"House in France" Tarbes by tattooed

This is our next adventure, we have bought a farmhouse to renovate and plan to move there in July 2006. Needless to say the journey started with the usual heedless dash into something, so after viewing a few properties in the area, we signed on the dotted line after 8 days, and went back in May to pay the balance.

We moved to Monfoucan just north of tarbes on the 25th July 2006. I drove down from Grimsby with my 2 daughters Shannon and Christener and the cat roxy. We left grimsby at 08:30am to catch the ferry at 13:55 from Poole to St Malo. Arrived in St. Malo at 19:30 with the prospect of another 8 hour drive in front of us. I did the journey in 6 1/2 hours but this was at the expenxe of 2 speeding tickets and blowing up my Turbo. I did the last 15kms with the oil warning light on and very little power. So my first task was to arrange a hire car and get the BMW repaired. That was a great test of my rudimentary french, but the car was repaired in 8 days and is now fully employed as a mobile skip going backwards and forwards to the local dump.

I had arranged for a very competively price removal company to bring our belongings out to france and Michelle my wife oversaw the loading of the van, unfortunately as the saying goes you pay for what you get and they only had room for 1/2 of our belongings. Having thought this was a ppossibility I had arranged for a friend with a van to be available and the rest of our belongings are now in Bristol waiting for me to get them transported out to south west France. also the economy of saving on the removals meant that when the van turned up a day late there was only 1 person driving so I had to unload it. So yet again I have been the victim of my own frugality.