Meet René…

Tuesday 2 October

While we are having a good time here in New York we are not allowed to forget our next stay in France.  Dear René, the Frenchman we are swapping our home with in November, is so keen and enormously friendly, he keeps regularly in touch with us via email.

He was the one to suggest our next swap and it came a bit out of the blue, but we said yes when he wrote to us to ask if we wanted to come to the South of France.  What we keep saying is: let’s do it! Now we are young enough and still healthy.  We are no worriers, but let’s be honest, we don’t know what’s around the corner, so we want to enjoy life and see a bit of the world while we can.

René seems to be a kind and considerate gentleman.  He sent a postcard which we received just a day before we left.  We are going to meet him too, just like we met Diane and Dave.  He is going to arrive a day or a few days before we leave, so we can introduce him to the area, shops and our way of living.  He wants to meet the rest of the family too, but I doubt that we can arrange that, with everyone being so busy.  The young ones have their jobs and the children and not a lot of free time.

In France we are going to be met by René’s sister, who appears to be a mayor in a nearby town.  She’s going to pick us up from the airport in Lyon and will take us to a supermarket on the way home to help us get the necessities for the first few days.  How kind is that?

  

This is the house where we are going to stay.  I can’t get the picture any bigger, but I am sure I will be able to post some more pictures once we are there.

So, we are going to be in Montfalcon, in the Rhone Valley near the southern Alps.  We’ll be there for 8 weeks, including Christmas, so it will probably be an old fashioned Christmas in wintertime for us.

It’s a large house with plenty of space, so if there friends or family out there in The Netherlands who want to come for a visit (more than just a cup of coffee!), you are very welcome.  We would love to have you, seeing that Australia is often too far to travel…

Well, back to Hamburg and our newly found friends who spent the night with us.  We got up very early, as they had a bit of travelling to do, and had breakfast together.  We shouldn’t have worried so much, because we had more than they needed/wanted and they were over the moon that we had our breakfast with them.  They could visit a bit more, as the call it.  Meaning, we had a bit more time to chat… ;-)

They left at about nine and all of a sudden it was very quiet at home again.  As I hadn’t slept well during the night I was rather tired, so I didn’t do more than washing the bedding and towels.  After lunch we paid a visit to Wallmart for some groceries and that was about all we did.  After dinner we crashed in front of the TV and I had an early night.

As an aside, we have been very lucky.  I don't watch TV very often, but was lucky enough to see an interesting documentary on The Niagara Falls, the Rushmore Mountains and The Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, and the Statue of Liberty.  These documentaries provide a lot of background information that makes our stay here so much more interesting.