Trip to France - Thursday

Thursday December 13th 2007

Chateau de Rodie, Courbiac, France

An early start - 4:15am - to take Linda and Emma to Heathrow for their flight to Boston, then onto Gatwick for my trip to France. I have about five hours to wait for my flight but have already checked in for the flight and only have hand luggage, so I can go straight through into the departure lounge. We are hoping that some of our travel next year can be done with just hand luggage and so speed us up considerably.

My journey was pretty uneventful. Gatwick was very quiet but then so was Toulouse airport when I got there. No queues at the hire car office for instance. I tried to follow the suggested route to the Chateau given by Google maps but this was harder than it could have been in the dark. The last 30 km seems very slow, passing through many tiny villages (some of which seemed very nice looking I thought)

I arrived at 8:45 and was met by Pippa and her youngest daughter who I think is called Janine but seems to be known as "Mole". The chateau looks amazing already, even in the dark with a couple of spotlights on it. The chateau is battened down for the winter and only a few of the rooms are being heated so it does feel quite chilly walking round to find my room. I am in the "apartment" which is the room they recommended that Linda and I have next year. It has two bedrooms, and a lounge and kitchen of its own, so it will be better for us for running the business, etc, when we are there.

Dinner is held in the Great hall with all the family. I meet Paul (Pippa's husband) and Uncle Richard who is down for a few days, plus the two kids, Suzanne and Mole, and several dogs. There is a huge fireplace at one end which is kept going all day at the moment with some very large logs. We have hot mulled wine and a three course meal which is really delicious. I start to explain where we are up to with everything - how things have changed and developed since the summer when we had our first contact, how we still have gaps in our planning but that things are falling into shape. Already I am getting lots of useful points to bear in mind, mainly because they have had courses of various sorts run at the Chateau before. So, for instance, it is very important that rooms be allocated to guests in advance so guests don't try to race down to get the rooms they want! Apparently that has happened before.

So we stay up till after 12:00 chatting about stuff. I'm sure already that this is going to work out really well.