Ups and downs.

Last blog I talked about how the jobs I thought I was going to have in September failed to materialise and I ended up with just one job on Wednesdays teaching English (plus a bit of graphic design stuff) but now I’ve lost that one job! Or more accurately I quit that job, which I know might seem insane given the lack of work me and Dan have between us, but it got to the point where it was impossible to stay. I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say the things I was being asked to do, and asked not to do were becoming more and more unhinged, to the point where it felt more like we were in rival drug gangs, instead of just being two people in separate villages that want to teach English to children. So I’m doing it on my own now, I had a few kids come to a free trial lesson last week and then I did my first real lessons this week.

We had visitors last weekend, my lovely friend Helen and her husband Graham. Me and Helen have been friends since 2005, and have done many bizarre things together, like attend a medieval dance class at a Polish arts festival, went to a basket ball match in Palestine, got told off by the police for doing fire circus tricks in the park, and when I had only just passed my driving test I drove her while she held a fish tank full of water and fish, which sloshed around a lot. But these are the kinds of things that make a friendship. Helen moved out of Liverpool to the south in maybe 2009ish so we don’t get to drive fish tanks around much anymore. But whenever we do get together it’s always a good time. 

On an outdoor ice rink in Norway 2008

Força Réal 2024

That friendship group we were in was the absolute best. I’d already been in maybe 3 good friendship groups before that at school and sixth form and unfortunately I’m not friends with any of those people anymore. A lot of them are all friends with each other still, and I wonder what I should have done to still be in their crews. But anyway when I met this bunch I thought, “I have to stay with these people forever even when we’re not all living round the corner from each other, these guys are the best.” And I have, kind of. Everyone is more spread out now, internationally as well as nationally, and a lot of people have kids and partners and you just can’t hang out in the same way. If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t stop Hitler I’d just go back to a Saturday in 2007 where we just hung out in each other houses, playing board games going to the park, playing ready steady cook where we all buy the most obscure item we can find and then cook a terrible meal. 

So it was super nice to have one of the original crew in our little corner of the world showing her the sights. Our kids didn’t remember them at all but they quickly became friends, and got some great banter going with Graham. It was nice to have a break from everyday stresses and just be reminded of what a beautiful place we live in. 

Eric looks like he’s in love with Graham

The beautiful town of Eus

And I’ll probably look back on this time the same as 2007 like, “remember that time we lived in France and the kids were at a fun age and we went to beautiful places” and I won’t remember all the stress and the times when the kids are grumpy. While Helen was here, we still had to do annoying things like fail to get my new ‘I’m still allowed in the country card’. I am still allowed in the country but I have to wait another month for my card, which is in turn delaying any benefits I’m entitled to.

But it was fun to then forget about that and hang out with my mate. We phoned some of the old crew including Will in Australia and Joy in L.A. And Josh in the Lake District. We haven’t spoken to them for years! And it’s mad that you can call someone for free and video chat but we rarely do. If you want a video chat let me know, I know some people find them weird but I’m always up for them. On the last day we were seeing Helen and Graham we were having lunch together and there was a knock at the door. It was a signed for letter from our landlord telling us what we roughly knew anyway. We have to leave this house by 11th April. Cheers for ruining our lunch landlord. It was kind of a sad goodbye after that. I don’t know when I’ll see them again because although we do come back to England its tricky when there’s lots of people to see and you dont have a car to make it down to the middle of nowhere south. 

It is an odd feeling not knowing where we’ll live or even which country we’ll be living in, in a years time. But that’s enough sad stuff now, let me cheer you up with the happy news that we won a weekend away in a holiday park! Maybe we should go there on 11th April and then just squat. 

In the summer we had Dan’s parents visiting us and they very kindly paid for us all to stay in a local holiday park in Canet. And while we were enjoying our free holiday I saw a sign for winning a holiday by sharing a photo on social media so I shared this photo:

And we won second place! Which is a weekend in any of their parks. We could go to a local one with a nice pool or we could go anywhere in France or the Netherlands. I’m tempted by Paris because we wanted to go there anyway, and although it doesn’t have any nice pools it is a free weekend’s accommodation just outside of Paris.

