increase of €17 on top of Skrill, a welcome improvement.
(NB: Looking today on TransferWise the transfer fee now seems to have increased slightly to £4.98 so the difference will be less)

This time though I thought I'd try the other big peer to peer transfer service, CurrencyFair. CurrencyFair offer a very similar 'QuickTrade' service whereby they do the matching, or they offer a 'Marketplace' service where you can actually see what other currency swaps are being offered and either accept one of them or request a different rate, hoping that someone else will decide to take you up on your offer.

CurrencyFair's QuickTrade offered me a rate of 1.2114 with a €3 transaction fee to deposit the money into my French account, so I'd receive €1208.40, but as I said you can try to better that in the Marketplace so I thought I'd give that a go.

First step in the process was that I found that I had to record the different currency holding accounts in CurrencyFair. I needed to create GBP and EUR accounts and then deposit the required GBP with CurrencyFair before I could try to do a transfer, but it didn't take too long to do this, setup the transfer details from my bank, and thanks to same day transfers the money arrived at CurrencyFair within about an hour.

With the MarketPlace you can nominate what rate you want to convert the money at, so I thought I'd ask for 1.2160 which was slightly better than the QuickTrade rate and would have netted me €1213 if it had matched successfully.

15 minutes later my trade was matched, but unfortunately not for the full amount, I was only partially matched but at least my first £204.97 was now converted to €249.25.

Result!

Unfortunately I then watched for the rest of the day as the market dropped and the rates offered on CurrencyFair slid slowly downwards, until at 8pm when the market closed and my conversion request was cancelled.

Next day I tried again, requesting the same conversion rate of 1.2160, but by then this wasn't a competitive rate and my trade sat there all day unmatched until 5pm in the afternoon when I cancelled the request and booked the best rate on offer at that time, 1.2000, converting my remaining £795.03 into €954.03.

So over the two trades and after paying the €3 transfer fee I managed to receive €1200.28 into my French bank account which duly arrived a day or so after initiating the transfer out from CurrencyFair.

So in summary ...
Firstly its clear that TransferWise and CurrencyFair offer a better transfer rate than my previous favourite Skrill/Moneybookers, although in my case it wasn't a massive difference - €17 or 1.4% more currency, but its worth remembering that all of these still beat the high street banks hands down.

Secondly you have to look carefully at the fees and exchange rates offered. TransferWise charges you a fee in Pounds (£4.98), CurrencyFair's fee is in Euros and is lower (€3), but when I was doing my transfer CurrencyFair's exchange rate wasn't quite so good, so this eliminated the fee difference.

Thirdly, by using the CurrencyFairs's Marketplace that shows you real time exchange rates offered by other customers you can get an even better rate, or if the market is sliding away from you, you won't, and locking in to a guaranteed rate earlier in the day could have been a better option.

With both companies your money should be safe, CurrencyFair is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland and TransferWise by our own FSA.

In conclusion I suspect I'll continue using CurrencyFair and TransferWise for my foreign currency transfers, and will close my Skrill account if I'm not going to use it.

PS: Here's the full lyrics to Simply Red's "Money's too tight to mention"

There's a barney brewing above and below the Straits of Dover

2013-03-16T12:34:00.000Z

Changing topic slightly, I've been following with interest recent developments in the emerging spat between Eurotunnel and the Competition Commission over the recently launched MyFerryLink.

Last summer I wrote about SeaFrance going into liquidation and then in June Eurotunnel announced that they had bought 2 of the 3 defunct SeaFrance vessels, spending €65m in the process, and in August I included photos of their nearly launched new Dover/Calais service named MyFerryLink.

Some might think it odd that the undersea channel tunnel ferry operator is funding what is effect a direct competitor to Eurotunnel whose ferry boats will carry freight and passengers over a pretty much identical route.

P&O and DFDS as the other two incumbent Dover/Calais ferry operators at this point cried "foul" and their unhappiness was further intensified when Eurotunnel considered bidding for the concession to run Boulogne and Calais ferry ports as well.

In October 2012 the whole Eurotunnel/SeaFrance takeover was referred for investigation to the Competition Commission. Preliminary findings from the Competition Commission's investigation into Eurotunnel's actions were that Eurotunnel acquired the boats to prevent DFDS doing so and that "the transaction may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition in the freight and passenger markets. This could be expected to lead to an increase in the prices charged".

The Competition Commission's recommended remedy for the Eurotunnel/SeaFrance issue is for Eurotunnel to dis-invest in MFL (i.e. sell the boats), but the possibility of P&O investing in its place was also rejected as being another conflict of interest.

Eurotunnel not surprisingly contests this point of view and in an interview with ThisIsKent, the chairman and chief executive officer of Groupe Eurotunnel said: "Eurotunnel intends to continue to work with the Competition Commission to allay the concerns raised by existing ferry operators and to demonstrate that the creation of MyFerryLink is a good thing for the market as it is both pro-customer and pro-competition".

