Jumping Forward

There are still a couple of tales to tell about our time in France last spring, but I've just been reminded by the snowfall of last Saturday that it's nearly winter - or at least definitely autumn.  Rather than hold off writing about the recent past while waiting for inspiration to blog about the more distant past, I thought I'd do a post about our summer in Alaska.

We arrived late this summer....July 2nd. A fact which made for a confusing entry into Alaskan life. After 8 seasons of arriving in time for the start of the tour guiding season (late May), it was disconcerting to see trees completely leafed out.  Alaska made it easier for me, though, by providing the coolest, wettest summer on record.  It never really felt much like summer.

I led two Day Hiker trips for Adventure Alaska Tours and filled in the rest of my days working as an Expediter and Waitress for the local cafe and bar, the Seaview Cafe.  Expediting consisted of driving a van to Anchorage one or two days per week to do a major shop at Costco and supermarkets, pick up the halibut and beer kegs and drop off empty kegs.  It was a great way to be able to do my own grocery shopping without having my own vehicle.  Serving in the restaurant was an excellent opportunity to hear all of the live music that was offered as well as witness more of the Hope social scene (which had previously been impossible with my number of days on the road).

   

Michiel left Hope in mid-August to start an extended contract in Antarctica.  He has been down there for "WinFly", the winter fly-in period used to prepare for "Mainbody".  Working at the Seaview allowed me to earn a bit of money and stay busy enough to make it through these last 2 months without him. The other saving grace was a glorious September.  We had almost 27 days without rain (which is absolutely unheard of in September in Southcentral) and day after day of sunshine, blue skies, and, for me and my friends, super hiking and the birthday celebrations that never ended!

I leave Alaska this coming Saturday for the long haul southward and season 6 at McMurdo.  Here are some summer photo highlights taken by friends or with our cellphone (Michiel took the camera!).

   

The End of Summer...

Fun in the Pyrenees-Orientales

Collioure

Even though we had difficulty finding a suitable host and then dealing with the hosts we ended up choosing, we DID have some great outings in the Pyrenees-Orientales and made the most of our free time to explore.  After all, this was the entire point of using HelpX as our (low cost) way of discovering the region.

Our last host was located close to Céret, a charming, if not touristy, spot known for its cherries and annual Cherry Festival, complete with cherry pitting and pit spitting contests. Céret was also a popular spot of several artists, notably Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Chagall, and Soutine, who did many street scenes of Céret. Replicas of these and other artists' works are posted throughout the town in the exact spot where the artist might have stood.  They make a wonderful little walking tour. Here's an example:

Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943)
Les platanes à Céret

Cherry Festival

    We were just a short drive to the beaches of the Mediterranean and the (very) touristy town of Collioure.

But the real highlight of the region was crossing over into Spain and, finally, visiting the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueras.  It was absurdly crowded but that didn't dampen Michiel's delight (I wish I could say the same.) .  These are just a small sample of the photos he took there and in the town.

     
 
   

Second Thoughts

Even though we had discovered what we felt might be our "Perfect Place", we felt that we should travel further east along the Pyrenees to check out the sun-kissed region adjacent to the Mediterranean Ocean.  This department is called the Pyrénées-Orientales (eastern Pyrenees) and was recommended to us by our friends in the Ariege for its warm, sunny climate, great fruit trees (especially cherries) and proximity to beaches.  We knew, however, that we wouldn't likely be able to afford any property there.  Nevertheless, we started to contact HelpX hosts in the area.

We had a hard time finding a host situation that was suitable (not camping, sane-sounding hosts, tasks that weren't back-breaking, a location that wasn't so remote that we couldn't explore, hosts that didn't have terrible reviews, etc.) but we decided to contact a couple who had a beautiful, but remote hideaway and good reviews.  Without realizing that I had the calendar wrong in my head, I  accidentally made arrangements to stay with them for 3.5 weeks (1.5 weeks longer than we normally stay) to fit with our desired departure back to the Netherlands.

I wrote a couple of emails to the host to ask for directions to their place and get some more detailed information, but never received an answer.  Then, about a week before we were supposed to arrive, I wrote to ask if it would be ok to shorten our visit with them to 2.5 weeks, as our current hostess needed just one more week of help to finish off her Bunkhouse project.  I also added in my email that I hadn't heard back from them after my last 2 emails.  Here was the response:

"Yes, I did get your two emails: the first didn't appear to need a reply and the information about the bus stop hardly seemed urgent...I think we can cope with your arriving on the 17th. If it's going to be delayed further than that, I don't think it's really worth the upheaval of having you here for less than 2 weeks."

We didn't care much for the tone of this email and decided that we could surely find something better and someone more welcoming, so we wrote back that since we had clearly gotten off on the wrong foot with these hosts, perhaps it would be better if we found somewhere else to stay.  Back to the HelpX webpage to find somewhere else....

