Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!! No!! Please.  I’m not ready to start thinking about going home again.  But it appears that I must.  We’ve only been at Les Terraces for 10 days, but leaving is just a week away.  In fact, this time next week Graham and I will be sitting in some salubrious (?) airport hotel accommodation wondering why we’re leaving France.  I don’t want to go!

It seems that it was just a few hours ago that we had arrived at home, I’d dropped Graham at the Globetrotter so that he could chill out over a well deserved beer while I did the grocery shopping and resume life here.  But it wasn’t.  When I joined Graham at the Globetrotter on the day that we arrived and we sat on the terrace catching the sun Graham surprised me by saying “You really do love it here, don’t you?” In my head I was thinking “Duh!  What do you think??”  but I answered simply – “Yes.  What makes you say that?”  Graham said “You’ve not stopped smiling since we landed.”  And I haven’t.  Stopped smiling, that is.

I’ve had the frustration of a (semi) revising slobby teenage son downstairs who, at his current most civilised, walks upstairs at 9:30 at night and says “Food?!?!!?” and leaves his clothes and books scattered everywhere ………… that helped me wage “la guerre de la bambou” and the over-cautiousness of my very loving and caring (vertiginous) other half who refused to let me climb onto the roof to clean the veluxes (I did, with his help).

I hate driving.  But I’ve just driven 552KM – once to the Gouffre de Padirac and back and thence to Beynac & back.  But both trips were WELL worth it.  Please see other posts for details and pictures.

We’ve a list as long as my forearm of things that we would like to accomplish before we leave, the highest priority being starting the process of re-registering the car here in France.  Pretty close to everyone with whom we’ve talked has told us to take the car back to the UK and buy a French car instead; not to beat ourselves over the head with the stick of trying to accomplish the apparently impossible.  However, we’re made of sterner stuff.  And we’d have started the process this trip had it not been for the small problem of an envelope full of original documents mailed from Germany that appears to have gone AWOL.  Gin for breakfast anyone?