Today Eurotunnel published their formal response to the Competition Commission's report, saying that:

Groupe Eurotunnel took part in an open and transparent tender process for the assets of the defunct company, and put forward the best offer
The acquisition was approved by the French Competition Authorities, subject to some restrictions including a requirement not to market a bundle of Tunnel/Ferry options
Eurotunnel considers the maritime activities of MyFerryLink to be complementary to those of Le Shuttle, in particular for the new breed of super-large lorries that won't fit onto the tunnel trains
Eurotunnel does not envisage the activity putting the two incumbent operators at risk.

The CC's deadline for resolution of the issue is currently set at 22nd of April so there will no doubt be further spats and press releases over the forthcoming month.

One news item that the Competition Commission will undoubtedly take into account when coming to their final ruling is that for the first time in Eurotunnel's 19 year history, official Government statistics reveal that it outperformed the ferries. When the tunnel was first built it was predicted that the quicker undersea route would serve as the death-knell for the ferry operators, but its taken all this time for rail passenger numbers to overtake the ferry operators - in 2012, 20 million people used Le Shuttle or Eurostar services, compared to 19.7m travelling by sea.

Brrr, maybe spring hasn't arrived just yet

2013-03-05T22:38:00.000Z

In my last blog posting I wrote about how lovely the Gite was with the spring flowers just peeping out, but maybe I spoke too soon.

Got up today and we've been reminded by the weather that we're not into the halcyon days of summer just yet awhile, it was cold last night and there's a frost on the grass.

I'd spent a bit of time over the last few days removing the few leaves from the pool that had fallen in (see last picture on my earlier post about the swimming pool), but today the pool has a layer of ice over it.
It wasn't just a thin sliver of ice either, I carefully pushed the edge of the pool out and eased my finger down to judge the thickness, and it felt like the ice was about 1cm thick (¾ of an inch in old money). Not sure how cold it has to be to freeze this much but made me glad that Geoff had disconnected the pump pipes from the pool and had drained the water out of the pipes so that any frost wouldn't damage them.

By mid morning the sun had come up and burnt off the frost from the ground. We didn't try swimming in the pool though ..

Spring has arrived in Brittany

2013-02-28T23:34:00.001Z

A couple of lovely photos taken last week of spring flowers at our Gite.

Child labour still in use at our Gite!

2013-02-23T16:13:00.001Z

Actually not true, Toby enjoyed making himself useful servicing the fleet of bikes and chopping firewood (from when we had the oak tree pruned 2 years ago) when we were over at the Gite

The pool is sparkling clean

2013-02-19T16:28:00.001Z

After all the hard work of installing a sand filter and heavy duty pump last year, I was really pleased to see how sparkling clear and clean the swimming pool was.

The little pumps you get supplied with the pool are really not up to the job and previous tines I've visited the pool at the end of the season there would usually be algae and cloudy water.

But not any more!

The few leaves that had blown in as a result of the cover coming off were not really much trouble to fish out, but Toby thought it'd be easier if he got into the pool to remove them!!

It is February and despite a bit of sun the pool thermometer was only reading 8 degrees C. I did warn Toby that it would be cold, but of course like all children he thought he'd try it anyway.

Only managed to stay in for about a minute before admitting that Dad was right ...

The Gite is looking good in Brittany

2013-02-19T15:26:00.001Z

Got to the Gite ok after driving down through France (via Leroy Merlin to buy some electric cable for the renovation project of the second Gite).

Despite spraying weedkiller on the gravel before we left the Gite in August last, I still had my usual job of pulling weeds out for half of the first day after we arrived. If anyone knows of a way of stopping weeds growing in the gravel then I'd be eternally grateful ....

Forgotten things come in threes

2013-02-16T13:26:00.001Z

You know the.old saying that "bad things come in threes", well so far this trip to our Gite I'm proving it quite well.....

Forgotten item number 1, realised as we sat in the queue to board the ferry that we'd not brought any headlamp beam adaptors. I usually use a strip of gaffer tape, but had forgotten to pack the roll of tape (unlike the people in the next car in the queue)

Item number 2, remembered as we queued to get off the ferry and was looking at the car in front that we didn't have the magnetic GB sticker with us.
There's plenty of advice for driving in France on our Gite website. Pity I didn't read it before setting off!!

Number 3 took longer to discover. We stopped off for a cup of tea on the way down through France.
Retrieved the cups, milk, thermos of hot water from the car all ok, but the tea bags? Must be in the car somewhere, kept pulling things out, emptying the boot, looking inside bags and boxes, but no sign whatsoever of the errant tea bags.

Rats must have forgotten those as well.

Hopefully no item number 4 ....