This week I’m in an art exhibition which has been nice, and a definite bonus of living here, there are a lot more inspiring things to paint. These are my painting from the exhibition it’s on until Sunday if you’re in the area.

The other bizarre kind of fun thing that happened this week was, for the second time ever, I had a video go viral. Really viral like at its peak it was getting 2000 views per minute.  It’s slowed down now but it’s on 2 million views. Unfortunately I dont make any money out of it, but I have got what money can’t buy….a lot of data about what people call a “Chinese Burn” in other countries. Wow it’s a minefield. Very interesting. I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge now. I might actually be the current world expert on this very niche subject having read the majority of the 10k comments.  Here’s some of that data on a map…. 

And last bit of happy news for this blog is Dan has an interview next week for a remote job. Thanks for reading.

Déjà vu

After about a year of living in France I finally learnt what Deja Vu literally meant. “Already seen.” The same with Prêt À Manger. One day (the day I learnt the word Prêt) I was like, oh that makes sense it means “ready to eat” not just “pretentious sandwich shop”. Anyway I am having some kind of déjà-vu with where we are now compared to last September. Last September Dan had been made unemployed by his job based in the Czech Republic (did you know it’s now called Czechia?) I know someone who’s still calling it Czechoslovakia. Anyway Dan had no job and I had one job on a Wednesday. A year went by, loads of stuff happened, we both got more work at different times. Dan got screwed over with a job that didn’t pay him, then there was a nice 3 months where Dan had a good job, we thought everything was sorted and we bought skis, and then it all came crashing down and we’re back where we started. 

Except this time we are getting some good benefits, because we’ve been poor for a year apart (from that 3 months where we were living it up). French benefits are eventually really generous. We didn’t get anything last year, we just used up all our savings on the very dull task of staying alive. There were probably some things we could have got, but we didn’t understand the system and you have to be poor for at least 3 months before they care. Now I almost feel bad to be receiving so much more than the UK would ever give. (Except for the fact our silly car just cost us 800 euros in repairs.) Dan gets 56 euro per day for 150 days, and we got this August back to school payment that we just missed out on last year, which is over 400 euros per child for us to spend on their back to school stuff. And 100 euro per child for clubs which are already very good value. For example, Eric’s roller skating club is 180 euros for the year. It’s so generous that one day I might even be able to afford a keyboard with the euro symbol. 

I was thinking I would have plenty of work for September but unfortunately, one of the jobs I was going to do (homeschooling 2 kids who are here for 6 months) has not materialised. Even though I met the kids and the mum and it all seemed a definite plan. And then my Wednesday afternoon English teaching is not going to happen anymore due to less kids signing up, so I’m going to try starting my own little English classes in my house for kids of this village.

Dan’s still thinking about his options. He’s still applying for jobs of course, but financially there’s no point him taking a minium wage terrible job right now. He’s got a bit of time to learn something or do something. He’s thinking about either learning computer programming or doing a bus drivers course, he’s going to a bus driving open day tomorrow. It’s not the most exciting job but it’s a job in demand, and today we were talking about how maybe one day he could train to be a train driver. And I said driving “le petit train Jeune” has to be the ultimate train driving job. Everyone is on it for the views and a good time. If there’s delays you’re never going to get angry commuters wanting a refund.

I’m so happy the kids are back in school! They are happy too. The summer is too long, we were all going a bit crazy with no structure. Percy is going into his final year even though he’s only nine. In England he was one of the oldest with an October birthday but in France he’s one of the youngest, because they do the year from January. He wants to go to secondary school here in the next village and live here forever. We have no clue what we’ll be doing in a year or even where we’ll be, we have to leave our house in April. You can’t rent another house without a good job. Our worse case scenario plan is we stay till April and then put our stuff in storage and live in our friends empty house from April until the end of school in July and then move back to England and try and not be grumpy about it. 

