Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany

DFDS and LDLines launch the new Dover/Calais Service

2012-02-04T23:27:00.003Z

Following right on from the Blog news of Sea France's demise and DFDS's announcement of a new Dover/Calais route I just received an email today from DFDS Seaways announcing that the new Dover Calais service that they're running in conjunction with LD Lines will start operation on 17th February this year.

Right now there's scant information on either DFDS or LD Lines's website, just a brief announcement of the new Dover/Calais route, and a "special launch offer" link that's broken and takes you you a page that doesn't exist !

It looks like the new route has been hurriedly added to the DFDS website because there's no details of the journey time, what boats are being used, or anything about Calais at all. The LD Lines website has a single link to the new route but that takes you over to the DFDS website so no more news there either.

The email I received from DFDS did however have details of the launch offer:

Book by 14 February, using offer code DC12, for travel on the Dover-Calais route between 17 February and 13 December 2012 for just £29 each way during low season dates, or for £39 each way during peak season† dates.
You can even make a free amendment to your booking before 30 June 2012.

I personally quite like DFDS, the boats are very clean and modern and the crossing prices are extremely competitive. It's only the slightly longer 2 hour crossing to Dunkerque and subsequent half hour additional drive back towards Brittany that have been slight negatives. With the Calais route both of these concerns will go away so P&O will be into another price war I wouldn't be surprised.

Postscript update 6th February
A few additional updates as more news is now appearing on the DFDS website including a Press release and the Sailing schedule. DFDS have announced that the service will initially be operated by LD Lines' Norman Spirit (which used to run on LD Lines' Dover/Boulogne service before it was canned in 2010), and a second boat will come into service once they've secured it.
The service will run 5 times a day in each direction and is scheduled to take an hour and a half to cross. Checkin 45 minutes before the sailing time and Pets are allowed.

So all in all a very similar service to P&O. Only a little bit cheaper.

Travel updates for Aer Arran and Sea France

2012-02-02T23:45:00.001Z

Aer Arran announced yesterday that they're starting two new Aer Lingus Regional routes including a Shannon to Rennes service that will operate throughout the summer months, complementing the existing summer service from Cork to Rennes and Dublin to Rennes.

Rennes is the capital of Brittany and the airport is about an hour's drive from our Brittany holiday home so this new service should hopefully give our Irish holiday guests a few more options to stay with us.

Aer Arran ought to update the European route map on their website though as they've rather mistakenly portrayed Rennes as being just a short distance to the South West of Paris. In reality Rennes is about 150 miles away and is much more to the West of Paris than it is to the South. Rennes looks to have transplanted Orleans on the map, much to the surprise of both cities I'm sure!

I took the opportunity to update the Brittany ferry and flight choices travel page of our website with the new Aer Arran service; also removing Aer Lingus from the page as they've now stopped their Irish flights into La Rochelle and Lorient as they're now instead acting as flight subcontractors for Aer Arran on their services into France.

Also removed from our website was Sea France who went into liquidation on the 9th January 2012. As the SeaFrance website rather sadly says:

Urgent information
On 09th of January 2012, the Commercial Court in Paris informed us of their decision to liquidate SeaFrance. From now on we are prohibited to continue trading.
Customers who have a valid reservation which has not yet been used will be refunded in full as soon as possible.
Customers who have a reservation which has been used one way will be transferred on arrival at the port to another company for the return journey

DFDS Seaways have announced on their website an intention to start a new Dover-Calais ferry service in conjunction with LD Lines - effectively taking over some of the Sea France assets - but other than the news release on the 10th January of their intent, there's been nothing more since (and there's no announcements at all on the LD Lines website).

Watch this space as they say!

Taking Poochie or Tiddles on holiday to France has got a whole lot easier

2012-01-29T20:29:00.002Z

Last year the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (or DEFRA for short) announced a simplification to the Pet Travel Scheme that now means that it's now even easier to take your Pet Dog, Cat or Ferret to/from the continent.

The revised rules that came into effect on 1st January are laid out on the "what Pet owners need to do" page of the DEFRA website, but boil down to:

Ensure that your pet is uniquely identifiable either by microchip or tatoo. This is a a fairly cheap process that most vets can carry out, or if your pet came from an animal rescue centre they they are quite likely to already have been microchipped.
The nightmare scenario is if the microchip fails because you then face the whole quarantine process on your return, so worth getting your vet to verify that the microchip is still working before you leave the UK.

Vaccinate your pet against rabies at least 21 days before the date you are due to return to the UK.
Prior to 2012 there used to be a requirement to wait 6 months after vaccination and then have a blood test to verify that the rabies vaccination had worked. This requirement has now been abolished as long as the vaccination is at least 21 days prior to entry to the UK.

Collect ther pet passport which your vet will issue. This records details of the unique identification number (microchip or tattoo), Rabies inoculation and bi-annual booster dates, tapeworm treatment, etc.
Our dog's pet passport even has space for a photo of him but we've not been able to get him to sit still for long enough in the photo booth !

