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A very different trip this year – and a different way of communicating…

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Less than 3 weeks to go …

The ferry is booked, and I’m watching the weather …

The Alternative Tourist Map of Scotland

sunny weekend weather

Such a beautiful warm, sunny day – and the weekend forecast is just as good. So, where to go? What to do? As it turns out, we’ve plans to fix up the garden a bit, so nothing too adventurous for us.

But imagine, if you will, that you are visiting Scotland for only two weeks from your home in the south of France. You are based in the central belt, slap in the middle of the M8 corridor. Where would you go and how would you spend your time?

We’re preparing for our next round of house-swaps which are fast-approaching, and we wanted to ask for some suggestions for an alternative tourist itinerary of Scotland for our guests.

Interesting towns, secluded windswept beaches, perfectly undulating hills – where’s your favourite place to recommend? What’s your favourite must-do activity? Where do you take your visitors from afar?

Please add in your suggestions below – you’ll be doing us a huge favour! And keeping the Auld Alliance well and truly alive ) So far, we can make the recommendation of seeing Aly McBain and Phil Cunningham on tour ..

The Trip That Never Was and the Trip About to Be

And so it is April already – how the year has flown by… I am writing this from a Scotland in the midst of the weather confusion that is the season of Spring.

A Scotland where we have been for the last 6 months – Morocco didn’t transpire in the end : work. Work happened, and sometimes even an internet business needs you to be in a particular place at a particular time.

It is difficult to describe, but in fact we don’t feel a great longing for the Moroccan trip that never was. We’re quite positive we will go another time – when the time is right. Instead, we have a great home-sickness for the land of our summer travels, France. Every time we catch a glimpse of the French countryside in one of the hundreds of French movies we love so much, our hearts and minds are jolted back to a life rhythm we have come to love.

And so it is that we prepare to leave tomorrow – for definite – for the town we were first introduced to last August – Montauban. We are to be the guest of our friends there, Patricia, Jean-Michel, Felix and Joachim. The kindness of people whose lives we shared most intimately through living in their house, but in reality don’t know at all.

That’s what the house-swap adventure does, though. It allows you to bunk up with a family you don’t know at all, with great expectation of a wonderful time – and an opportunity to see the world through different eyes. Okay, so the eyes we’ll be viewing the world from are not Moroccan, but even in Europe the culture is different enough to allow us to assess our place in the world, and our hopes and aspirations. Sometimes even a little distance is all that’s required to jolt us from our habits and routines.

Operation Morocco underway

Travel is infectious. We were no sooner back from our 3 months in Europe and we were thinking about where to go next.

It’s not that we don’t love Scotland, or indeed the people in it, but there’s so much world out there, it seems a shame not to drink it in.

And, we’re so very lucky that we can – thanks to the wonderful world of the internet. Sure, the internet allows us a few practicalities, like running an online business from anywhere (aka earning an income); providing WeeR with a wonderful up to the minute educational resource (he’s home educated); making travel arrangements and so on. But the most important travel tool it offers is putting us in touch with some truly amazing people. And it is two of those amazing people that inspired us to choose the location of this next adventure – to Morroco!

Annick and Keith have changed our lives in many more ways than one – not least that they helped facilitate our wedding in France this summer! – they are totally inspirational, in the most humble of ways.

They’ve travelled all over an have lived in such exotic locations as Reunion Island and Madagascar – and most relevant to us, Casablanca. You can see the contributions all these places have made to their rich lives in their beautiful Charentaise house which is bursting with exquisite hand made furniture, artwork and crafts; in Annick’s wonderfully aromatic cooking and in Keith’s eloquent delivery of tales about far off peoples; in their generous and open hospitality and their genuine warmth and affection. Most of all, it’s apparent in their encouragement and support and can do, practical attitude. They’re making the world a smaller place, and the people within it more tolerant and trusting.

Back to the business of choosing a location…

Seeking out some winter sunshine is definitely a big consideration for us and so southern Spain was in our minds as a natural extension from this summer’s travels – and the simplicity of travelling through borders in Europe is reassuring in it’s own right. Research, however was throwing up some pretty disappointing temperatures, and little home exchange opportunity in anything other than a holiday apartment, so nothing was happening fast in terms of settling on a destination.

However, in our continued correspondence with Keith and Annick, we were thrilled to learn about their plans to visit Morocco for a month or so to escape grey clouds in the Charente Maritime. Gentle questioning, and it became apparent we would also find the weather in Morocco agreeable, and the culture friendly and different enough to provide a huge learning experience for all three of us. In fact, Martin has already visited Morocco in his youth and remembers it affectionately. For my turn, I’ve spent time in Eqypt (pre WeeR) and adored it.