Spirit of France manoeuvring in Dover Harbour

2013-02-16T08:23:00.001Z

We're sitting on board MyFerryLink's "Rodin" waiting to sail to Calais when Spirit of France moved in front of us.
For a £35m vessel it didn't look all that different from the other cross channel ferries,and only appears to be marginally taller than "Pride of Canterbury" in the next berth

Ferry pricing peculiarities

2013-02-10T10:39:00.001Z

I'm off to our Brittany Holiday Gite next week, a combination of using up my remaining holiday allowance from work and taking the opportunity to go and do some more work. I've an accumulation of things to take over to the Gite since we were last over there in August 2012 and so by going it'll clear up some space in the garage as well.

Some of the ferry companies (notably Brittany Ferries and LD Lines) are running a lesser service with not all routes running and a service not being run every day, and having had a quick look at their sites I didn't find any crossings I fancied.

So it was down to the shorter Dover/Calais or Dover/Dunkerque routes with P&O, DFDS (Norfolk Line as was), and newcomer MyFerryLink who took over the SeaFrance boats in late summer last year.

I wanted to go out early on Saturday morning so I could drive down through France during the day and call in at Leroy Merlin to buy some 2-core 6mm mains cable for the oven in our slowly-being-converted-second-Gite, and then return back on Friday night late so we didn't have to rush out of the Gite and we'd be back home in time for youngest son Jack's birthday party on the Saturday.

P&O's service in February is roughly once an hour, and I quite fancied going out on one of their new massive €360m super-ferries, now named Spirit of Britain and Spirit of France after they were forced to withdraw from cashing in on the Olympic theme with the originally chosen names of Olympic Spirit and Olympic Pride.
P&O wanted £82 for the return crossing (£45 outbound and £37 return), but with a £4 supplement if I used a credit card.

Next up I tried DFDS who are now sharing boats with LD Lines and are sailing again about every hour, but two out of every 3 boats go to Dunkerque rather than Calais. It doesn't makea lot of difference but Dunkerque is a slightly longer crossing and slightly further autoroute drive, so a Calais crossing is preferable.
Unfortunately at the time I wanted to go DFDS were operating only a Dunkerque sailing, and wanted a slightly cheaper £74 for the return journey (£39 out and £35 return) with the option to pay by paypal for no credit card fees.

Last up was MyFerryLink who with only two boats (Rodin and Berlioz) are running the smallest number of crossings, only 5 crossings each way each day between Dover and Calais.
MyFerryLink offered to take me for £69 return (£34 out and £35 return) with no credit card surcharges.

Remember all these crossings were on the same dates and as near as I could get the same time of day, so it shows the value of shopping around.

In the end I decided that the MFL outbound sailing and the DFDS inbound sailing offered the best timings for me and it was with some trepidation I searched for the single journey prices.

Sometimes you find that the return prices are much cheaper than the single prices, especially if the return journey is completed with a certain number of days and I have heard that it can even be cheaper to buy a return and not use the return ticket although I've always been to scared that the ferry company would then surcharge the full single ticket price if I misused the return ticket in this way.

Anyway, it wasn't a problem this time, My Ferry Link's single ticket price to Calais was still £34 with no surcharges so job done, ferry booked.

DFDS however did surprise me. The return journey was coming out at £74 (made up of £39 for the outward leg and £35 for the return leg from France), but when I went to book just a single ticket from Calais to Dover they only wanted £33 to take me one way ! Why it should cost £2 more to sail on the same boat for a return journey instead of a single, I don't know, but I'm happy to have made the saving, and the all-in price came out at a very respectable £67 for the two ferry trips.

How peculiar !

What's the probability? My Gite advert on 4OD

2013-02-06T20:37:00.002Z

I have recently taken out an advert on Holiday Lettings.co.uk for our farmhouse rental near Josselin, and much to my surprise today I saw a banner advert for our Gite!

I was viewing the Channel 4 TV 'catchup' service 4OD, to try to watch an episode of Time Team that my father recommended to me as they were digging in York, which is where I went to University (an awful long time ago).

And there, in the banner advert at the top of the 4OD website was an advert for Holiday Lettings, with links to two of their Brittany properties, including on the right, my own holiday Gite.

I was at first incredibly surprised at the probability of being served an advert for holiday lettings, and then for there to be two featured properties that included my own. After a while I figured that it was probably the cleverness of Google Advertising that had worked out that I have sometimes searched on Google for Brittany holiday Gite's, and that this was thus a good advert to serve to me. However having refreshed the 4OD page several times since I've been shown adverts for Aviva Insurance, Audible spoken word books, Thomson Holidays and now Marc Jacobs fragrances, so I am not convinced it was clever Google after all.

Here's my full browser window, showing the advert in context:

Well let's hope the bookings come rolling in !

Always on the lookout for Brittany books

2013-01-18T20:43:00.000Z

Walking in Brittany: Fully Mapped Guide to 30 Scenic Walks
(Bartholomew Walk Guides)

Ever on the lookout for useful books and items for our Brittany Gite, I spotted this Brittany walk guide book on ebay last week for the princely sum of 99 pence plus postage.