Tapeworm treatment for dogs is required to have been completed before you return back to the UK, and this must be between 1 and 5 days before your UK arrival time.
So if you're going for a short trip you could have the treatment done in the UK before you depart, but for most people this will mean a trip to an overseas vet before you come back home.
For pet guests to our Brittany Gite we provide details and directions to a local vet in Loudeac that we use, its about €20 for the consultation and tablet which you can administer yourself.
This is another area where the rules have changed in 2012; the treatment can now be up to 5 days before travel (it used to be 24-48 hours beforehand) and tick treatment is now no longer mandatory, although is recommended.

Finally ensure you are travelling with an approved transport company on an authorised route - all the ferry routes from France are, but only the more major airlines that fly into large airports like Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, etc - so if you are using a budget airline best to check beforehand.

And that's it.

We're very happy to take pets at our quiet holiday Gite and the garden is safe and secure and fully fenced in. Our only request is keep the pets off the furniture and ensure that the garden is cleaned up afterwards.

We usually have about one Dog visiting the Gite each year. It's too early to tell if the relaxed DEFRA travel rules will mean that we get more pet guests; but do drop us a line if you'd like to come and stay.

New Year Guests and the house threw us a Christmas electrical present we didn't want

2012-01-02T21:19:00.001Z

In between Christmas and New Year (on bank holiday Tuesday 27th to be precise) we received a booking enquiry from a couple and their young son that wanted to take a New Year break in our holiday Gite from the Friday before New Year Eve through to Friday the following week.

Yes the Gite was available, yes our agents were available to do the cleaning and changeover to prepare the Gite beforehand, so we quickly arranged the rental and payment straight into our bank account, I sent the guests travel directions from Eurotunnel, and everything was booked.

The afternoon before our guests were due to arrive Shirley and Geoff (our agents) went over to the Gite to prepare it ready for their arrival and to put the heating on, but 5 minutes after they'd arrived the lights in the lounge and the kitchen "blew" out and the bulb in one of the lounge lights actually started to burn! Geoff replaced the bulbs and fuse (twice) but to no avail, no lights in the kitchen or lounge.

Unfortunately the downstairs lights are also on the same circuit as the central heating boiler, so no heating or hot water either!

Shirley managed to get an electrician they know, Russell, to meet them at the house the next morning to try to diagnose and fix the problem, and other than leaving a note for the incoming guests in case they arrive early, there wasn't much else that could be done.

Next morning I kept nervously phoning Geoff and Shirley to find out what the news was, and fortunately by lunchtime Russell had found that there was a wiring fault in one of the two metal lights in the lounge that was causing the short-circuit. He removed the light and problem solved, lighting and heating restored again.

Phew.

What caused the problem I have absolutely no idea. These lights (which you can see in the photo above) were in the Gite when we moved in but several years ago I had replaced the wiring in them with brand new 2-core lighting cable because I didn't feel that the previous "bell wiring" that the French owners had used was really up to the job! So why this went wrong and what caused it to suddenly fail I don't know but a big thank you is definitely due to Shirley, Geoff and Russell for sorting out the problem and doing it quickly before the guests arrived.

For those with longer memories of the Blog will remember that this story has a very familiar echo to a posting I made at Christmas 2008 when the main EDF circuit breaker failed and we had no electricity in the Gite at all, resulting in me having to try to telephone and explain to EDF (in French) that I needed them to come and fix the problem on Christmas Eve.

These things are sent to try us I suppose !

Hohoho - Personalised Santa Greeting

2011-12-21T22:06:00.000Z

It's been a while on the blog (I know, I know); blame it on work and more work.

However, as the festive season draws near and dreams that I can put the laptop aside, here's a couple of Christmas websites I thought I'd pass on that is definitely in my Cool Websites category.

First up if you've not seen it is the Google-Earth supported Norad Santa. Run in conjunction with the USA defence boys who normally spend their time looking out for Johnny Foreigner sending missiles at Uncle Sam, they use all their radar technology to track Santa on Christmas Eve as he flies around the globe delivering presents. I first showed my kids this one a couple of years ago and they loved it.

Secondly is one I've never seen before, run by Portable North Pole (PNP) it's a website where you can create your very own personalised child's Christmas message from Santa. It's an absolute hoot of a site, you fill in some details of your child, their age, where they live, what they've done this year, whether they've been naughty or not, and then let Santa's magic do the rest.

The resultant video is then emailed to the lucky child and you can also buy a permanent HD quality copy if you want as well.

I've had a go for our youngest child Jack who is 10 and you can take a look at Jack's video for yourself, I just couldn't stop laughing at it.
Unfortunately I forgot to upload a picture of him so at one stage there is a gingerbread man icon but never mind, its all part of the mystery of Santa.

Enjoy!

Mixup over holiday booking dates led to a stressful day

2011-10-28T10:20:00.001+01:00

If you believe in Karma or destiny, then it was bound to happen one day and there was nothing I could do about it to avoid a mixup over rental bookings for our holiday Gite.

I'm slightly less fatalistic and do believe (despite what my wife thinks) in being methodical and organised when it comes to administering the Gite booking process.

But regardless of all my care, and maybe Karma took a hand, but the other week I had a rather concerned phone call from Shirley our agent in Brittany to tell me that something had gone wrong. She'd been to the Gite to do the changeover between two sets of guests and the prior guest family were clearly still in occupancy, but were nowhere around, and it looked like they'd gone out for the day!