Back to the Story!

Ax-les-Thermes

Our "home"

  Before we left France, we stayed with two other hosts - one of whom was absolutely wonderful.  Our hostess, D, lives in a small town in the eastern part of the Ariege.  She was working on converting a former truck garage to a bunkhouse/budget hostel for hikers/climbers/bikers.  The crew she hired to work on the building were almost all British expats, several of whom we already "met" on the HelpX website.  That is to say, we had seen their profiles as hosts (and even contacted one of them) but decided to contact D instead.  This was a terrific experience for so many reasons...our accommodations were comfy and luxurious,the scenery was beautiful, our co-workers were fun and a wealth of knowledge about the Ariege, our work environment was very laid-back (coffee and baked goodies every day at 10 am and 4 pm!), and our hostess was exceptionally generous, fun, intelligent, energetic and loved a good party.


We worked hard and provided lots of hours of labor, but in return we got more food than we could eat (and tasty, too), the use of a car on weekends, guided drives out to potentially interesting spots and outstanding hospitality.  We did lots of socializing and ingesting of adult beverages together and really felt like we were staying with a good friend, rather than a host.

Here are some photos of the project.  We built all of the IKEA cabinetry for the kitchen, sanded the columns, painted the cast iron plates and bolts, cleaned the grout off the shower tiles, put together the beds and put in the deck railing.

Le Refuge de Rive is now open for business.  Check out the website here

When we weren't working, sleeping or partying, we got out to enjoy the great tourist activities in that part of the Ariege, including the mind-blowing prehistoric cave paintings from 13,000 years ago at Niaux, the castle at Foix, local fairs, and the ski resort town of Ax-les-Thermes, which has hot spring pools dating back to the time of the Crusades, where returning Crusaders would treat their pestilent feet (of course, I did the same.)

Traditional shepherd garb from the lowlands

Typical Pyreneeen goats for excellent goat cheese

The castle at Foix

Freak snow storm

Blog Reader in Greenland!

We have had our first blog reader from Greenland!  We keep track of the locations of our readers using the ClustrMaps feature on the bottom left-hand side of the blog pages.  Our friend, Tracy,  is working in Greenland right now and was good enough to take some time to read about our search and give us our first red dot in that far-flung outpost.  Thanks, Tracy!

Now if could only figure out who those readers were in Russia and Japan...

No perfect properties yet

Our house hunting trip was fun but we didn't find the perfect home in our first outing.  Though we've now moved on to a new area in the Pyrenees, we feel quite certain that we'll return to the Couserans next year to continue our search.

In the meantime, though, we'll enjoy where we are ... as tourists :)

Our (nearly) Perfect Place???!!!

From the Tarn-et-Garonne, we headed south on a day in which the train company was on strike.  Of course...France is known for its strikes so it makes perfect sense that the one day when we need to get somewhere, they decide to begin what turned into a 5 day work slowdown.  Fortunately, we weren't impacted at all and were able to catch the train to Toulouse where we took advantage of a multi-hour layover to take turns walking around the city center.  From Toulouse, we caught the bus towards the Pyrenees to the town of St. Girons (photo, above), known for its large and hippy-dominated Saturday markets.  Our first impression of the area wasn't overwhelming on that first day in the rain but the next day, the sun shone and with this view from our window, we were enchanted!


Our second hosts in France were a young couple (our age :) originally from England who purchased a ruined sheep barn to convert into a Bed and Breakfast.  They did all of the renovation work themselves (with the exception of the plumbing) with the help of volunteers like us and some friends here and there, and now, after three years of hard work, they have opened their beautiful and impressive accommodation.  They call their Bed and Breakfast L'Ancienne Bergerie (the old sheepfold).  You can take a look here:  www.anciennebergerie.com.

They did all of the tiling, waterproofing, staircases, doors, re-pointing of stones, plastering, painting (with natural pigments), drywall, flooring, etc., etc. and found time to make the website, too.  What is even more inspirational is that they had done little to no DIY work before starting the project! 

We were there at the point in the project where there were just the final touches left before completion, so after preparing and planting their potato patch, we did lots of the final cleaning to get the rooms ready.  This was in preparation for a dry-run with some pub friends they invited from Scotland for a long weekend.  They wanted to be sure that the wood-fired home and water heating system worked properly, that the bathrooms all functioned as expected and that they had thought of everything necessary for the comfort of the guests to come later in the summer.

There was an exceptional amount of drinking, some good eating (our hostess makes (amongst other things) outstanding home-made bread) and more work to be done on the house while the guests slept off their hangovers.  Michiel moved on to painting, varnishing and placing slate for the outdoor terrace while I focused on sanding; I spent a good deal of week two sanding the posts for the pergola that will be a major feature of the terrace.