I stalked the auction to the end, then nabbed in at the very last minute and was lucky enough to bag a little bargain. The book arrived today and I've enjoyed flicking through and looking at the walks described within it.

The walks are largely all around the Brittany coastline, with quite a few in Finistere. There are fortunately some in "my part" of Brittany, with walks in St Brieuc, Carnac, Plouha, Berneuf, and more, that are all easily within reach of our central Brittany Gite right on the Morbihan/Cotes d'Armor border.

When I next go over to the Gite I will pop it on the bookshelf for the benefit of our guests. Everyone of course is more than welcome to come and stay in the Gite to "try out" some of the walks themselves !

Panda Power brings a touch of French language

2012-12-23T23:12:00.001Z

For 8 years now we've been renting out our holiday Gite to anyone that would like a tranquil holiday in our lovely little corner of Brittany. In that time we've had the majority of our guests from the UK, a smaller number from Ireland, and a few from America, Canada, Holland, Sweden and even Australia!

But the one country we've never had any guests from is perhaps the most obvious, i.e. France itself.

Obviously never having had any guests from France I'm not sure of the precise reasons for this, but one thing I have considered in the past that may put potential French guests off is that our holiday rental website is written entirely in English.

So hence on my "wouldn't it be a good idea to do" list for some time is the idea of having a small sub-set of our Gite website pages written in French in order to make the property more accessible to French speakers and residents of France itself.

Unfortunately like many of my well meaning ideas the French site has just never got done. Although I can "get by" in conversational French I don't think the quality of my written French is good enough, and similarly using an automated service like google translate comes up with a passable conversion, but again I don't think it would look professional enough to put on my website.

So the only remaining option is to find someone who can speak good French and good English and ask them to do the translation.

There are plenty of professional companies that will translate anything you like - for a fee - but its the size of the fee that has put me off. Fees vary quite a lot but are typically around the 10 to 15 pence per word mark, so even translating a core subset of our website (which has 20 plus pages) would be a few thousand words to translate ... and a price to match.

And so there the task has sat.

Until last week when I read an article on lovemoney.com about taskpandas, a new way to make money from doing odd jobs. The idea of taskpandas.com is brilliantly simple, it acts as a marketplace to match people who have a bit of free time and skills that others might want, with people that need tasks doing. So if you need someone to assemble some furniture, to do some dog sitting, to deliver leaflets, to paint a shed, or simply give you a hand with something around the home, then taskpandas can help.

Since you generally need most of the requesters and taskpandas (those that offer their services) to be local to each other the service launch has started off in major UK cities (London, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh & Glasgow), although is spreading quickly.

Simply post what you want done, when you want it done by, how much you are prepared to pay, and then wait for panda's to offer (bid) their services to you. You can review prior feedback star ratings and comments (ebay style) from the pandas that bid for your task, and then accept and pay for whoever you like. Payment is taken by paypal and once completed the panda is paid into their paypal account (minus a 15% commission that the website takes for acting as intermediary). According to taskpandas.com there are 1,500 registered users and some £50,000 of work has been offered since the site was launched earlier this year, so its growing quickly.

So I thought I would give it a go. Taskpandas offers CRB checks for their more active pandas as a measure of trust, but for what I needed help with this wasn't a deciding factor.

On Monday evening last week I posted my task on taskpandas, asking for a virtual task (i.e. didn't need someone local), with a 'due by' date of mid January as I'm in no immediate hurry:

Translate some web pages from English to French
I would like a fluent French speaker/writer to translate a small number (circa 6) pages from a website from English to French

Tuesday afternoon I received my first bid, the second came in on Wednesday afternoon, and then on Thursday morning I assigned the task to one of my two bidding pandas.

My winning panda has taught French for over 25 years and is a senior A level examiner for two examination boards so I am very very happy with finding the kind of skilled person that I don't think I could have found easily otherwise - and in less than 60 hours from raising the task to agreeing who to do it.

I'll let you know how I get on with the actual translation.

It's been a while ...

2012-12-18T23:10:00.000Z

Yes I know, it's been a while since I last contributed to our Brittany Gite weblog diary. Work and other things have got in the way (again).

So what's new?

Well we continued receiving a few holiday bookings for our Brittany Gite through Autumn, and those that stayed in the Gite in September, October and November seem to have had a good tranquil break and enjoyed the Brittany countryside. I'm always surprised that we don't get more bookings in September and early October when frankly the weather can be just as good as in the peak summer, but of course it's a bit quieter without families taking school holiday breaks.

2013 bookings have started arriving as well and to date we have 3 holiday weeks booked in the cottage Gite for 2013. I was a bit late with uploading the holiday calendar for next year (it wasn't completed until November), by which time we'd already had a few people asking if we were open next year - of course we will be !!