I checked and double checked the original Gite booking request and confirmation emails for the two sets of families and confirmed that yes the bookings were sequential with one group due to leave at 10am on the Tuesday and the second group due to arrive at 4pm the same day, but these back-to-back bookings are quite normal in peak periods, so there wasn't a mistake there. Unfortunately I didn't have mobile phone numbers for either set of guests so I couldn't phone them to try to resolve the issue, and I knew that the incoming family were already on their way down to the Gite from the Calais ports so would be arriving later that afternoon.

Fortunately Shirley had the solution, one of her neighbours also had a holiday Gite that Shirley was sure was empty that week, so Shirley went off to ask her neighbour if she could open up her Gite for the night and we'd at least have somewhere for the incoming guests to stay when they arrived if the outgoing guests were still there.

And that's in the end what happened. Shirley and her husband went over to our Gite in the afternoon to wait for the incoming guests to arrive, which they eventually did, and whilst Shirley was explaining what the problem was the guests that were still occupying the Gite arrived back and the problem was explained to all parties.
It turned out that the first family had booked their return ferry for the Wednesday and had booked the Gite up to the Tuesday - not realising the difference in date - and then hadn't even read the booking confirmation that stated that their booking was up to 10am on the Tuesday departure day. If only they had read it then the error would have been realised and avoided much earlier. The outgoing guests were very apologetic about the problem and the incoming guests were quite understanding as well; they stayed one night in Shirley's neighbour's Gite and then moved in to ours 24 hours later.

We've been renting out our holiday Gite for over the 7 years now and in that time have had over 100 different sets of guests staying with us, so it was kind of inevitable that one day we'd have a problem like this. I'm pleased we managed to sort it out in the end but it was a bit stressful at the time.

Moral of the story is please please do read the booking confirmation, that's what its there for!

Save5 - an inspirational campaign to make a difference and save lives

2011-09-18T01:09:00.003+01:00

This blog posting is unashamedly not about our French Gite, but about something much more important, about saving lives.

Here's a simple question for you; if you were seriously ill or dying and needed an organ transplant to save your life, then would you accept a transplant if one was offered to you?

What if the same situation occurred with a close family member, your parent, your wife or husband?

I'm sure most people would say that they'd accept the transplant for the chance to live a little longer.

The reason I ask is all because of the Save5 campaign to give everyone the chance to save 5 lives - despite 97% of the population saying they'd accept a transplant if they needed it, only 28% are currently on the organ donor register; this is a massive imbalance and Save5 is trying to change this situation.

Let me explain more. Just before we went on holiday to France I was at my Rotary club meeting and the speaker that evening was 'T' Sandeman-Charles who told us her own personal inspirational story and how she has created the "Save 5 campaign".

T's story is quite amazing, from simple beginnings of becoming a legal secretary straight out of school, she then worked then for Thames TV and progressed her career up to working on some of the major shows of the 80's and 90's, and then she went on to form her own business selling Pampered Chef cookware, and over 7 years grew to a multi-million pound team turnover; and then last year she gave up the business and walked away, taking nothing out of it.

The reason for this dramatic about-turn is that T found out she was diagnosed with not one but two incurable lung diseases and one of them (idiopathic pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis) is so rare that only 7 other people in the world have been diagnosed with it. These diseases will eventually mean that the lungs will find it harder and harder to breath until she either lucky enough to receive a lung transplant, or she will die.

T decided not to dwell on her illness but instead to focus her considerable energies on making a positive difference and she set herself the goal of getting 10,000 more people to join the organ donor register before she dies.

Nobody wants to talk about dying but the amazing thing is that your kidneys, heart, liver, lungs, pancreas and the small bowel can all be transplanted - literally saving the lives of 5 people. Tissue such as skin, bone, tendons, cartilage, heart valves and corneas can also be donated to help others such as in reconstructive surgery after an accident, heart valves can help children born with heart defects, skin grafts can help burn victims, and corneas can restore the sight of people that have suffered eye injury or disease.

Unfortunately many people put off joining the organ donor register, or if they have registered they don't keep their address details up to date when they move, and of course some people die in a way that means that their organs can't be used, so T's campaign to encourage 10,000 more people to join the register was I thought a fantastic personal mission that could literally change the lives of thousands and thousands of people.

For more details of T's life-changing campaign see her Save 5 website and please please do join up. It costs nothing but could make a real difference to someone else.

PS: Long standing readers of the Blog may remember my own personal account of my Mum dying from a massive stroke in May 2005. We gave our consent for her body to be used for organ donation and I think her corneas, liver, kidneys and heart were all used successfully to help other people. The people at the hospital and the transplant coordinator were very good and afterwards we were touched to receive letters from the families of those we had helped.

PPS: As at today T's Save5 campaign has resulted in an extra 2,748 people joining the organ donor register. Please do pass on details of the campaign and help to reach the 10,000 target.

French Heating Oil Prices

2011-09-01T22:40:00.000+01:00

For both our Brittany Holiday Home and the house we live in in Bedfordshire, UK, we have an oil boiler for the central heating and hot water. The French system is slightly different in that it has a flash (on demand) boiler that switches on to heat up the water when you open a tap whereas the UK system is a conventional hot water cylinder in the airing cupboard, but other than that they're pretty similar.