There was a time when I was 19 and I just came back from an amazing time volunteering in Palestine, and had a month in my leafy village of Burton Green before I left for uni in Liverpool, and I was really grumpy about it. I hated everything about that village for a month, I will try not to do that if we come back. But I will find it hard to enjoy Crosby beach. I know someone who has lived in the Caribbean and they find it hard to enjoy the Mediterranean. I guess the lesson is, never go to nice places. If I do go back I’m going to hold the biggest jonesfest ever and I’m going to try and be a comedian again. But our best case scenario is we somehow both find amazing work, and we buy a house here and put on a jonesfest here. Either way I promised at our leaving party a big Jonesfest in 2026 when I’m 40 and it needs to happen!

Jonesfest 2021

Happy September.

The Long Summer Holidays

Anyone else reaching that point of August when you’re counting down the days until your kids go back to school? We’ve had some lovely moments but two months is a bit much right? Since we got back from our France road trip we had two weeks of boring trying to get jobs done, me and Dan taking turns looking after the boys while the other one does some work.

And then there was a week where I was running an English learning holiday club from my house, which was actually pretty fun. The preparation is boring but then when you’ve got a fun day planned with all the materials ready for different activities and a timetable to follow, it’s kind of an easier day than a day at home with the boys where I’m just suggesting things and they say no, and then I just let them do their own thing until they start arguing. This week made me feel like a better parent because we were doing nice things like making pizza and clay pots and my kids actually wanted to do this stuff because other kids were doing it too.

It was still hard work. On the pizza day I had 6 kids making pizza, one of whom was gluten intolerant and nothing we were using could touch her special pizza, which looked absolutely rank. I really feel for kids with allergies your food is disgusting, and you have to live with a constant fear of death.

At the end of the holiday camp week it was the Olympic opening ceremony and we had a party where everyone brought a dish from another country. It was one of the best parties we’ve had. Everyone was very generous and the range of random food we had to eat was incredible. We ate the leftovers for the whole next week! 

The boys stayed up until the end of the opening ceremony, until 11:30! The latest they have ever stayed up. Percy was particular interested in watching all the countries and their boats, I feel like our family flag knowledge has at least doubled in the last few weeks.

We got quite into the Olympics too, we watched a lot of sports including gymnastics, trampolining, skateboarding, climbing, diving, breakdancing and basketball. Me and the boys even made up our own artistic swimming routine in our paddling pool, and we made the sink and a ruler and lego people into an Olympic diving pool.

Between that party and last week we spent a few weeks considering moving to a chateau near Carcassonne after seeing this advert:

We spoke to the guy and then were going to arrange a trip to visit. It would solve our job and housing problems but would create other problems like, being trapped in a job that you might not like and the boys having to move schools, and in Dan’s words he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a “chateau bitch”. In the end we were turned down because the guy decided we were too poor to be his servants. He said we would need more than just the 20 hours a week each of work he would give us and then he worried that working for him wouldn’t be a priority. He wants a richer couple who want to be his servants for fun and have nothing else to do in their spare time.

Last week our best chums the MacMaster family arrived to visit. Or as Eric writes about them in his diary “the Max”. We’ve known Jude (the mum) for almost 20 years but we got to know them as good friends in 2016/17 in my pregnant and homeless stage. Jude was also pregnant a few months behind me but ended up having a very premature baby and then having another baby a year later and now our kids look a bit like quads together, they all have the same hair and are roughly the same size. Their youngest Theo (6) is almost as tall as Percy who will be 10 soon!

It was so fun to see them. They were the family that hosted us in our last week in Liverpool so we could clear out our house and they were meant to come and visit us in 2022 right after we moved, but unfortunately chicken pox struck at exactly the wrong time. So gutting. But we made up for it. The first day we went on these big inflatables in lake Vinca, I’ve got no photos so you will have to trust me that it was epic! What’s not to love about basically a big bouncy castle obstacle course on a lake on a hot day? People who go to museums and see culture on holiday are missing out. Also I got to test out a new French word that I just learnt the week before “zizi”, when Eric fell down an inflatable climbing wall and the life guard wanted to know he was ok. “What has he hurt?” He shouted across the lake. He then started shouting body parts at me in French just to help me out. I tried subtle pointing but then I had to resort to shouting “penis” and I had no idea how rude the word I was saying was, like was it the equivalent of shouting “willy” or “dick”?

