From Alsace to Gascony

Patrick & Carine

Like many others, my wife Carine and I wanted a new adventure! In my case it was actually the start of a second new life as six years ago I moved to Alsace to be with Karine – her place of birth and where she had always lived. It was there, in Alsace, that the plan to move to Gascony together was first evoked.

Carine was a true Alsacienne from the tips of her fingers to the tips of her toes. But with grown-up children on both sides it wasn’t an easy decision to make – relocating to the opposite end of France – and turning what was initially just a dream – into a reality for both our families.

That said, after a few holidays in the South West of France, it was easy to convince my beloved Alsacienne of the merits of living here and the life we could have together!  The only problem being, I was already retired and Carine still had four more years to go!

The first step in what would become a long process was putting Carine’s house in Alsace on the market, during which time we made several trips down to the Gers

Nina’s story 4

Hubert

Waiting is alway waiting – whether you are 6 or 60… waiting for the amazing thing to happen always feels like an eternity. At 6 you count down the days until you’re opening all those packages under the tree having not slept for more than 3 hours on the evening prior. At 60, you count down the days until you’re sitting in front of the Notaire, pen in hand, and signing the contract for your new French home. And finally, after countless house viewings, thousands of air miles, a lot of fois gras, and very muddy boots, our Christmas Day had arrived early on December 7th – we signed for Le Tuco! Our massive present was fully unwrapped and just like you say when you’re 6 (or 60) “it’s exactly what we always wanted!!!”

Key in hand, obligatory photo in front of the Notaire’s office, euphoria beyond belief, and we were off to our first night’s stay at Le Tuco!

We have driven up to the house no less than 20 times…and each time has been like the first – a cocktail of awe and awesome. You feel an overwhelming sense that somehow, you’re living in someone else’s life. These things only ever happen to others, not to you…until you pull up, park, unlock the door and realize every tile, blue shutter, old beam, and sprig of lavender — is yours! And, like a sign from above, we also had a welcome committee of 1…meet Hubert. 4 footed, wonky eyed, blotched with gray and white, Hubert was the infamous cat that the previous owner had mentioned. A “he” named Hubert – until the previous owner realized “he” had kittens. So now Hubert is a “she” with the name of a “he”. Regardless, we were thrilled as it was a sign that we were officially welcomed to Le Tuco as one of it’s own.

It was going to be en exciting first night – no heat, no hot water, no food nor utensils but cards from well wishers and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot would surly keep us warm and happy for the night. And it did! Best night’s sleep ever as we blissfully sat on the stoop in the following loop: “it’s so quite here, it’s so quiet here, it’s so quiet here.” The sun set, the moon rose and we gazed out over mother nature’s clock feeling like time had stool still for just this one night.

In the morning, we woke to distant sounds of roosters (which replaced the sounds of car alarms) and church bells (which replaced the sounds of planes on their final approach into Heathrow). It was a sumptuous night giving way to a sunny day and we were about to meet the A Team…the team of Artisans who would be translating Le Tuco from best to better. The team who would look at the house from the inside out as we all held hands and agreed to listen to Le Tuco talk and parley her voice into a year round home. It was a pinch yourself moment as we all discussed windows, heating, plumbing, and septic tanks etc. I never thought these things could be so interesting… until they were about our own house and spoken in French… which makes everything sound better.

As the day came to and end, so did our first 24 hours with Le Tuco. Feeling homesick even before we left the building, we knew this time was different. This time Le Tuco was ours and now that we knew Hubert was there standing guard, we felt calm as we said “A Bientot!”

* Please note the cat pictured is not the real Hubert and indeed any resemblance to any cat called Hubert alive or dead is purely co-incidental.

Nina’s story 3

Dates & plums

This whole house hunting experience is a lot like online dating — you trawl the house sales websites looking at one random image after another. At first glance you see what seems to be perfection, the ultimate box ticker. How could it be that no one else has snapped up this gem of excellence? What could possibly be wrong? So you make a date. And you march off terribly excited and hopeful — your first date with the amazing object of your future. But when you get there, things are never as they seem. What you see in front of you is the evil twin sister of whatever you saw on the website. The house, like the date, is never as good as it seems as the cold hard truth of reality wakes you up from all the unicorn/fairy dreams. And in that split second you exhale woefully… another broken house-heart. Will you ever find the one?