And the heating oil which is 28 sec Kerosene is the same.

But what is really different is the price we pay for our heating oil in the two countries.

Just before I left for France I decided to order 1500 litres of heating oil for the UK as I wanted to buy before the prices started rising in the autumn and winter, so the day before I left I phoned around, got the best price I could and asked for the oil to be delivered whilst we were away in France.

When we were over in France one of the first things I did was to phone up a local supplier and ask him to deliver 1000 litres of heating oil for the holiday home as we were getting down to the last 300 litres or so and so it was time to refill the tank. The French tanker driver arrived on the Tuesday, quite by coincidence the same day that the UK delivery took place.

In the UK we paid 54.95 pence per litre - which is incidentally the highest price I have ever had to pay for heating oil in England, but economic conditions, prices of a barrel of oil, uncertainties in the Middle East, etc all conspired to make this the price it was.

So after 5% VAT the bill came to £865.46 for 1500 litres.

In France I'm not sure whether there is any TVA tax charged or not, I'm only ever quoted a single price per litre, and I paid 88.6 cents a litre, making the total bill for €886.00 for 1000 litres, or roughly £782.

So for only 10% more money I got 50% more heating oil in the UK. This works out that French heating oil is a wopping 36% more expensive than back at home.

Ouch.

Fortunately we don't use anywhere near as much oil in France as we do in the UK and we only have to fill the tank every couple of years or so rather than once maybe twice a year in the UK depending on how cold the winter is, but the price differential is really noticeable when you see comparative numbers like this.

Goodbye France Magazine

2011-08-30T23:06:00.000+01:00

New Horizon media who are the owners of both the popular frenchentree.com website and the highstreet French Magazine have announced that on 27th October 2011 following 10 years of French Magazine they are bringing the two publication avenues closer together and rebranding French Magazine as 'FrenchEntrée Magazine'.

There's no details of the new magazine look and feel on the current French Magazine website section but in the press release I received the magazine editor Justin Postlethwaite says: "The magazine has been receiving great feedback from readers and advertisers this year. So rest assured that the new name is the only aspect that we will be changing. Once they turn the cover, readers will still enjoy all of the same high-quality articles celebrating the best of France, brought to you by the same team of journalists and designers."

Plus ça change?

There's been lots of prior company mergers of online and offline business models (some with really dire consequences as a result - AOL/Time Warner as the biggest example), and personally I suspect there really will be more to this than just a name change over time.

Moncontour medieval videos

2011-08-30T00:15:00.000+01:00

Following on from my earlier posting from the Moncontour medieval festival, here are two short video's to give some further flavour to the day's entertainment.

I tried more than once to upload these video's from McDonald's when I was in France but just couldn't get enough bandwidth over their free Wifi - so had to send these separately when I got back home to the UK.
(and sorry again to my family for having to sit around in McDonalds, twice, for over an hour whilst I tried !)

The first is of a procession coming up the hill for a "mock religious interrogation:

And the second is of some musicians walking past us:

Very colourful Breton home

2011-08-20T23:51:00.004+01:00

[Warning, this is the very first time that I have ever tried the
Mail2Blogger interface of emailing my Blog posting to Blogger, so if the results aren't readable or are badly formatted, blame Blogger not me!]

Across much of our part of Brittany there's a real mixture of properties, the traditional stone-built ex-farmhouses with steeply pitched slates roofs, and the newer block construction properties which are also tiled in slate but are pretty universally rendered and then painted with a near-identical shade of buttermilk or pale-yellow exterior paint.

Most of the Breton population seem to prefer the newer houses than the cost of renovating and maintaining an older property (so us ex-pat's get to buy a lot of them!), and I can kind of understand the logic of wanting to live in a more modern double-glazed and centrally-heated home, but whilst you don't get the "housing estate" effect of rows and rows of identical houses as most new builds are built to order once the owner has bought the land, you still can't get over the uniformity of exterior appearance.

I guess there is no local planning regulations as to what colour to paint your home, it's just convention that causes everyone to stick to buttermilk, but for one house owner we drove past on the way into Loudeac to go to the supermarket for food shopping the other day, the owner is definitely bucking the trend with their brilliant orange home.

We just had to stop and take a few photos:

Moncontour Medieval Festival

2011-08-19T18:02:00.000+01:00

After visiting the car boot sale around La Cheze's lake we carried on to the medieval city of Moncontour for their medieval festival.

The Moncontour Medieval Festival is held every 2 years as the clock is turned back on the whole of the town with the streets full of jugglers, magicians, street entertainers, sideshows, knights and armourers, and everyone is turned out in fancy dress - apparently if you arrive in suitable medieval clothes then you don't have to pay to enter but at €20 for the family of four of us it wasn't exactly breaking the bank to pay.

We've only visited Moncontour's fete medieval once before in 2005 as we've managed to take our holidays either just before or just after the festival so we really enjoyed our visit this time, wandering around the streets and seeing the sights and sounds.

Unfortunately 'rain stopped play' prematurely as the heat wave broke and we were treated to a torrential downpour which caused an early retreat back home to the Gite.