That evening we went to a really nice restaurant , where I recommended people having a burger where instead of bread it’s like a hash brown kind of thing. It’s so good. For a lot of the week the Macs were staying in a holiday park by the coast, and we had been fortunate enough to be housesitting for friends. If anyone wants a house sitter I will happily sit a house like this that has 1) a pool 2) a trampoline 3) air con all over not just in one spot like ours 4) lots of space 5) British TV 6) no pets not even any plants that need watering. 

The Macs joined us one night for a meal but were very late arriving. When they got there their shiny bright hire car was brown, and they looked very stressed, their sat nav had taken them a ridiculous way though many fields. A few hours earlier our sat nav had tried to do the same but we ignored it, I said to Dan, “shall I text the Macs and tell them not to drive through any fields?” “No,” he said, “they’re coming from a different direction so they’ll be fine.” It’s all Dans fault. If fact if he’d have taken that job with google maps he could have fixed that. 

One day we went to a water park, we have been wanting to go to for ages, it was amazing but incredibly busy, the queues for some big slide were nearly an hour. We were there from 10am until 6:30pm and guess what time Eric decided he did actually likes water slides? 5pm. So in the morning he was in a grump he only wanted to go in the wave pool or lazy river, so Dan went on the lazy river with him while Zac had the other 3 boys on the smaller water slides leaving me and Jude to queue for a big halfpipe one. While we were in the queue we saw Zac at times wondering around with only 2 kids, looking worried. Jude left the queue to see what the problem was, while I tried to work out the how to argue in French that my friend only left the queue for a minute please let her back in. We were almost at the front of the queue when Jude returned to say that Percy was missing. Which meant I had to leave the queue or everyone would judge me. Sorry, I mean I had to leave the queue because my child’s safety is my top priority. Turns out Percy couldn’t see Zac for one minute so had just wondered off to find Dan and was having a lovely time on the lazy river while poor Zac was panicking that he’d lost someone else’s child. The whole morning was a bit of a right off but the day redeemed itself in the afternoon, and everyone left happy.

On their last day they gave back their hire car and we were going to give them a lift to the airport in our bag car but as just Dan and Zac were driving on the way back from the hire car place a warning light came on our car AGAIN! Not the same one as on the previous blog. This was not a reliable car to take them on a fairly long journey to get a plane. We looked into trains which are also not very reliable and sort of annoying because you need to get to the station and then get a connecting bus from the town to the airport. So Dan made the embarrassing call to the family we were house sitting for. “Hey Matt you know you let me stay in your incredibly nice house, and have our friends over, please can I also borrow your car?” And being the incredibly nice family they are he said yeah sure no problems.

So they all got to the airport safely only to discover they were there at completely the wrong time! Not in the very bad way though they were 4 hours early instead of 2 hours and there is NOTHING to do in Carcassonne airport. But thankfully Dan was only 5 minutes down the road so he turned round and took them out to see the lovely city of Carcassonne, which was the original plan which got lost a bit in the stress of our car being an absolute zizi.

Camping part 2

Eric’s holiday diary:

(I did 1 bellyflop! I was happy and hired a pédalo with a slide. I went down the slide 3X. For tea I had nuggets and chips and salted caramel ice cream.)

Percy has written in his diary that he did 77 farts this holiday.

I finished the last blog on a cliff hanger: we were stuck with a broken car in the town of Evian. And sorry to disappoint you, but we did make it back fine. I know most of my blog readers prefer it when I’m in some kind of jeopardy. Most of my everyday life kind of blogs get 80 -120 views. But when something is going bad for me I get around 300 views. That means there about 200 people who think, “oh Hannah’s fine, just enjoying her life, I’m not reading that.” You guys reading this now are mainly the good guys though, “camping part 2” is not a very clickbaity title, so you must actually like me or my writing or just be very bored and procrastinating doing something. Either way thanks for being here.