Bookings usually start trickling in from September onwards and then jump up at the start of the new year. Fingers crossed for a good year next year, 2012 looks to have been better than 2011 was.

I was planning to go over to the Gite in December for 2 weeks as my company was offering a winter sabbatical and my application to take a month off was initially accepted, only then later to be rescinded as they decided they needed me too much. Grr. I still plan to go over in March and will use up the remainder of my annual leave when I do so.

Definitely will need to go over to the Gite at some stage as the pile of things to take over in the garage is slowly growing. Every time I come back from the Gite I write out for myself a list of "things I need to do when next over in France" and a second list of "things to take over to France", but then I usually loose the piece of paper, sometimes only finding it again just before I next go out to France, or in extreme situations only finding it some time after I have next returned!

This time though I have got myself more organised. I have found a free task/to-do list planning service, astrid.com, which has both a website and an iPhone/Android app that automatically syncs your reminder lists. You can share lists and tasks with other people (even those that don't use the Astrid app) so I've used it to create reminders of all the things I need to buy and take to France.

Mega-pleased with myself about my new levels of organisation.

Saturday is Josselin Market Day !

2012-09-11T22:47:00.001+01:00

Every Saturday morning the streets of Josselin are closed to traffic and a busy market runs in the heart of this lovely mediaeval "little city of character" down the hill towards the Chateau.

The market runs down the hill and the normally quiet streets are packed with sellers of just about anything - fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, clothing, household wares, pots & pans, hot roast chickens, table clothes, computer games, plants, plastic BB-guns, hand-made jewellery, Breton cider, and much more. There's even a stall selling beds and folding dining room tables right next to another selling fresh chickens!

It can be quite hard walking down through the throngs of people because the residents of Josselin and the surrounds seem to take the event as an opportunity to stop and catch up on all the local gossip as well.

Every time we are over in Brittany we try to go to the market, mainly to browse, to buy a kilo of fresh green French beans and a demi of peaches or plums, the kids buy some XBox games from the English video game seller, and we treat ourselves to a scrummy sausage pancake for just a couple of euros from one of the stalls.

One of the other things we have as a little family tradition when we visit Josselin is we take a family picture. We don't often stop as a family to have a group photo but we now almost always stop in the same little park by the top of the market and I balance my camera on a wall to take the shot.

On my blog photo we have an older one of these family photos, which must have been taken at least 4 years ago, maybe more, because our children look an awful lot younger than they did in the photo taken this year, and I am sure I had much more hair then! I think it's just that I'd had a haircut just before my holiday, well that's the story I'm sticking to anyway ...

As well as the hair and age of the children this photo also has Whitey with us, our second dog who is a little love but does like sleeping in Dexter's bed.

Much more details on the lovely city of Josselin, which is about 15 minutes from our Gite is on our Gite website. We also have details of the times and days of Brittany markets in other towns near to our Gite. Please do come and enjoy Josselin market for yourself, we love it!

Cheap dogs, cheap holiday ?

2012-09-03T21:40:00.000+01:00

Very much on my "to do" list is to add a page to our Gite website about taking your dog to our Gite, and in the past I've written about how much easier it now is to take your pet to France.

We try to take our own dog Dexter to the Gite when we go, and now he's been accompanied by Whitey who joined our family last year. I've taken loads of photos of the two of them lazing around the Gite (it's a dog's life !), and here they are chillaxing (as our kids would say) in the shade of a parasol by the barn.

We don't charge extra for pets in the Gite, only ask that the owners clean up after them and keep them off the furniture. The ferry companies normally charge a nominal amount of £15 or so to take your dog on the ferry, but I picked up news from DFDS recently that pets will travel free on for all DFDS sailings in the remainder of 2012 and all of 2013, as long as the booking is made between September 10th and the 23rd.

And to tempt you a little more, we've recently cut the price of the remaining September dates in our Brittany Gite so you'll save on both your crossing and on your Gite holiday as well.

Not a ruff deal at all !!

MyFerryLink starts service, taking over SeaFrance's vessels

2012-08-21T22:17:00.001+01:00

You may recall that I wrote back in June about the demise of SeaFrance and the surprise purchase of their assets by Eurotunnel.
In amongst the list of blog postings I was going to write about once I'd come back from holiday was my conjecture as to the new replacement service, but Craig over on ThisFrenchLife and Dover Port itself have both beaten me to it yesterday.

Dover Port announced the introduction of MyFerryLink as a new ferry provider on the Dover/Calais route, initially with 16 crossings a day using the sister-ships 'Berlioz' and 'Rodin' (both purchased from Sea France).

Craig on TFL posted two articles yesterday, announcing the introduction of the new service, and then later on, that the timetable and online booking service is now available.