And even the rubbish bins were suitably dressed up for the medieval fete:

Free tickets to A Place in the Sun Live (Birmingham) 2011

2011-08-16T10:58:00.003+01:00

Here's a quick and easy way to save some money if you'd like to visit the Place in the Sun Live show at Birmingham's NEC from 30th September to 2nd October 2011; the tickets normally cost £12 on the door but if you use this special link you can print your own etickets to enter the show for free.

There'll be lots of properties for sale, information about how to buy your own dream place, plus expect some guest appearances from the Channel 4 TV presenters Amanda Lamb et al.

Enjoy !

Car Booting in La Cheze

2011-08-10T14:09:00.000+01:00

Up early(ish) today because we've got a busy day. Slept like a log last night after the short night's sleep the night before, and awoke to a beautifully warm and sunny day.

The little town of La Cheze is just 2 miles from our holiday Gite and has a range of shops, a supermarket, three restaurants and a couple of bank branches.
There's also a large lake and it was around the bottom and sides of the lake that the 'Festival Ete' (summer festival) was held. As we walked around and managed to buy far more than we'd started off with it was noticeable that there were quite a few English stall holders as well as French families clearing out their attics and garages.

The boys were happy because they bought an XBOX game (fortunately in English - I managed to steer them away from the French ones), an inflatable boat complete with Oars for €10 and Toby had the star purchase of a moving electric robot. The boat has been played with extensively in our swimming pool and we're still trying to figure out the robot as all the controller instructions are in French - so far we've found the demo dancing mode and how to get it to walk and move its arms !

Further round the lake we found an old hay maker and displays of old tractors, a parade of classic cars and Liz was happy with the Breton horses she found to stroke and make a fuss of.

We finished up with lunch at the fair which had a longer queue than usual. It wasn't the traditional Saucisse et Frites or Galette nature or even the Sandwiches that was causing such a queue, it turned out to be the battered Fish and Chips sold at a premium €6.60 that was proving to be such a popular item that they kept on running out and having to cook some more for the next batch of hungry customers. I'm sure the french 'language police' would have a fit with the sign that said 'Fish and Chips' not 'Poisson Frites' but the Union Jack flag above the stall and the satisfied customers said it all - this little transplanted corner of English produce was going down a smash hit!

Travelling off to the Gite for our summer holidays

2011-08-08T12:57:00.000+01:00

We're back on the road again today travelling down through France for a summer holiday in our Brittany Gite. From a price perspective I prefer the shorter Eastern channel crossings via Dover so it was an unhealthy 3:30am get-up in order to catch the 7am Sea France crossing to Calais.
For some reason I've always had it in my head that it takes about 2 hours to drive the 130 miles to Dover and so previously we've ended up in a real rush and have several times literaly caught the ferry with minutes to spare, so slightly better planning ahead I allowed an extra half-hour and we then left 15 minute late! Still the extra 15 minutes made all the difference, it was a much less stressful drive down to Dover and we still ended up pretty much driving straight onto the ferry when we arrived.

Liz absolutely hates driving onto the ferry, she squeals as we go onto the boat and she squeaks again when we go up the ramp onto the upstairs deck.
Today was even more anguished noises as we in the last few rows of the upper deck so had to park on the inclined ramp - left car in gear and pulled the handbrake on as hard as I could manage. Once the ramp was full and everyone was parked the ramp was lifted up level with the main deck and we were deafened by the noise of all the car alarms going off!

Ferry over was pretty full but took just an hour to sail into Calais harbour and just half an hour later we'd stopped off and filled up at the petrol station enroute to the autoroute, and we were then given our first taste of French roadworks by being directed the opposite way down the autoroute, a U turn over the motorway to head back in the right direction, and then stopped in a tailback by the Calais port exit.

Despite it being August peak Saturday holiday period the drive down wasn't all that bad and we only had a couple of minor delays on the journey. We stopped off for a "traditional" meal at Ikea outside Rouen - traditional Swedish meatballs that tasted pretty much identical to the Ikea meatballs in the UK !

Got to the Super U in Plemet literally 2 minutes after they closed so we diverted on to the small supermarket in nearby La Cheze for some provisions for the weekend. We'll do a bigger food shop early in the week.

Who’s winning the war in the Dover Cross-Channel Ferry Routes?

2011-07-04T22:45:00.003+01:00

I came across an interesting article recently on the DFDS Seaways website (aka Norfolk Line as they used to be), announcing how for the sixth year they had increased market share on the short channel routes out of Dover.

Within the news article is a graph (reproduced below) from IRN Ferrystats that shows the percentage of car ferry traffic out of Dover carried by the different operators (Hoverspeed, LD Lines, NorfolkLine/DFDS, Sea France, Speed Ferries and P&O Ferries).

Graphically you can see the demise of Hoverspeed (in 2005) and SpeedFerries (in 2008, whom I’ve blogged about lots of times before), both of which were pulling in 12% of passenger numbers, and of course LD Lines who entered the Dover marketplace in 2009, talked enthusiastically about increasing their service following the introduction of the Norman Arrow, and then of course LD Lines pulled out of Dover in 2010. LD Lines only reached 5% of Dover passenger numbers so I guess the service cancellation was pretty inevitable.