There was a little bit of jeopardy. Check out this giant spider that I found in our tent:

Also the car went to get fixed in Evian and while they were fixing it they said ,“by the way your tyre is dangerously worn.” You could actually see the metal bits poking out. This was on a Friday afternoon and they didn’t have time to fix it, so even though the orignal problem was fixed we were still stuck with a dangerous car and we couldn’t fix that until after the weekend, and a long drive to Lyon.

Evian was fun. It’s the French bit of lake Geneva, they actually call the lake another random French name just to be awkward. Like people who say vacuum cleaner and vulva when hoover and vagina work fine. Anyway we went to see the home of bottled water, there’s a bit where water constantly flows from a pretty mosaic and that water is proper Evian water, people fill up bottles and bottles of the stuff. 

But we did a blind taste test for Dan and he couldn’t tell the difference between tap water and Evian water. So there’s really no need to be filling bottles. Nearby is a sort of Evian water museum, like a healthy Cadbury’s world. You can buy Evian merch and learn how they get it out of the ground.

We were staying with Dans parent’s in an airbnb that was right by the lake, there was a nice little playground where we had a picnic on the last evening and went for a swim. On the return journey we stopped in at Geneva, partly so the kids could say they’ve been to another country. Me and Dan have been before on our big 2013 adventure so the fact that it was a different country was a mild inconvenience, it’s not even in the EU so you would get charged a lot for using a phone and the currency was different. We went to the same lake beach we went to in 2013 and we went to see the massive fountain. We were taking bets on how many daddies high it was, the answer is 76. 

We left to Lyon while trying not to use the sat nav so we didn’t get internet charges. Geneva is very near to France on 3 sides of it, so we figured it couldn’t be that difficult to get to the French bit and then put the sat nav on for the rest of the ride. We did not go the most efficient way! But we got there despite our dangerous tyre. Unfortunately the airbnb lady for the apartment we were meant to be staying in didn’t tell us the code to get in and was not answering her phone, so we had a while standing around on the street needing a wee googling other places to stay before she finally bothered to tell us the code.

We arrived in Lyon on Bastille Day but neither of us could be bothered to go out and see the fireworks, we just sat and half watched the England Spain football thingy. Spoiler alert it’s not coming home. But I did have a nice text conversation with my Spanish friend who I can only talk to in French saying things like “bravo” when they scored, with football emojis to make up for the lack of sentences. I bet I would have been a great ancient Egyptian. I love emojis, I prefer cats to dogs, and I just like their whole fashion vibe, I’d really have to practice my eyeliner technique though.

We didn’t see a lot of Lyon. On the Monday Dan finally managed to get the tyre sorted, while me and the kids got lost in a massive shopping center. We managed to get sleeping bags though, in preparation for the next bit of camping. We also briefly went to a great park that had a free zoo in it! 

Percy was concerned the ducks were getting less attention than average in this park so he made sure to talk to them.

Our final stop of the road trip was Vallon Pont d’Arc which was amazing! Our pitch overlooked the river beach which was just 1k from the famous natural rock bridge. We only had one full day there but we made the best of it by doing a 3 hour 7k family kayak trip. You get dropped off at one end so that you’re only travelling with the river and then we kayaked right past our campsite and through some rapids and finally right through the arc. I was nervous, the minimum age was 7 and we had to prove Eric was 7 because he looks so little. They told us one of the rapids was especially difficult, and I just didn’t know how they would cope if they were scared. But they coped really well. At first I was with Percy, and we got stuck on some rocks in a rapid and ended up going down backwards but he was fine. Then we swapped kids and Eric was also doing a great job, at one point he said, “paddle mummy, this is no time for taking photos!”