But where to go? Home exchange is not really part of the Moroccan culture yet, so that struck out. Agadir is a reasonably popular holiday destination for UK tourists, but offers up less authentic Morocco than one would expect, having been rebuilt in the 1960’s after a huge earthquake. Our summer experience had proven our affinity with the coast, so we were keen to live nearby.

Annick suggested Essaouira. It looks perfect – well, the internet presents it as such. I already feel an affinity with the shabby white-washed walls and blue painted shutters. I can almost imagine the smells from the spices and the fish. The sound of kids playing football on the beach. The calls to prayer….

We found a beach apartment to rent for comparatively little (all those fuel bills we’ll save on!) and so we’ll be following in the footsteps of Orson Wells and Jimi Hendrix … and many wind and kite surfers. We’ll be riding horses on the beach and we might see our way to a few freshly caught sardines (not many veggies in Morocco!). We’ll be rummaging in the spice souks and marvelling at the marquetry and wood work for which the area is renowned.

There will be so much more .. I’m only now beginning to accept our 2 months there as a reality with the booking of the flights.

Apartment. Check
Internet. Check
Innoculations. Check
Flights. Check
Passports. Underway
Arabic. Ouch …………

Countdown … 34 days to Day 1.

Heading north to the coast

It’s the very end of August and travelling from south to north to south to north, south and back again (yes, we have crossed the Dordogne 5 times) on this Grand Adventure, we have seen quite a bit of the toll roads network.

Heading north to the Charente-Maritime from the Tarn et Garonne region really brought home how long we’ve been on the Grand Adventure as the scenery has quite dramatically transformed before our eyes.

The sunflower fields that always signal the start of the summer in the south are no longer glowing. Instead, the stems are the colour of tobacco, and their once golden happy smiling faces are bowed to the ground in defeat, a pale lemon imitation of the majesty they once were.

The summer here hasn’t been as hot as we had expected, but even so, the verges are scorched brown, and the once green crops are yellowing. Even the sturdy maize crops are straggly and we can see the cobs begging to be picked.

We bake in the car on one of the hottest days of the summer, but it’s a reasonable short journey of only 5 hours or so, and although we’ve been on this journey for 2 months already there is something of a feeling of heading closer to home.

House Swap No 4

This next chapter won’t be a complete surprise to us as we have already taken complete advantage of the very generous hospitality provided by house-swappers no 4, Keith and Annick.

We’re familiar with the picturesque house and a little of the area. This provides a whole different proposition than that of the previous 3. We’re looking forward to it. The countryside. The peace and quiet. The coast. The gastronomy.

Wish you were here…
Julie

Enforced hiatus, dial up and French engineers

So it’s been a while since we last blogged the Grand Adventure. Due to a variety of factors not worth mentioning – except the major factor – we have one dial up connection between us!

We did try and resolve the situation. First we visited Alexandre from Data Clic in the nearby town of Saujon. He sold us a fast ethernet switch. Of course, it didn’t work. This is a dial up account – not always-on broadband.

We tried to get him to help. We offered to pay him to come visit, but he was certain it was all to do with our settings and insisted we take the laptops to his shop. It’s 20 minutes each way, so an hour later we dropped them off and agreed to return at 4pm to collect them. 5 hours later we returned to the shop to find out he hadn’t even looked at them. “Tomorrow” he insisted. We told him we’d be back in an hour – he agreed to have it sorted by then.

At 5pm we removed the laptops from his care and vsisted Bruno in the newly established PC Shop. He tried to help there and then. The settings all seemed to be correct and he sent us away with a promise to help if we couldn’t get it sorted – we’d just to send him an email.

Over 2 weeks later and we’ve still received no reply. However, we managed to get online ourselves. We can sometimes miraculously obtain a simultaneous connection. This is simply not possible the tech support unit of D-Link tell us.

They must be somewhat corrrect as we can only manage a dual comnnection every so often and to be honest, we’ve never quite managed to work out how we do it.

Suffice to say, we take turns online. It’s a bit tricky given we’ve moved almost every single – no strike that – every single without exception activity server side. It’s taken 2 weeks, but finally I have reached the stage I can manage some time online which isn’t solely dedicated to work. I even managed to figure out how to upload large multimedia files without crashing the systems completely.

Once again the posts are out of synch with real-time, but should give you a flavour of this next chapter nonetheless.

Wish you were here…
Julie

(p.s. Only if you don’t need to use the internet. If you need Internet then you’d be best off elsewhere…)

Making new friends on the kayak adventure

Wee R and Joachim

Montauban in France’s south west brought us a great deal of pleasure – and lots of new friends. WeeR found some boys his own age (this is important when you’re ten).

First off, there was JoJo. Alas, JoJo was exchanging houses with us for 3 weeks, so we were only able to spend a little time with him.

The boys were not at all perturbed by their language incompatibility – they shared so very much more in common – including the boy’s favourite Lego.