Of the three operators that have remained constant during this 8 year period:

SeaFrance has more or less remained constant with 24 or 25% of the market share
P&O has seen a steady decline from 58% in 2003 down to 43% last year
And Norfolkline/DFDS has been the winner, picking up passengers from the other failed operators as well as no doubt also taking customers from P&O as well, with a steadily increasing market share rising from 3% in 2003 to 30% in 2010.

Statistics can be spun any way you want of course and what this doesn’t show is how passenger numbers through Dover have changed over this period, so no doubt other ferry operators will be able to show equally positive figures when looking at just passenger numbers or car numbers or somesuch other fact, but on simple market share analysis it looks like DFDS is doing quite well.

Dogs are allowed with us

2011-06-06T19:17:00.001+01:00

Over on This French Life I recently came across an article about how it has been judged illegal in France to ban pets from short-term holiday rental agreements.

In the recent comments on the TFL article there's different points of view expressed as to whether Gite owners and customers feel positive or negative about accepting pets or not.

For our own Brittany Gite in the 7 years we have been renting we have always accepted pets, although we've only had a small number of customers that have asked about bringing their dog on holiday to the Gite.

We do ask that guests act responsibly with their dogs and pets and ensure that any mess inside or out is cleaned up afterwards, and without fail every one of the customers has been quite happy with this arrangement and we've never had any problems with the pets that have stayed with us. I personally think it's something about the kind of dog owner that wants to take their pet on holiday with them that also accepts the responsibility of doing so.

We had a lovely letter from one couple who took their dog on holiday to the Gite and they wrote a letter of thanks afterwards as if it had been written by the dogs themselves saying how much they loved their holiday and running and playing on the North Brittany coastal beach at St Brieuc. We've taken our own dog there a couple of times and as you can see he loved it!

We've also been able to help our doggy owning guests out with practical details of pet passports and also the English speaking vet we've found nearby for the inoculations for the return trip back home.

Unexpected Late May 2011 availability for our Brittany Holiday Gite

2011-05-24T21:46:00.000+01:00

Rather unfortunately for the couple concerned I had a phone call on the weekend from the guests that have booked our Brittany Gite for the week of 21st May to 28th May to tell me that they'd been involved in a motorcycle accident and weren't well enough to travel to France for their holiday later this month.

I was able to transfer (free of charge) their holiday booking to a week in June but this does mean that we now have this week available to rent.

We're almost full for the summer period now but do have the following dates free:

21st May to 28th May - £350
11th June to 18th June - £350
25th June to 2nd July - £375

If you're interested do use our Gite booking enquiry form to contact us - mention this blog post and I'll see about a late availability discount as well.

(PS: If you're looking for later in the summer we still have some dates availabile in September 2011 as well).

Our Oak Tree gets a serious haircut

2011-05-06T23:00:00.001+01:00

In the back garden of our Gite we've a large oak tree with a 3 or more feet thick trunk which must be well over a hundred years old.

In the photo above which is taken from the bottom end of the garden in winter you can see that the tree is behind the barn (to the right) and the main house which is to the left of the picture. We've not "done anything" with the tree since we bought the Gite 7 years ago and have been quite content to let it grow; apart from once when I put my ladders up the tree and went up and cut off a couple of smaller branches. It was then that I realised just how big the tree is as my double extending ladders only just reached up into the main crown of the tree where the branches all split off from the main trunk.
I realised that I was going to need some help when it came to pruning the tree ...

In August last year I decided it was about time we gave the tree a haircut as several large branches were now overhanging both the barn and the house. I wasn't particularly worried about the tree being unstable but all the leaves, moss and small twiglets from the oak tree would fall down each year onto the house roof and block up the gutters so I was keen to stop that annual job, and also I was concious that if ever a dead branch did fall off the tree then it could do serious damage to one of the buildings when it came down.

So I phoned Dave Robbins a British ex-pat tree surgeon that lived the other side of Pontivy and he came over and we agreed a price for "part-pollarding" the tree.
Dave would remove all the branches that overhung on the barn and house side, taking them back to 4 feet or so up from the main crown of the tree. I didn't want the tree completely pollarding as it would then look like a large stump until it started growing again, and there was always a slight risk that more major surgery could damage or kill the tree. No, a haircut on one side was agreed to be a good idea.

Dave advised that he'd need to do the work in October or November when the tree growth had ceased for the winter and so we agreed a date in November when he would do the work and I could come over as well.

Unfortunately the November day that we'd arranged turned out to be heavily overcast and dismal and as the day went on the rain came and came and came. I was quite impressed that Dave was happy to continue clambering around the tree with his chainsaw in the rain, but other than tea breaks and one period of torrential rain the two of them just kept on going.

Interesting to see how Dave climbed up the tree, he doesn't use ladders but instead he threw a weighted rope over one of the upper branches, then pulled a heavier rope behind it, and then using mountaineering equipment and carabiner's he climbed up into the tree.

Down below Dave's mate, also chainsaw equipped, was busy cutting all the large branches up into half-metre or so long logs which were then stacked in the wood store. You can see the woodstore in the background, the left-hand side we use for drying wood and the right-hand side is for wood that's already dry and ready for the fire.
At the start of the day the left-hand wood store was quite empty.

