A weekend at Le Pignoulet

A weekend at Le Pignoulet

We are down at Le Pignoulet for the last weekend before the arrival of our furniture. It’s an eventful weekend all in all…. flight to Toulouse is fine and we pick up our hire car. En route to the house we  pass through several beautiful medieval villages. In Montesquieu there is a hairpin bend, clearly being guarded by a swan which decides to literally head butt the car and drag its beak along 3 panels – The car came off much worse than the bird and we will have to explain the damage when we return the car. The swan must be made of solid stock as it continues apparently undamaged by the encounter but neither of us was willing to step out of the car & approach it in that mood. We saw it on the way home – totally unscathed, but luckily a little calmer!

Our route to the house always involves a stop at SuperU to stock up for the weekend. There’s something about a French supermarket that brings joy to grocery shopping. We have a meeting with the builder who is going to install a new en-suite bathroom – this involves knocking through a metre thick wall (could be quite messy). We decide to upgrade security and change the alarm code, the padlock code on the main gates. This high security situation has been used for the last 18 years without incident, however we are unsure how many folk on the planet would be able to get into the house armed with this information. We carry sofas up and downstairs to see how they look in the bedrooms and move beds around.  We order logs and oil to see us through the next few months.

The rest of the weekend was filled with the joy of the 6 nations on tv, a huge log fire, waking up as the day broke as we didn’t close the shutters, dawn doesn’t break until well after 8am and we are greeted with a beautiful sunrise. I went on a couple of long runs – where the only sound to be heard was that of my feet striking the ground. Quite a lot of rain fell & it felt very wintery,  so we felt bound to ‘do’ Sunday lunch at our favourite restaurant – which we fondly call the Omelette restaurant where Omelette aux cêpes is the highlight of the 5 course meal!

We returned to the UK on Monday with many plans in our heads and many lists on our laptops of tasks that need fulfilling – plans that need to be put in place before we arrive at Easter. We now have the feeling of being on a roller coaster, time is marching on apace and our lives are about to change – in a huge, exciting way. We are so looking forward to our new lives at Pignoulet, but of course feel sadness at leaving our old lives and our friends in the UK – we hope you will all come and visit us (but not all at once please)