Hopefully we’ll be able to arrange for the boys to spend more time together in the future – perhaps on a language exchange to each other’s homes. After all, they are already familiar with the territories…

Wee R and Théotime

Home exchange no 3 afforded us the opportunity to spend time with the family before we swapped houses, and it was great to spend time with and understand the family before we adopted their life for 3 weeks.

One of the added benefits was that Patricia and Jean Michel were able to introduce us to their friends Luc and Sandrine and their family. English language teachers (and true linguists), they made our visits very easy by speaking in flawless English.

Unfortunately their 10 year old ( and JoJo’s friend) Théotime, spent most of our visit on holiday with his grandparents, but we were able to meet up the day before we left the region for a kayak adventure, organised by Sandrine.

Team Kayak

In 30 + degree heat, we headed across some very flat country to the quite spectacular village of St Antonin Noble Val, where we were to set off down the Aveyron River and had an adventure to ourselves, with the addition of Corrine, Olivier, Olivier’s 3 beautiful girls and Luc and Sandrine’s eldest son and his German exchange student friend.

It was such a super day, and we exhausted ourselves paddling furiously down river and colliding into each other and getting stuck on the rocks and watching jumping fish and getting very very wet.

The last time we’d done this it was also in blistering heat down the Dordogne a few years back. It was much more fun to take the trip with a bunch of other folks, although we were completely hopeless and outshone by the 10 year olds.

Playing Tomate

Back on dry land, we learned a new children’s game – “Tomate”. Those kids play to win!

This is a game we can definitely take back home with us. All you need is a circle of friends and a ball. The aim of the game is to push the ball between your opponent’s legs. Penalties are applied if you let the ball in, until eventually you’re disqualified, with the winner the last person standing.

So after some serious Tomate, we headed home after dark and had to skip dinner in order to pack up for the next stage of the Adventure – 4 weeks on the Atlantic Coast in the Charente-Maritime.

New friends in new places. This Grand Adventure is enriching on so many levels.

Wish you were here
Julie

They’ll come at you from the drains …

Montauban Town

Well, living in a town is surely different from the countryside – and in France, it can be quite dangerous!

It must be something in the way they learn to drive – or perhaps it’s just symptomatic of the French psyche.

No matter if you have a green man and the cars have a red light, you can’t guarantee safety crossing the road. Look right then left then right then left and raise your submarine telescope to check round corners.

I’m reading a fantastically well written book just now Narrow Dog to Carcassonne, which regales the tale of Terry Darlington and his wife Monica, and their whippet Jim and how they sailed a narrowboat over the channel and all the way down to Carcassonne. Terry has great style and a superb wit about him.

I’m laughing aloud all the way through this book – in a combined response to Terry’s dryer than sand humour, and his concise appraisal of the French. When he talks about them on the roads he suggests there is no car too small, no driver too old, no road too narrow, no pavement too wide for the French to not try and mow you down. Ultimately, he says, they’ll come out of the drains to get you…

Town Sculpture

Despite the crazy drivers, we like the town of Montauban very much. It’s certainly a contrast to the countryside we live in, and the other exchange houses.

At The Multiplex

We’ve enjoyed the cinema – in French and English. With our still limited language skills, we wanted a film we didn’t really need to understand any of the language to enjoy the story – and so La Momie it was.

The dubbing was actually very well done – and the effects were the same in any language. As for the story – it really didn’t require any understanding of the dialogue at all.

I’m not sure we’ll manage the same level of enjoyment with a typical French film, without a full and complete set of sub-titles. Which is a shame, because just around the corner from the house is a small independent cinema. I think we’ll hit The Cameo in Edinburgh, or the Glasgow Film Theatre as soon as we’re back and get back into the groove.

Ruaridh in the Fountain

We’ve walked round the fountains in the dark and in Ruaridh’s case we’ve spent a lot of time in them.

Place Nationale

We’ve enjoyed a smoky cafe in the square.

The independent boutiques are prolific and all sumptuously beautiful or typically chique.

Real people live here, and seem pretty unperturbed by tourists. We hear the mayor is trying to gain approval for a golf course. I’m not sure many of the residents will take him him up on the offer.

The Emerald Lake

We’ve also explored the countryside – and discovered an Enchanted Forest and an Emerald Lake and Giant Spiders and Praying Mantis and postbox art.

We also discovered we’re as slow at walking as we running marathons. We plod along in the heat and the sun and enjoy a slower pace than we ever do back home.

Life here is hot and sunny in the main. The refreshments are plentiful and we’re already getting to leave. Has it been 3 weeks already? How has that happened? We’ve been up at 6am for work, so our days have been longer. Surely with more hours, our days should feel longer?

More work now, some packing and then we’re off to kayak with some new friends and children. In the 30 degree sunshine. Can’t beat it, this Grand Adventure.