We stopped for a picnic lunch, or as the French call it a pique-nique (I just really enjoy that word). We made a stop to explore a cave including one that you can walk in and at the back there’s a hole that you can crawl in and then you come out kind of on top of the cave and from there you can jump off into the river. So fun.

In the evening I decided to not go to my online French lesson, it would have been hard with bad internet and no way to charge stuff, and instead go to a night market in the local town. It was such a big market, lots of cool stuff to buy and also an exhibition of the kayaks from previous Olympians that are from the area. The only thing we bought was ice cream. 

On the last day we packed up our tent early and went to see the Tour de France. They were starting about 45 minutes away from us and Dan has been wanting to see it for ages. He said if you get there at the right time you can get free stuff, hats and T-shirts and things that companies throw out of their vehicles. We made it in pretty good time but it was busy and difficult to park. We followed the crowds to a car park where all these mad cars were, there were cars shaped like Orangina bottles, and laughing cow cheese and washing detergent bottles, loads of different mad stuff which was cool to see. We saw the cars leave the car park on their journey but we weren’t in the right place where they were throwing out the free stuff, and we couldn’t get to that bit because of the crowds and the police. Eventually we made it there just as they were finishing up with throwing stuff. It was very cool to see all the fun cars though.

The actual race doesn’t then start for at least another 2 hours, you see the big coaches with the teams in them and all the bikes on car roofs, but from where we were you can’t easily get to a bit of the race where we could actually see them race. We waited around for a while and then finally found that in the village they had made a stage and they were introducing the cyclists team by team and then they would do a little practise cycle through the village center. There were also more people giving out free stuff and we managed to get a shopping bag two awful hats and 3 cans of non alcoholic beer.

Dan wearing an awful free hat with some cyclists in the background.

We saw Mark Cavendish and a guy who I like to call “egg on a barn owl” (Colombian cyclist Egan Bernal). Dan was a bit disappointed to not get to see any actual racing but next year we’ll be prepared. It was nice to arrive home from holiday and it’s still hot and sunny. In 48 hours we managed to get 5 loads of washing done!

Feeling very grateful that we got this time away and that our car works now, and feeling very motivated to make things work here so we can stay and have more Europe adventure road trips.

How not to camp

We are currently on holiday, and I have some beautiful pictures to share but I feel like you need some words for the full story. I can’t just share the beautiful bits, that’s not real life, you have to see the state of our cool box too.

We’re doing a road trip from our house in Perpignan to the Swiss border to meet Dan’s parents. So far we’ve been to some incredibly amazing places but it hasn’t been easy. A week before we left our car developed a problem where it lost power and couldn’t go very fast, especially on a hill. Dan managed to order a part and fit it, he took it for a test drive on the fast roads and it all seemed fine. We were very relieved because we feel like we need a nice holiday. All the finding a job stuff has been stressful and it would be great to try and have a break from it all and enjoy exploring some beautiful parts of France.

I really wanted to try camping as we did it a lot when I was a kid and we’ve not yet done it with the boys, apart from in a van which is cheating. So we’ve managed to borrow and buy most of the stuff you need. We set off on our journey with the car packed to the brim. Our first stop was a campsite by lake Verdon north of Marseille. We were going to break up that journey with a few stops though, the first being Séte just outside Montpellier. Just before we got there the car warning light went on again and we lost full power. 

We tried to chat about our options while down playing the problem to the kids. Obviously the car needs to be fixed but without being in one place for long it would be hard to do that. We really wanted to continue the journey but was it wise to carry on driving to the campsite in the wilderness with a problem car? And were we actually in danger of the car just completely stopping or bursting into flames while we were in it. Spoiler alert we are all still alive.

Dan had this way of resetting the car so it didn’t think there was a problem and it worked normally for a bit, we had driven an hour and a half on fast roads fine before this happened. If we could reset it and get another hour and a half out of it we’d be nearly there. There was no real point stopping where we were to get the car fixed because it was a Sunday and so they wouldn’t be able to look at it that day anyway. So Dan reset the car and we continued our journey, but after about 10 minutes the problem returned and we quickly realised that in order to get anywhere we would have to go very slow. We continued driving nervously onto Arles where we stopped at a sculpture gallery with a big slide. And then we carried on to lake Verdon. We were camping there for 3 nights so we figured if we got there we could at least have the chance to go the garage and ask their opinion.

