The last leg

Next day on to Montpellier, and then to Aniane. After all the travelling of the past couple of days and feeling so tired, I found the plane journey really harrowing. Boy did I feel sick! Although I did notice that the two male Air France flight attendants were very handsome (obviously not that sick).

Arriving in Montpellier reminded me a bit of Palmerston North airport ... well, except for the armed soldiers guarding the luggage carousel. By this point I was probably acting very suspiciously (actually I was trying not to throw up).

Our friend Stephane was waiting for us and we picked up our car without any problems. It is grey (of course ... sigh...) but at least she's not government grey - she's about as dark as grey can get before it becomes black. She's very cute, and we have named her Francoise. Thank God Stephane was there, because we might not have been able to find our way to Aniane by ourselves (more about this later).

I nearly fainted in ecstasy when we did arrive in Aniane. It's just the cutest village you ever saw, like the one in Chocolat, except with real people, nice, friendly people, who generally don't speak much English at all, but try very hard to understand what we are saying in our very bad French. The houses are made of sand-coloured stone, and are joined together in the central part of the village, and there are lots of tiny streets, too small to fit a car into. Right across the road from us is la Chappelle des Penitents, a 12th Century church, which is now an information centre and art gallery. The bell rings the hour and the half hour, as does the bell from L'Eglise de Saint Saveur, the 'working' church just up the road, also very old.

The house itself is stone, inside and out, but quite cosy. Our first view, once we entered, was of a steep stone staircase leading up to the main living areas and kitchen. The house is narrow and tall so there are two more sets of steep stairs leading up to bedrooms and bathroom. I think we will get fit living here!



Which is just as well because we have been stuffing ourselves with delicious bread, cheese and meat from the artisan butcher up the road. Emily didn't go into the butcher shop, luckily, as there were skinned rabbits, plucked birds that were not chickens or ducks and various body parts just lying around in the display case. The ham was extremely good, though, as were the sausages, although I kept thinking about the body parts as I ate the sausages, spoiled it a bit for me ..

The first few days we have spent sorting out administrative stuff, as well as strolling around our new home and trying to find our way to and from Al's workplace. The first two things have gone well, so far, but we have had terrible problems getting around in the car. Yesterday we decided to do a trial run down to work and jumped into the car with a map and off we went. The journey was supposed to take 28 minutes. I've never been so lost in my life! After an hour and a half we gave up and phoned someone to come and lead us to where we should be. We made it back home okay, by following the signposts to a town called Millau (pron. miaow) which is further away from where we are. Today we had another go. How hard can it be! Oh, very hard. Very very hard! Al had this whizzo computer programme that told us the way ... part of the journey took us through a village street so narrow that we clipped someone else's wing mirror .. it was that or scrape Francoise's paint on the other side. But we did eventually make it here on our own steam, although we did take a wrong turn somewhere (after the narrow street) and ended up pretty much where we were yesterday. Still it only took an hour today, so we have knocked 30 minutes off the travelling time. This evening we are going to try a different route that avoids going into Montpellier at all, this one was given to us by a woman here whose parents live near Aniane, so we will hope for the best.