What I was most amused about was that the MyFerryLink website is just a single page deep and then redirects you through to seafrance.com to handle all the actual booking and ferry service details.
The SeaFrance website has only undergone a superficial makeover from when Sea France went into receivership last year, and all the photos of My Ferry Link's ferries appear to have been suspiciously Photo-Shopped with the new MFL logo being super-imposed onto the side of the existing Sea France boats.

What I can however claim a first on though is this shot of the MFL check-in booths that we snapped as we came through Calais 2 weeks ago:

Flap, flap, we've got a flat; necessitating a French garage trip

2012-08-18T11:33:00.000+01:00

Friday morning I got up and decided that I really needed to clear the big pile of rubbish from our second (renovation project) house. The heap of broken bits of plasterboard, broken kids toys, bits of swimming pool, etc was in the way and it was time to take it to the local waste recycling centre (déchetterie) so I loaded up the car and drove off.

Unfortunately I'd once again forgotten the opening times of the centre and when I got there I saw the sign that said they were open only on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. So drove back home with all the rubbish in the back. Liz asked me where I'd been so I told here I'd "taken the rubbish out for a drive in the country!" She was not overly impressed especially as the car was now full of stuff.

Made the point of going and writing the opening times on a spare bit of plasterboard wall in the old house so that I didn't make the same mistake next time we visit.

Next morning (Saturday) I also got up first thing and this time I knew that I would be able to empty the car. Drove off out out of the Gite and down the lane leading to the Gite to be greeted by a flap flap noise coming from outside of the car.

Stopped and got out to look, and rats, the front passenger side tyre was completely flat.

Fortunately I knew that there was a garage in St Etienne which was not that far from our Gite, I'd never actually been to the garage and wasn't even sure if they were open on Saturdays and did tyre replacements, but it seemed the best option to carefully limp the car to the garage.

Along the way I tried to guess what the French words for 'I have a flat tyre', but couldn't remember the words for tyre or wheel so gave up and just went for a limp J'ai une problem avec ma voiture, and pointing to the offending part which did the trick and I was sent to wait in the office.

After a very brief wait a service technician arrived, whipped the wheel off the car, inflated it and found the nail-sized hole in the tread that was gushing air out.

I have to admit I was fearing that we could be in for a multi-day problem trying to find a replacement tyre in France that would fit our UK car, but no, he got what I can only describe as a large hooked needle, threaded through the eye of the needle something that looked like hemp covered in a pliable material, inserted it into the hole in the tyre, twisted to remove the needle, and then cut the excess hemp off.

Job done. He inflated the tyre and to my surprise started putting it back on the car. Over the years every time I have had a flat tyre it has resulted in having to buy a new tyre so I was quite impressed that he'd been able to repair it so quickly.

C'est bon pour l'autoroute? (it's OK to drive on the motorway?) I asked, Oui was the reply.

I then managed to miss-hear the price I was asked to pay, muddling up quarante (forty) with quatorze (fourteen) so they were very confused when I handed over way too much money, but we sorted that out and I was pleased to end up only paying €14 for the repair.

Car all fixed I drove off to the waste tip and emptied the car before I got into any more trouble for being late.

So thanks to the garage for a super job, the tyre's been fine ever since, and I've added the opening hours for the garage to our "Gite Guide" so the benefit of our guests.

New swimming pool

2012-08-10T00:02:00.002+01:00

Having found a leak on our swimming pool that turned out to be caused by the bottom of the pool degrading, going hard, and then splitting, it was time to go and buy a new pool.

Ideally would have just bought a new pool liner as that was the failing part, but there was no time for that as we wanted to get the pool up and running as soon as we could do, especially with guests arriving a week later immediately after our own Gite holiday.

So it was off in the car to Ploermel where I knew there were several large supermarkets that were sure to sell suitable swimming pools. It was a bit of a race against time as we decided at 5pm on Saturday that the pool was dead, Ploermel is 30 minute drive away, and the supermarkets shut between 7 and 8pm.

Although several supermarkets did have pools in stock they were either of the "inflatable supporting ring" type, or they were absolutely tiny and were little more than a glorified paddling pool. Our (now dead) frame pool is 15 foot in diameter and 36 inches in depth and we really wanted something similar.

After driving round E Leclerc, Weldom, Super U, Intermarche, Bricomarche, Centakor and Max Plus all in Ploermel with limited success, we sped down to the autoroute to Super U in Josselin and was able to find the kind of frame pool we were looking for. €400 lighter and a lot of straining to carry the massive box out of the supermarket to the car, we set off for home with a new 15 foot Intex frame pool in the car boot.

Our swimming pool is on the gravel driveway in front of the patio; obviously with all the pipework for the sand filter now being in place we needed to put the new pool in the same place, but we wanted to try to get it more level than its predecessor so we spent ages with long pieces of wood and a spirit level trying to rake the gravel up to level the pool base off.