Wish you were here…
Julie

Getting into the art groove

Meditation Gardens

Guardian

Moon Goddess

Fairie Queen

So that last post was a fairly superficial update on things. You might be wondering what else is going on? You might not. Either way, I’d like to post about the other stuff that’s going on during this grand adventure.

Swapping lives with 4 other families in 2 different countries is bound to have some effect, don’t you think?

Windows to the Soul

For us, we’re learning a lot. We’re understanding more about the places we want to live – town, village or city; the utilities we prefer for a comfortable existence; the internal set up of our ideal house – where we want our office to be located; the climate; the activities we like to indulge in; the knowledge we still would like to acquire. The list is pretty enormous, and it grows every day.

Perhaps the most important experience for me is that I can’t wait to turn my attention to time getting creative away from the computer and websites. I want to feel the physical sensation of getting my hands stuck into some clay and moulding a piece of me from the earth… I want to put some colour on a piece of paper and leave something of me in the physical world rather than the internet.

What was it that re-awoke my creative energy? A visit to the Robert Tatin Museum back in house exchange no 2.

"Être"

"Picasso"

I had never come across Robert Tatin before, and it was really only by chance that I was looking through some tourist information which described some nearby attractions to house exchange no 2. The museum was described as a ‘village’ full of Robert Tatin’s sculptures.

Before we got to experience any of the ‘museum’, we were invited to watch a short film introduction to the man himself, Robert Tatin – and how the museum came to be.

The Dragon Protector

La Frenouse

It was not a detailed introduction but it made it very clear that Robert Tatin was a very special man. His work at the Museum was begun at the age of 60 after a long career as a businessman, craftsman and painter. He carried on completing the Museum for the next 20 odd years until his death there at age 82.

After many long years traveling the world and working all over France, he had returned to the countryside near his place of birth in Laval, Pays de la Loire.

Now, he had decided to leave his legacy – and boy, what a legacy. In fact, one day is really not enough to try and absorb the impact of Tatin’s work. I was left processing my Museum experience for many days. The symbolism, the mysticism, the meta-physical, the philosophical. Every single piece carries meanings far outwith my ability to compute.

The Museum starts with the avenue of Giants. Huge cement ’statues’ representing different stages in Tatin’s life. The Giants were in fact erected on either side of a communal pathway, leading down to his house La Frenouse, which he rebuilt almost from scratch.

The Dragon acts as a guard to the house, and the Garden of Meditations. The Garden of Meditations could have kept us fully engaged for at least a week, I think.

Green God

Farewell Archway

Yin and Yang

Gallery Queen

We took loads of photos, but I wish I had managed to capture more detail. Everywhere we turned there was something to marvel at, a tale to be told and a message to be absorbed.

At the most basic level, we were amazed at the energy the man had put into the project. The scale of the Museum was really quite beyond comprehension.

And it was more than just statues made from cement. Every surface was applied the same level of care and attention. Painting on the ceilings, stone decorations on the floor – you name it, it was decorated.

In fact, most of the time Tatin was building his Museum, he was also selling his paintings through his Patron in Paris, to help finance the tradesman and materials he required.

The Meditations Garden houses a few galleries displaying Robert Tatin’s paintings and some other work by him. I loved every single piece.

Talk about a labour of love. This really is a fine example of a marvellous legacy, to create wonder and inspiration for decades to come.

I only wish I’d been able to visit 35 years ago when the colours on the statues were still vibrant. And when the man himself was still there. We did pay the extra to be allowed a visit into his house – everything was exactly as it had been when he was living there. His wife moved out of the house in order to open it to the public. Tatin is buried in front of the house, where his wife will join him eventually.

And now we’re here in house swap no 3, and it seems my creative spark is growing brighter.

This is a very creative family, these people whose house we have adopted for 3 weeks. Furniture has been transformed into works of art. Original 50’s floor tiles have been embraced as original features, and spared the curse of the fitted carpet, or indeed the ubiquitous laminate flooring so common back home.

There’s art in the garden – with Gaudi-inspired mosaics lovingly created on small town house garden walls. There’s art in the bathroom, with postcards and hand-painted decorations vying for attention.

The children’s art is framed, and proudly displayed on walls throughout the house. And it doesn’t stop on the inside …

The streets of the towns are decorated beautifully. I am awash with it, and inspired by it. I see the art in nature, in the architecture, in the food – even in the countryside with it’s orderly rows of trees and surprising mailboxes peeking out from the green.

At every turn I am reminded of my rekindled desire to express myself on the physical plane – and it’s all without walking into any art gallery.

Now, if only I could drag myself away from the laptop….

Kids Kitchen Decoration

Religious Art

Bathroom Art

Chair Art

Toulouse Street

Chambre dhote Garden

Medieval Restoration

Forest Rows

Garden Mosaic

Mailbox Art

Wish you were here…
Julie