While we were putting up our tent in the beautiful lake Verdon area, I felt like we were obvious camping virgins. We are a family of 4 in a 3 man tent. We didn’t have a table which did make things tricky, one day a couple who were going out for food lent us their table because we obviously looked like we were struggling to cook and eat pasta on the floor. We also didn’t have warm bedding. It’s really warm at night normally and the car was very full so I thought just a little blanket would be fine for me and Dan. It turns out it’s really cold at 4am. So I ended up wearing a lot of clothes plus one of the kids poncho towels with hoods round my feet as a kind of bad sleeping bag. 

Also top tip cool bags aren’t cool bags forever. Day one they’re great. We made up some pasta sauces before hand and froze them which kept everything cool. But by day two our cool bag looked like this:

The couple who lent us the table had a plug in cool box. Boring!

I loved the campsite though, it was very small so the boys could go and do their own thing without getting lost. There was a beautiful little pool and some trampolines, some table tennis tables and an area for boules. Percy even said “normally screen time is the best bit of my day but I haven’t had it here and I haven’t missed it.”

Campsite pool

Lake Verdon

The lake was incredibly beautiful, a perfect turquoise colour and it was a lovely temperature to swim in  on a hot day. It’s not really near a city so it doesn’t feel too full of people it felt like we had found a secret part of France that English people didn’t know about. The first day we swam and the second day we hired a pédalo with a slide. That was so much fun, if someone said to me you can have any boat in the world I’d pick that one over a fancy yacht. Of course I tried going down head first and backwards.

In between all the fun Dan took the car to the garage and the guy said there’s a hole in a tube somewhere but you’ll be ok to drive it slowly. That reassured us a bit that it wasn’t going to burst into flames. But we had a really long mountainous trip to make from Verdon to Annecy on the windy slow roads.

That day turned out to be even more ridiculous and long than we imagined. In a working car on the autoroutes with no stops it should take 4.5 hours but with a slow car and kids that need regular breaks door to door it took 11 hours. At the first stop in Gap (it’s a city not a clothes shop) we went to an outdoor shop, to see if we could buy more sleeping bags. And if you’ve got a ton of money and you’re about to climb Everest this would be a great shop for you. They had many different kinds of sleeping bags starting from 100 euros. No thanks, I’d rather sleep in my child’s upside down hooded towel. Which was still an upgrade from 2013 when we slept on a beach in Greece with no tent and no sleeping bag and Dan wore a dress as a scarf. We’ve really come a long way,

The 11 hours also included a lot of messing around at the end when Dan dropped me and the boys and a load of bags off where he thought was 2 minutes walk away from where we were staying while he went to find parking. But we were actually ages away and had a lot of bags and a very tired 7 year old who claimed he was unable to carry anything. Eventually we found the little apartment and then all (separately) had a cold bath to chill out before bed.

The next day was a lot better, Annecy is an incredibly beautiful place. The city is really old and beautiful but the lake was just incredible. It was pretty touristy though and a lot more expensive to hire a boat than in Verdon, so we went to the area where you can eat a picnic and swim. 

After that we had a relatively short journey to Evian, on of the French bit of lake Geneva, where we met Dan’s parents. They were in the area to go to a jazz festival, and they kindly went to a Renault garage for us before we arrived to order this very expensive pipe, which they should be fitting today.

Did we get it fixed? Did we make it back home again? Did Dan get a job? Will camping round 2 in Vallon pont d’arc go ok? This stuff hasn’t happened yet so carry on following this blog to find out.

