Our "gîte" in the Loire Valley

Gîte in French means a specific type of holiday home for rent.  Technically, to be called a gîte, the owner must live close by in order to provide help, assistance, and a warm welcome to guests.This place is called Crène and is about 11 Kilometers outside a nice little village called Loches which is in the Loire Valley about 40 Kms south east of Tours.  We are on a large farm of some sort of grain and mustard by the looks of most of it.  There is a series of large relatively unused barns that at one time housed horses but now contain things like bicycles for our use.  The owners live on the west half and we live on the east half of the house.  Our nearest neighbours (other than the owners) are at least 1/2 a kilometer away through the fields.

The gîte is made of concrete and rocks and our walls are at least a metre thick.  It has very good new windows and doors so the place is as quiet as a tomb.  We are finding it a bit cool as the daily temperatures have been under 10 degrees for the most part but the owners put on the main heat from 6-9 in the am and from 18-23 in the evening and we generally spend our days in the very large living room/kitchen/dining area which we can partition off and have a separate propane fired space heater.

The kids have a swing set outside which has kept them both entertained and they have a great collection of DVD's so we are catching up on our movie fixes at night.  The reason we were to spend three weeks here was so that the kids could catch up on their studies and perhaps learn some French.  Jen has found a tutor that comes 2-3 times a week and has done a great job with the kids so far.  Jen is also listening in and enjoying it.  As you can tell, I've found some time to get up to date on the blogs which is nice as the perfectionist in me never rests easy until that's out of the way.

The weather has been fairly cool, rainy and windy which has by and large kept us inside but we have the great little Focus and have made occasional trips into town and to the local markets.  We are eating like the French... enjoying lots of different locally cheeses and wines.  We found a great little Cabernet Sauvignon table win for 2.35 Euros (about 3.50) that Jen and I both quite like so most nights we polish off one of those.  The cheeses are fantastic as are our daily baguettes and pain au chocolat for the kids.  Things are different here from home... some better, some worse but I must admit that I like their UHT milk... nobody buys fresh milk.... so you buy these UHT containers (much like Africa and SE Asia) and just keep them around.  They only need refrigeration after opening.  This means that fridges are much smaller here and we've found that we can easily live out of a beer fridge rather than the two we have at home (plus a chest freezer).

That's all for now.  Shawn needs the computer for his math.  Love to all.

Our gite.  We live in the right side of it.

Our nearest neighbours

Our side yard patio

Our driveway

Our little Ford Focus Wagon.  It is a manual 6-speed diesel with a neat start/stop feature when you come to a stop sign and let out the clutch in neutral, the engine stops.  When you put the clutch back in, it starts up again to save gas.  It is almost completely unobtrusive.  Good idea.  It also has a hill hold function so is as easy to drive as an automatic (but Jen hasn't tried it).