We then laid 3 tarpaulins down over the gravel to protect the pool base and started assembling the topmost ring of the pool. This is quite difficult as carries a lot of weight and the metal ring segments are a a very tight fit:

Next the legs slot into the top-ring it was then that we started to realise that the new pool wasn't the same size as the old pool. Although the top ring was the same 15 feet diameter, the new pool legs were considerably bigger than the old one.

It was also starting to get quite dark ...

Toby then assembled the ladder for the new pool and we started the slow job of filling the pool up. The ladder has a safety feature, for small children you can remove the ladder steps so that they can't so easily climb into the pool.

Our two dogs (Dexter and Whitey) are not interested at all !

With just a 15mm supply pipe to the Gite it took most of the next day to fill the pool up, but it didn't prevent our two boys jumping in pretty quickly ...

It turns out that the Intex frame pool is 48 inches in depth so our kids loved that they could splash around and dive around even more than its predecessor.
Despite our best efforts to level the gravel out and put flat stones under the legs of the pool so that it didn't shift to one side, the pool did settle and shift slightly so leans a little downhill by probably about the same amount as the old one was. At least with the extra depth this makes it less noticeable.

The sand filter is continuing to keep the water extra sparkly clean, and if my schoolboy maths still holds true I calculated there's some 16 cubic metres, or 16 metric tons of water in the new pool.

Tried in vain to fix the swimming pool leak, it's kaput

2012-08-04T18:22:00.001+01:00

As I discovered last week, our Gite swimming pool has sprung a leak, not a major leak, but still I didn't want to keep on having to fill it up with very expensive French water.

After a couple of days of the kids playing in the pool and stiring up the water I found that I now couldn't see the hole that Toby had found in the bottom of the pool and as the water level had dropped down with the kids splashing around and the water leaking out, the water level was now below the pool pump inlet.

Nothing for it but to have to fill the pool up again so I could then turn the pump on and clear the water to find the hole again.

A few cubic metres of water later and having left the pump on overnight, the water was all sparkly and clear again and the hole was soon found on the bottom again.

We'd bought some patches that were supposed to work underwater so Toby donned his swimming goggles and dived down to try to apply the patch which of course didn't stick properly.

Neither did the second, third or fourth patches so there was nothing for it but to drain the pool, dry the bottom of the pool, and then try again.

I laid a hosepipe in the pool and ran it out to the drainage ditch opposite to siphon the water out of the pool and left it draining out overnight. It wasn't until the next afternoon that the pool was emptied, we could lift the pool up and find the little hole.

Or rather I should say, find the holes:

Our swimming pool was bought (second hand) in February 2007 and installed when we were over at half-term in June 2007 so it's been sitting outside the Gite come rain and shine for the past 5 years. Over time the plastic on the bottom of the pool has suffered from damage from ultra-violet radiation and has now gone wrinkled, hard and brittle.

Basically it's worn out and it was some of these wrinkles on the bottom of the pool that have now cracked. There was no way I could stick a patch on the bottom over the (multiple) holes, and even if I could, and it did seal the leak, I think it'd only be a temporary fix as the plastic would be sure to break again pretty soon.

Nothing for it but to buy a new pool so next stop the French supermarkets to see what they have in stock ...

Went to the beach, Pleneuf Val Andre, North Brittany

2012-08-02T17:37:00.000+01:00

Nice weather today so we up-sticks from the Gite and went (via a French car boot sale) to the beach at Pleneuf-Val-Andre which is a lovely sea-side resort about 45 minutes drive from the Gite on the North Brittany coast.

We found a massive underground car park that adjoined the Casino right on the sea-front, plenty of spaces and best of all it was completely free! So completely different from the UK where the holiday resorts take the opportunity to take what they can in extortionate parking charges from the tourists ...

Unfortunately dogs are not allowed on the beach in July and August so I stayed on the promenade at the top and watched the beach volleyball competition whilst Liz went down on the sand and the kids ran wild, dug holes in the sand and played in the sea.

Some hot crispy galettes smothered with jam or Nutella chocolate afterwards and then having found a free Wifi hot spot courtesy of the town council we all checked our emails !

Septic sorted

2012-07-31T17:38:00.001+01:00

I'm pleased to say that after my prior adventures with the electric pump and the wrong plumbing joints that resulted in a face full of "stuff" and then a very dodgy body afterwards, I've now fixed the septic tank properly.

Mind you it wasn't without a little more excitement during the way as I'd noticed that there appeared to be a leak in the pipe that went up to the filter bed, resulting inauguration flow back of effluent when the pump switched on.

I'd suspected that the pipe had cracked, maybe because of settlement of the ground, but I firstly had to expose the pipe joint to find the problem. This required digging a hole nearly 2 feet in depth down beside the sump chamber to get down to where the pipe went through the wall of the concrete sump chamber, which is where I had seen the leak emanating from.