Most of the time Dave actually used the ropes to support his weight and he walked along the branches with his feet to get into position to cut the next branch back in sections. Larger pieces were lowered to the ground by rope, all the smaller stuff was just allowed to fall down.

The guys worked a pretty full day and it was just about going dark when they finished the work and tidied up the ground underneath. Next morning it was of course a beautiful blue sky day and you could see much clearer just how much they'd taken off the tree.

And as you can see in the picture below taken from the patio side of the garden, there was still an awful lot of oak tree up there !

The wood store was very very full afterwards with all the cut and logged oak brances. It'll take 2 years or so for the wood to try out properly and some of the sections will need to be split before we can put them on the fire, but we've got an awful lot of wood now.

All the smaller branches, twigs and leaves went through a shredder onto a tarpaulin in the garden and when we were over at the Gite at Easter we wheelbarrowed it all onto the flower beds. We had enough mulch to cover the 8m by 4m flower bed that's behind the swimming pool to a depth of several inches. Will hopefully keep the weeds down.

And this final picture was also taken at Easter this year when we had some scaffolding up so that Geoff the plumber could re-point and repair the chimney stacks on the main Gite roof. It's still an awfully large oak tree, but now with a suitably well groomed hair-cut!

Anyway I couldn't finish without passing on details of the Tree Surgeon we used, Dave Robins, take a look at Les Bocages, Brittany arborist. Definitely recommended.

Dead Famous - holiday book review

2011-04-28T08:57:00.000+01:00

On holiday again (hurrah) and once again I’m enjoying the opportunity to relax and read some books.

This time from the bookshelf I’ve enjoyed reading one of Ben Elton’s books, Dead Famous.

With more than a little nod of inspiration to the ‘Big Brother’ phenomenon, ten contestants are locked up in House Arrest where their every action is scrutinised day and night by ‘Peeping Tom’ with thirty cameras and forty microphones and the inevitable confessional box. There’s the usual petty arguments, stupid tasks for the inmates to do, and weekly eviction nominations and public vote.

So far so very much like the TV show.

Things take a dramatic twist though when one of the contestants is gruesomely murdered and despite all the surveillance cameras, no-one can work out "who dunnit". Cue the start of a great murder mystery story with the grumpy detective forced to watch hours and hours of archive footage to try to find out a motive for what happened and trying to piece together the clues. With all the possible suspects locked together inside the Peeping Tom house it should be simples to find a motive and method for the crime. Of course it's not as simple as that, maybe someone from outside wanted to do the murder (but how?) and it seems that in the few short weeks they've been locked together everyone has a motive for wanting their fellow contestants dead.

The story flashes backwards and forwards between the ongoing police investigation and what happened previously in the house and one by one the house inmates are investigated as the finger of suspicion turns on each of them in turn. The story ends (perhaps slightly cornily) with a 'showdown' of the police detective collecting all the suspects together and revealing who didn't do the crime, and then ergo who did do the dirty deed. Although a contrived mechanism of revealing the final clues to the story, Elton does so with unashamed flair and whilst I did manage to work out pretty much who was the guilty party there still a few surprises thrown in that made it an enjoyable read.

Dead Famous is available from Amazon for £7.99 as are lots of other novels by Ben Elton.

Enjoy (or come and stay in our Brittany Gite and you can read my copy that's on the bookshelf) !

Flash bang, oops

2011-04-08T00:38:00.000+01:00

Following on from my last blog posting, travelled over to France via DFDS Dover/Dunkerque where I talked about the time and cost difference of taking the longer drive down from Northern France to Brittany.

In fact it didn't cost me anything in autoroute tolls as I took the N roads that run roughly parallel to the autoroute and were of course the original main roads before the autoroute's were built. There's two sections of tolls on the route we take from the Northern ports, one section from Boulogne to Abbeville, and the second from South of Rouen to Caen. The N roads took a little longer but it was a pleasant drive ... right up to the point when I went past a speed camera (Contrôle radar) at mumble mumble slightly too fast, and flash bang and I was caught on candid camera.

Well I don't know whether the camera had any film in it or whether the French highway authorities have arrangements with the UK to pass on details of speeding British cars or not, but it's been a few weeks now and so far I've received nothing in the post so fingers crossed. Having said that though I have nervously opened every letter I've had that has been obviously posted in France, so far two bank statements and a new cheque book which arrived by registered post - so I was doubly worried at the sight of it !

And just so you don't do like me, here's a useful link to locations and maps of speed cameras in France.

First crossing with DFDS Seaways

2011-04-02T23:19:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I was over at our Brittany Holiday Gite for some well earned rest from work and had the usual dilemma as to which ferry route to take.

In the end it was the shorter Dover crossing that won out (again) as I was able to buy a return crossing with DFDS (NorfolkLine as was) for just £50 for the return journey.

Yes I know it's a longer drive down from Dunkerque to Brittany than the mid channel (LD Lines to Le Havre) or the western channel routes (Condor Ferries or Brittany Ferries to St Malo), but it's motorway almost all the way and I wasn't in a hurry, and it is an awful lot cheaper even taking into account the extra fuel and tolls incurred.