Then, like a mirage in a sea of shark infested waters, you stumble across the Blissimmo website. And, somehow, you know you are now in friendly waters — waters that present you with elegance of choice, beauty of layout and, most importantly, hope! Hope that on this website, at this moment, on this day — you may find your match.

I will never forgot our first “date” with the house. After so many speed dates with so many other houses, we were desperate for a meaningful first impression… one that gives you that moment of rush; one that makes time stand still; one that reminds you that at the ripe old age of 50 you can still feel like you’re 16 — falling irrationally, spontaneously and immediately in love.

It was first thing in the morning and we met up with Karen our Bliss Estate Agent in order to see the house. She asked if we’d mind taking a short cut and plugged the address into her GPS — we were off! Only we weren’t off down a normal paved road but rather we were off down a forgotten farmer’s tractor track complete with pot holes, mud, and a whole lot of meadow grasses growing up through the middle of the path. And like a puppy, reluctant to take that first big jump into a lake, our small, bare, cheap budget car sat at the start of the trail revving its engine in protest as if to say, “I am not going down that path!”.

But we were determined to see “the one” so we ignored the frightened outcry of the engine, pressed down the gas pedal and drove through a variety of buzzers, lights and car alarms that formed an unending symphony of “do not do this!” Up hills, down slopes, across mud, rocks and puddles until we arrived at the property. We pulled into what looked like a simple stone barn. No windows, no doors, and a whole lot of broken wood, debris and rusted corrugated tin in the front garden. Could this be it? Could this be the one?

We got out of the car with measured caution. We couldn’t make heads nor tales of the geography of this place. Just where were we?? We walked along the long length of the building, squashing plums under foot. Each footfall gave birth to another small puzzle piece of the whole house. Where were we going and what we were going to find at the end of the path? We rounded the corner of the house and saw the unimaginable. A view that only mother nature could provide. Big, vast, open and hopeful. This house was like an artichoke — all that hard work of the journey only to get to the central heart of such a beautiful location. This was Le Tuco for us.

In that moment, our first date with Le Tuco had turned from naive hope to the dream of a life time. We realized how silly it was to say “We’re looking for a house”…because the truth of the matter is that the house finds you. And Le Tuco was just that experience — it reached out and took us in, uncontrollably.

We took one walk around her land and one walk around her rooms, we were in love!

The Wed: The dream was to one day marry in France.  For years we visited our dear friends who bought a chartreuse in Saint Germain De Belves. And for even more years we would sit in their pool, eat their cheese, pluck figs from their trees, feed stale bread to their sheep and dream about a French wedding at their French home..And on July 16th, 2011 the dream became a reality!  We said, “Je veux” in France… Of course, none of my American friends knew what “Je veux” meant but Keith and I knew!  And we also knew that marrying in France brought us one step closer to our French life.

The journey to the wedding wasn’t easy as we had to get what felt like a Baccalaureate in French bureaucracy.  The seemingly unending stream of papers, signatures, translations, meetings and explanations tested our stamina… but, in the end, we prevailed and held the French gold medal in admin. And, as we sat with the mayor at 11:00am on the day before our wedding, drinking a pastisse and listening to his dogs bark endlessly outside the kitchen door, we knew we had made it to the wedding finish line. Paperwork done, signatures signed, minstrels hired! “Nous voulons!”

The Wait: With the wedding now over, the wait would begin.  6 years of hatching a plan to some day return to France in some way.  I can recall Keith often saying, “I don’t know when; I don’t know where; I don’t know how…but I do know that France is in our future.”  It was a lot of “I don’t knows” but the good thing about our wait was that it allowed the dream to breathe, to bake, to brew.

Our French house soufflé…just a mixture of a few main ingredients that would produce one magical result.  We let the dream cook for 6 long years until we finally pulled our French fantasy out of the oven — fully formed and ready to enjoy.  It was time to take our bite out of France and have our own little slice of French pie.

