Categories: uncategorized
Date: 07 February 2007 10:31:56
I have booked a holiday.
France.
Hee hee! I am so happy happy happy...
It took some doing. I can't believe it took me two whole days online to get it all sorted. Trouble is, it's so darned expensive to get to France. Anyone would think that a week in a gite would be an affordable holiday. Anyone who isn't restricted to taking their holidays during school holidays, that is. We were planning to fly and then hire a car, knowing that Flybe go from Southampton to Bergerac which was the area we.. OK, I... particularly fancied visiting. Anyone got a spare £1000 lying around? And that's before we start paying for a gite. Hmmm.. scrap that idea.
Next plan, let's think about Normandy. I went for a fantastic gite holiday there when my mum died ten years ago and it was idyllic. I look online and finally find a dream of a gite in a location my sister knows well and which is, apparently, really lovely. Excellent. Now let's look at crossings to Caen. Or to Cherbourg. OK... right.... seeing as I am reluctant to take out a second mortgage, I think we had better scrap that idea. Eurotunnel? Just as expensive and comes out in the wrong bit of France. Eurostar? Well, once we've paid for a hire car, that proves just as expensive and adds in the hassle of having to get ourselves and our luggage over the water and up to London by train to start with. What about going to Dover and going with one of the cheap companies?
Hmmm.. cheap crossings are there to be had.. but they go to Calais, and that's nearly five hours' drive from the gite I have found. Or they go to Boulogne, of course, which is just as bad, or to Dunkerque which is even worser! And instead of just crossing the Solent to get to Portsmouth, I have to drive to Dover too. The thing is, although I have driven before in France and am not really scared of doing it again (liar - the thought of negotiating roundabouts fills me with dread!), when I have done it before I have had another adult with me, an adult who can drive. SO they've done the looking out to see when it's safe to overtake/change lane etc. They've done the navigating. They've done the reading of road signs. And they have not played games or had arguments in the back of the car or suddenly desperately needed a wee (or something more drastic!) and while Tiddles and Smudgelet are actually really well behaved in the car and know the sort of things not to do because of distracting me, I really don't fancy arriving in France to be faced with five hours of negotiating driving on the right through unfamiliar territory. So that left us with one alternative - scrap the gite.
The whole process begins again - finding a gite which is available for the week we want to go, at a price we want to pay, in a location we want to be in.
And
SUCCESS - yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! We have a lovely gite now booked http://www.cheznous.com/prop_details.asp?sku=16587#bookdirectowner, ferry tickets reserved at the exhorbitant cost of just £78 (slightly less than £500, I think you'll agree) and plans to stop in Hastings overnight en route to make our holiday just a little longer.
Shame I have to take the Smudgelets really ;)
(Smudgelet has been told he doesn't have to come with us anyway. I showed him the gite I had booked and he commented "It looks OK, but I don't really like those fields... they look messy, and there's a road just there too." He is going through his "I will only grudgingly give approval of anything and will do my best to pour cold water on anything anyone else does except me" phase - which really endeared him to my brother when he criticised all the decorating he'd done!)