After the friends left (though they were stranded for another week in Spain due to the volcanic ash), our hosts received a booking for the following weekend from a French couple.  I encouraged them to accept it but to explain that the work wasn't complete and to offer a discount.  They took my advice and even accepted a booking from another French couple for the same weekend.  It was great to be with them for the momentous occasion of them receiving their first paying guests (and in French, as well!) and to support them in getting over their trepidation.  Almost everything went super smoothly and the guests seemed quite satisfied.  

We were joined during the second week by a young and very quiet Swede who dampened the jovial atmosphere a wee bit but we greatly enjoyed spending time with our hosts, especially since they had vast interests in all sorts of exciting homesteading activities like beer-brewing, wine and cider making, wild plants, and raising chickens, pigs and sheep (they had all of the above).  When we weren't talking about these topics, we listened to a staggering variety of music and talked about almost every topic you can think of.  It was a real treat made even better by their extensive library and map collection.

They entrusted us with their big Landrover and we did some epic drives on the narrow, steep and winding tracks of the Couserans (the name of their area).  We also did some great hiking which enabled us to explore the area and get some much-needed hill training. From the B and B, it was only a two hour hike from the front door to a gorgeous alpine ridge with sweeping views of the green valleys below. They were even located right on a marked long distance route (the GR78, which is one of the routes to Santiago de Compostela), which we followed to the lovely and charming town of St. Lary. (Perfect place criterion number 3: easy access to great hiking...CHECK!)


St. Lary


Terrefête - just below L'Ancienne Bergerie


The view from St. Lizier


The Lac de Bethmale

On our last day with our hosts, they decided to take a rare day off and took us all out for a hike high up in the Biros Valley.  Here is just one dozens jaw-droppingly beautiful scenes from that valley and a photo of one of its denizens:

The view from Uchentein



As we travelled around the region, we stopped to look at the offerings in real estate windows and there were a good number of affordable (for us) places that had some land but would need some renovation (not a problem after our HelpX experience!).  (Perfect place criterion number 4:  affordable properties with land...CHECK!)

This area was certainly starting to look like a winner. As we'd already met criterion number one (within short travel distance to Michiel's family), we needed to focus on criterion number 2: lots of sunshine.  This is a bit of a problem in the mountains, especially in spots without southern exposure or deep in a valley. Fortunately, our hosts are great at telling us which places are dark and cold in winter and should be avoided and which spots stay sunny and warmer.  They assured us that with good southern exposure, there were plenty of winter days when they could be wearing t-shirts in the snow. Sounds promising!  So though we moved on to another host further to the east in the same departement (the Ariege), we will be returning to the Couserans tomorrow to look at a couple of houses.  Whooppeeeee!

I Think We Stayed Too Long

We ended up staying at our first French host's place for nearly 3 and a half weeks. I'm not sure how the time sped by so quickly especially since there were moments of exquisite agony in which the only recourse was to retreat to our spacious, but freezing bedroom.

But there was also quite a lot to keep us satisfied...the freedom of setting our own work hours and doing mostly pleasant work on a property that was really special.  (I never knew that I got so much enjoyment out of clearing brambles or setting bonfires).   We got to practice our rusty French with an entertaining Parisian transplant who was renting a room in the house but was also engaging in a budding romance with our hostess.  Additionally, the free use of the owner's old VW campervan on the weekends was a great incentive to stick around. Without it, we would have been stranded in a rather remote spot.  In retrospect, I guess this was enough to allow us to bear the insanity which swirled around the new-agey artist who inhabited some kind of parallel universe in which one hour til dinner really meant two and a half hours and priorities were based on whims of the moment ("could you help me set the privacy options on Facebook so I don't get so much email?" or "can you help me find a program so I can put smiley faces on my emails?") or whatever she was trying to "manifest" in her life (usually money).   

We shared the chaotic lifestyle of someone constantly on the edge of financial ruin, who didn't have enough money to pay for the heating oil hemorrhaging out of her poorly insulated home and who ran her van only in the red reserve zone of her fuel tank. We endured (just barely) her questionable table manners (would clipping fingernails and swabbing ears at the dinner table be included in Ms. Manners' Guide to Dining Etiquette?) and her strange eating habits. We lived through the constant noise-making and ever-changing "great ideas" and even survived the steady flow of quirky friends (healers, gong musicians, etc.) and small children. In return, we enjoyed the magic of the surrounding woodland and empty pasture next door, the cuckooing of the cuckoos (and not just that of our hostess) and saw a great deal of the Tarn, Tarn-et-Garonne, and the Lot departements.