The Wow:  On August 21, 2017 we arrived in the Gers for the very first time on a very first visit.  It was like coming home — yet we never lived there.  We were wow’ed as we felt like Christopher Columbus discovering a new land. It was love at first sight and with every great love story ours was from minute one. It started with the landscape — big, rolling, green, and silly with sun flowers.  It then moved onto the architecture — yellow stone, blue shutters and very large spaces between the houses.  And it ended with the traffic – there was none!  This was our Oz and now all we had to do was find our Emerald Kingdom!

We looked at 47 houses from 238 websites all of which looked the same. Like Goldilocks, there was something amiss with each and every one of them — too large, too small, funny smelling, low ceilings, no light, bad karma. And then we came across bliss…and BLISS — the local estate agents who hand pick their houses like unique flowers to form a bouquet of properties that make you dream.

One of those flowers was Le Tuco… and boy did we dream.

Nina’s story 1

“In The Beginning There Was The Middle…”

It’s human nature to begin at the beginning. But sometimes the beginning is actually in the middle. So, I will begin in the middle because, in this case, the middle is really our beginning…

In the middle of our lives, 8 and a half years ago our French experience began. But like all of life’s little surprises, we didn’t know it at the time. I had just met my husband, Keith, and we fell in love — the English RAF officer and the America television executive. He was Richard Gere… I was Debra Winger.. and we worked. We had so many new things to share with one another — he would say lovely and I would say orgasmic, and we meant the same thing. I would be loud and repetitive and he would be soft and say things once. We would often disagree on the pronunciation of many words and his stock reply to this disagreement was a the standard English logic — “We invented it!”

But there was always one thing that drew us together beyond our one love, one soul, one beating heart path…and that was the dream of France.

All those years ago, it was just that…a dream. We were so busy merging two lives, raising four kids, balancing multiple in laws and juggling a variety of jobs that a life in France seemed like mercury. We could see it, hold it — but only for a fleeting moment as it rolled away through our fingertips only to pop up again when we least expected it. It was one of those dreams that you have at 6:45am, just before you rise, where you feel it’s so very real yet so very fleeting. It comes, it grabs you, and then as fast as it came, it rolls away just out of your grasp and you’re left with the vague perfume of something so sweet.

Little did I know that the scent of France was within Keith and me years before we even met. France was always a place Keith dreamed of living. He’s English to the core but his surname, Revell, suggested that maybe, just maybe, he could have been French in another life. His father had re-traced the Revell name back to the 1600’s but, sadly, found no evidence of any French lineage…anywhere. So Keith decided to change the course of history and integrate France in his bloodline. He started by doing a degree in French, which included a teaching stint in Blois, followed by Staff College at L’Ecole Militaire in Paris. He has climbed every major French mountain range on his bike and has added the purchase of a Citroen 2CV to his mid life crisis budget list. France was in his system and, like riding a bike, he would never forget.

As for me, my French roots were a little more tenuous. My mom was a Jewish, American girl raised in the Bronx, NY but always believed that there was some cruel misunderstanding at the outset of her life that, somehow mixed my mom up with another baby — sending my mom down the path of living in the USA while the other baby ended up in France. How could it be? As a result, my mom would spend much of her life learning all things French — the language, the food, the culture, the men — to such a degree that she often blurred her own lines of American reality with the much dreamier line of French fiction. I often recall my mother standing at the counter of McDonald’s asking the server if they had a “Pain Au Chocolate”? The server would adopt a completely puzzled look on her face as the server had absolutely no idea what my mother was referring to. My mother would then turn to me and say, “how do you say that in English?” And please remember, my Mother is a Jewish girl from the Bronx! I would die of embarrassment, of course, but these experiences marked the beginning of my fascination with all things French. Growing up, my mom made the French dream a daily reality and it dangled in front of my development like distant fireflies.

So, when Keith and I finally met, in the middle of our lives, we converged at the intersection of all things French. We shared our individual dreams and mixed them together to form one larger French dream of one day marrying in France followed by one day living there…