Anyway, this was the first time I'd travelled over on this route since summer last year when DFDS bought NorfolkLine and rebranded the service as DFDS seaways and it seems that in my absence they'd been busy re-painting and re-signing just about everything.

Other than a few small 'NorfolkLine is now DFDS Seaways' signs there was nothing to see of the former company and the ferry boat looked really smart with its new DFDS livery down the side:

Woken up last night by a Nigerian scammer

2011-02-27T11:04:00.000Z

I'm in India right now which is 5 and a half hours ahead of GMT. I think I'm surviving on less sleep than normal because I'm going to bed at 2am IST every morning (still 8:30pm UK time) and getting up at 7:30am IST (a horrible 2am GMT).

This morning though I was woken up at middle-of-the-night o'clock by a text message telling me that I'd received a Gite booking enquiry. I read the text, decided it could wait until morning, and turned over back to sleep again.

When I got in to the office I read the enquiry that had disturbed me in the night. Here it is in full, as it's a classic example of the scam artform:

The start date you are interested in: 2/4/2011
For how long: 4 Weeks

Your contact information
Name : jean frank
Street Address : 11 rd clement
Town/City : Canada
E-mail : jean.frk7@gmail.com

Type your message here to include any special Requirements or Comments:
Interesting in your property for the period below:
Checking date:1st of April 2011
Checking out :30th April 2011.
Let me know the cost for the period .
adult on party :2
And do you have internet?as we been using our Pc for our stay.
Looking forward to hear from you asap! Thanks.

Message requested by IP address: 41.155.16.193
Date/Time: 26/02/2011 23:04:35

Immediately suspicious by the long booking duration, the not great English, and the disposable email address with a number in it, I went to check the IP address at the bottom which this particular holiday rental site helpfully adds to the bottom of the email.
(reminder to self, investigate adding enquirer IP address details to the Gite booking enquiry form on my own website).

Anyway, Domaintools' whois site translated the IP address into details of where this network address is actually registered:

IP Location: Nigeria Lagos Dial Pool Subnet For Lagos Subscribers

And that's all I needed to know. Thanks Mr Scammer, your Email has been promptly consigned to the junk folder!

A Place In the Sun Live - Free tickets

2011-02-26T11:05:00.002Z

Coming to Earls Court, London from the 11th to the 13th March is the A Place in the Sun Live exhibition with buying advice and 70 free seminars over the weekend, and thousands of overseas properties for sale, from £20,000 upwards.

You'll probably also get to spot the television presenters Amanda Lamb, Jasmine Harman and Jonnie Irwin there, as well as gain lots of information on popular destinations such as France, Spain, Florida, etc.

If you turn up at the door you'll pay £12 to enter, or if you book on the website there is a special advance purchase price of 2 tickets for £15 with a free six-month subscription to A Place in the Sun magazine.

Alternatively, and with no free magazine subscription -sorry- you can use this special complementary free ticket link to create your own e-ticket entry for the princely sum of £0.

Enjoy!

Goodbye MyBlogLog, RIP

2011-02-24T19:22:00.001Z

Since 2006 I've been using a service called MyBlogLog to give me some insights into the popular articles on this Blog, and where visitors to the Blog came from.

Well I don't have to any more as today I received an email notification from Yahoo that Yahoo are sunsetting (aka terminating) the MyBlogLog service on 24th May 2011.

If your interested there's more details on MyBlogLog on the eponymous Wikipedia but in a nutshell MBL enables you to track who is visiting your blog, how they reached your blog, what they looked at, and form a community with them. The tracking is similar to the information that Google Analytics gives you except I personally thought it was better because the reports gave details of not just what site the visitor came from but also what keywords they used. So for instance yesterday's information was that I had visitors from:

Google Search: channel 4 documentary french gite
Google Search: what is nippi

http://us2.startpage-proxy.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&cat=pics&c=pf&q=kids%20playing&h=393&w=600&th=196&tw=300&fn=pool_L.jpg
http://www.google.es/imgres?imgurl=http://www.giteinbrittany.com/images/pool_l.jpg
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3339/4594389461_5bd1010156.jpg

So the last three are people who viewed various photos from search engines or a proxy site, but the first two show that visitors came with relevant searches to look at my review to look at the review of A Place In France - Indian Summer by Nigel Farrell and Nippi Singh.

The community side of MBL probably never reached critical mass, you can subscribe to your "favourite blogs", send messages to the Blog author and others that like your blog, and although there are now 45,000 blogs on BML but much of this is similar and of course far less popular than "like it" widgets from Twitter, Facebook and the other social media sites, the new darlings of the internet world.

Anyway, after spending $10m dollars in 2007 Yahoo has decided that it is not part of its "core strategy" and is killing it off in May.

BML had either a paid model or a free model, I used the free model so was able to view reports of my Blog visitors for just the last 7 days, so since 2006 I have been laboriously copy and pasting the reports into a massive Excel spreadsheet every week or so so I can see how the Blog is doing. At least I will be saved the task of doing that from May, but once MBL goes I'll try to produce some stats on what's been the most interesting articles - any bets as to what that might be?