Double Bad news

I don’t know what our future plans really were, but this wasn’t it. After a few months of a relatively stress free life where we recovered from 6 months of unemployment emotionally and financially, Dan has lost his job. He started this job in March, and was on a 4 month trial but after 3 months he was told he wasn’t quite right for it. I thought you had to do something bad to lose a job. When he got this job I thought all our problems are over now, let’s just enjoy life. We booked two holidays, we bought skis in a second hand sale, we even bought smoked salmon once. But it turns out it is quite common for people in France to not get through the trial period. The problem is that jobs in France are actually too good. Once you have an ongoing contract, called a CDI, you have all the rights in the world, you can be a complete idiot and still get paid. And if they want to get rid of you it takes forever and you get really good money for ages. But because of this, they are very hard to get in the first place. And if you don’t get through the trial you wont get good unemployment benefits. The same as last time, we don’t fit into the right categories of people who will get help.

Dan’s got 3 days left at this job and he’s already applied for a load of other random things, this time of year is good for getting random summer work, but not great for proper jobs. I also have very little work over the summer and the kids will be off school for 2 months, and we have visitors, so it’s complicated. We’re open to almost anything work wise, I’m doing a days work at a winery tomorrow. Dan’s messaged people about night shift work, cleaning work, teaching english to business people, but we would still like to keep our holiday which is in July. We’ve already paid for it, and if everything goes bad and we have to do our emergency plan B living in my parents canal boat, at least we will have made the most of this summer. 

Sunrise last Saturday 

I was so positive going into June. One of my jobs (teaching in a school) has stopped for the year and so I thought June will be a bit more chilled, I’ll find a bit more time for exercise and art and learning French. I haven’t really learnt much recently because since Dan lost his job the first time I’ve been focusing on earning money, but I just signed up for a new online course that I do on Tuesday nights. It’s run by a French lady who lives in Manchester who misses all her friends in France and is jealous of me for being in France. I can relate. I miss all my friends in the north west too but at least I’m in the sun, imagine missing all your friends and being in Manchester.

My first reaction to this news was to just feel like “I can’t be bothered.” I’ve not had enough emotionally stable time to go back to this taking over our lives again. There are a few positives. Dan does have a good French CV now and we do understand a bit more about the benefit system and places we need to go to get help, and we’re a bit more connected than last time so there’s a few more people we can ask for random work.

Painting on a beach my dream day.

I found all this out last week, so I’ve had a bit of time to process it and then tell a few people before writing this. But then this afternoon we got a message from our landlord, she would like to come and live in our house, because I guess it’s actually her house. This is not until April 25 so she’s being kind to give us a lot of warning but it adds a lot of complication. Firstly Percy will finish primary school in July 25 so not ideal to have to move just before that. It’s also really hard to find places to rent, we were super lucky to find this house, it was a bit of a miracle, and at the time Dan had a good solid job, we can’t find a house to rent or buy without a solid job. 

Originally we were thinking about whether it would be possible to buy something here, but now it seems almost impossible for Dan to get a job and get through another trial period and have enough savings for a deposit, and buy a house for April. It’s a bit reminiscent of that time we were homeless for 9 months when Percy was a toddler. Check back to the blogs of May 2016- Feb 2017 if you want to read about that fun time. (It was actually fun for about 3 months) and it did work out ok in the end though, so who knows what will happen here. But to Mum and Dad please have the plan B canal boat ready for April.

Wanna help us out? Want a bargain holiday? We’re away 7th - 17th July, we have a nice enough house, a 3 bed new build, in a lovely sunny bit of France. You’d probably need to hire a car, but then there would be loads of great places you could visit, beach, mountains, city of Perpignan, it’s beautiful. And if you could donate a bit towards our holiday so we can go out for a meal or two we would be very grateful. You can fly direct from Leeds or Birmingham or Stansted. Also I’m going to be flogging a load of stuff soon, I’ve been designing T-shirts, and my colouring book of my region of France (the Pyrenees-Orientales) is in the final stages. I’m getting some simple very postable art on Etsy or something like that soon. And if you know of any work going that we could do remotely, Dan does words and I do pictures. That’s the briefest joint CV I can write.

Gelli printing
I’m thinking of selling some things like this.

How was your week? (Genuinely I would love to know)