Quite a bit of digging later through some rather soggy and probably polluted soil and I'd got the joint where the non-return valve in the sump chamber was connected to the 40mm pipe up to the filter bed.

Only the pipe wasn't connected at all.

The pipe joint hadn't failed, the pipe hadn't cracked as I thought it might have done, but in fact the joint in the pipe that was supposed to have been glued with solvent weld glue had in fact never been glued together at all - there was absolutely no sign of any solvent weld glue on the joint at all.
I can only surmise that the joint had been dry assembled and then forgotten to be glued. Over time with the electric pump running the joint had slowly vibrated out until there was quite a deluge of liquid coming out of the joint - and I suspect that this may have contributed to the demise of the pump as well.

So, dried everything off, cleaned all the joints and glued it properly back together. Waited for the glue to dry and checked for leaks - all perfectly dry.

Filled the hole in next to the sump chamber, put the lid on the sump and I can now happily ignore the septic system again!

Next job though is the swimming pool.

Learnt a new French word today - unfortunately

2012-07-30T00:38:00.001+01:00

After yesterday's posting where I wrote about using the new electric pump to empty out the sump chamber on our fosse septique (septic tank), finding that the pipework fitting were a different size, and getting a face full of liquid sewerage whilst trying to hold the joints together, I got up this morning and had to reach for the English/French dictionary to learn a new word.

Diarrhée

(You can look it up yourself as to what this means in English, but it's not all that difficult a translation)

3 trips to the bathroom before breakfast was over so I quickly got in the car to buy something for the Diarrhée and a screw fit joint adaptor for the pump so I could install the pump properly.

The pharmacy in nearby Brehan was very helpful and one packet of Imodium tablets later I was sorted out; the plumbing joint took much longer to solve and took more than one shop before I managed to find a joint that would fit the pump.

Back at the septic tank we connected up the pump to the existing pipework, turned it on and watched the liquid all get pumped out to the filter bed.

And then 5 seconds later I started seeing waste liquid draining back through a hole in the side wall of the concrete sump, partially filling the sump up again. Hang on, this isn't supposed to happen, the pipework is all sealed and although I've not glued the joints together yet I shouldn't have had as much leakage as we were getting.

Nothing for it but I'm going to have to dig down to expose the 40mm waste pipe from the sump to the filter bed. with the volume of liquid draining back into the sump I guessed that the pipe must have cracked so I need to find and fix the problem.

Only challenge is that the waste pipe is buried about 18 inches underground so it's a fair bit of digging required to find where the broken pipe is. Spade and trowel in hand I started digging ...

Plumbing progress (sort of)

2012-07-28T17:36:00.001+01:00

After my last two blog postings I've made a bit of progress with the plumbing problems - the leaking pool and the dead septic tank pump.

Next morning I drove to Pontivy about 20 miles away from the Gite. There's a large dedicated plumbing merchant there so I was sure that I'd be able to get a new pump there.

Well the plumbers merchant wasn't successful, if they had submersible pumps I couldn't see them, and I certainly didn't feel confident in asking for one in French!

BricoMarche opposite however did have a small selection of suitable pumps, both pumps for clean water and foul, the latter of which would accept small particles in the water. Made in China of course and I bought the last one on the shelf.
BricoMarche also had some swimming pool patches including some that claimed to be adhesive under water so I could apply one without having to drain the pool. Bought a packet of these patches as well.

Back at Gite we briefly tested the new pump in the swimming pool before taking the lid off the septic sump to install it into its new home. Disaster though, the screw thread on the outlet pipe on the new pump isn't the same size as the old one, it's about 3mm different so the new pump won't simply fit onto the existing waste pipe that leads up to the filter bed.

Meanwhile the sump is getting pretty full with smelly liquid and I need to do something about removing some of the liquid from the sump and lowering the level at least temporarily.

Hit upon the idea of connecting up a piece of flexible pipe that we normally use to connect the pump to the swimming pool, I could use this to temporarily connect the new sump pump to the existing pipework and pump some of the liquid out of the chamber and into the filter bed.

In hindsight this was a bad idea. Concept was ok in principle but basically the flexible pipe didn't fit all that well.

Liz stood by to plug the pump into an extension lead, I lay down and tried to simultaneously lower the pump into the concrete sump whilst at the same time tried to hold the flexible pipe in place at both the top and bottom of the pipe. Unfortunately this juggling act requires 3 hands whereas I only have 2 ... so when the pump was plugged in and roared into life the bottom end of the pipe wasn't being held in place, the pressure of the pump blew the pipe off the pump and I got face full of liquid sewerage.

Yuck, yuck, yucky.

Dried myself off, managed to get the pump to empty the liquid onto the grass and left it at that.

I couldn't even take a shower on account of all the shower water would have ended up in the fosse which would have just added to the liquid level I would have to deal with tomorrow.

The swimming pool leak can wait for another day ...