That's the honest truth with a bit of biliousness held back for propriety. It's taken a long time to decide to write this in the blog because we never sat down and talked to our hostess about our irritation...but you just can't do that.  So though she was very kind, generous and extremely grateful for our assistance, it would have been better if we had left after 2 weeks -  feeling less negative about her... and better about ourselves.

Did we make the right decision?

On the day before we left for France, we received a urgent email asking us to phone the Emigration Fair representative for Lunde, Norway with whom we'd discussed a possible live/work opportunity (see this blog posting for the whole story).  Apparently, the three other couples they'd been working with had dropped out for various reasons and now they wanted to offer us the chance.

We had a long telephone conversation and several detailed emails in Dutch (the representative is a Dutch expat) discussing the somewhat unconventional business arrangement being offered by a Foundation.  In greatly simplified terms, the bottom line was that we would run the hostel as owners, using our own money to make interior improvements and keeping all profits but paying rent to the Foundation, which owns the building.  That sounded great...jumping in on a going-concern that was managing to provide a reasonable income with only summer guests and minimal effort.  An additional plus-point was that the municipality was enthusiastic about getting new blood into the business who would expand the offerings to guided tours, winter cross-country skiing holidays, etc.

There was a catch, though.   The previous owner-managers had put 100,000 euros into building improvements and wanted to be reimbursed by the new owner-managers.  We couldn't understand why the Foundation wasn't responsible for repaying and how it made sense to pass this debt on to us and the representative we were working with couldn't explain it sufficiently.

Here is the website for the hostel: Lunde Hostel

It's in a lovely location and looks like it's in good condition.  Additionally, as it was originally a home for elderly people, each room has a kitchenette and bath and there are no bunkrooms - so it's more like a ComfortSuites than a hostel.  We could do a lot with proper marketing and websites, even if it required mastering Norwegian. 

After a week of cogitation, making lists of pros and cons, stressing,  contemplating travel costs from Toulouse to Oslo and, in the end, enjoying our time in La Belle France, we informed our contact that we are going to pin our hopes of finding our dream place in the Pyrenees.  I don't think she was too happy with us as we haven't heard back from her but if this sounds like your dream future, let us know and we'll get you in contact!

Cheers!

Updates coming soon.  I promise.  But in the meantime...

Here's to all of us old ladies!

Le PLUS beau des plus beaux

Perhaps the most beautiful of the most beautiful villages in France is Saint Cirq Lapopie.  Aside from a name that's fun to pronounce, it has lots going for it...a dramatic siting perched on a 100 meter (330 feet) cliff overlooking the river Lot, well maintained traditional architecture, impressive 12-14th century fortress, church and castles, lots of blossoming fruit trees, an abundant selection of eateries and galleries and a convenient (overnight) parking area within easy walking distance.

We visited on Easter Sunday and got a taste of how these charming villages might feel in the height of summer (which is a kind way of saying that there were LOTS of tourists and campers/caravans).  Despite the hordes, St Cyrq Lapopie is so attractive and the weather was so dramatic that we took loads of photographs.

Even though this isn't our perfect place, we were glad we spent the day and were further rewarded later on our route homewards by a lovely drive along the Lot river and a short visit in the town of Cahors.

  






Le Pont Valentré in Cahors

Out and About

We still have a few days to go before we leave our first HelpX host in France and I don't think it's a great idea to write about our host while we're still beholden to her, so here's a glimpse at some of the journeys we've taken with the use of her old Volkswagen van.

We are staying in the south of France in the département of Tarn-et-Garonne which is part of the region called Midi-Pyrenees.  It is a region of rolling farmlands and bastide towns.  Bastide towns are fortified villages built in the 13th and 14th centuries in the Southwest of France for purposes of colonizing the wilderness and allowing the land owner to extract taxes from the new inhabitants and farmers.  Nearly 700 bastides were built between 1222 (Cordes-sur-Ciel, photo below) and 1372.


 Cordes-sur-Ciel

Many of these villages are now classified amongst the 152 Most Beautiful Villages in France (Les Plus Beaux Villages de France), an ingenious designation which brings tourist revenue to these picturesque little settlements, which might otherwise be on the verge of dying out. 

 
Two of the Beautiful Villages:  Najac and Cordes-sur-Ciel

  
Najac and Albi, a large town with an impressive brick cathedral from 1282


Albi on the river Tarn

We've spent our weekends visiting some of these lovely villages but there are tons of them and one can easily get "cute, little village fatigue".  So we've limited the number of bastide towns we've visited and tried to take lots of back roads to see the countryside. Though we can often say of the landscape, "This is pretty," we don't have the feeling that this area is one in which we'd like to settle down...which is why on Wednesday we are moving south - closer to the Pyrenees.


Natural granite boulder sculptures of the Sidobre