Finally we decided to make an offer of only 330,000€ (about £231,000) expecting it to be rejected. There was also another problem, my parents still had their property in the UK and it wasn’t even on the market yet. We explained that because we would have to sell my parents’ property first, that we would not be able to proceed immediately with the purchase.
To our utter surprise and delight, our offer was accepted and it was agreed that we could have seven months to sell my parents house in the UK. Perhaps at this point we should have heard the alarm bells ringing and realised that this was just too good to be true, but we are ever trusting, blinkered Brits.
Everything moved ahead, we paid the deposit, which was negotiated to be only 5% (it’s usually 10% of the purchase price) and sold my parents’ house in the UK. However, the joy was short lived when my daughter told me that she no longer wanted to come with us and would rather stay with her brother and dad to finish her schooling in the UK.
I had always said I wouldn’t interfere with her choices, but it was a truly terrible day for me; now it would be two children I was leaving behind. Then to top off this period of depression, I had an accident with our horses and badly injured my back; I couldn’t move for weeks, lost the feeling in my right leg and was on over 17 pain killers a day.
The damage was such that I was told it would never fully heal and that I should no longer ride or lift anything of any weight again. So another heart breaking decision had to be made, to sell our two beautiful horses. My daughter was distraught at the prospect of losing her beloved horse Danny, but her Father couldn’t afford to keep him, I certainly couldn’t afford to pay for his livery from France, not knowing how much income we were going to have, so there was nothing else we could do. They had to go.
Luckily I found great homes for both of them and we are still in contact with their new owners. But I am not sure if Chantal will ever forgive me, she loved her boy so much and it still breaks my heart to think about it.
We sold our English cars and bought left hand drives, sold any items we didn’t need to bring with us and sorted out a website for the hotel. I decided it would probably be easier to build a website while we were still in the UK, so I commissioned a large professional company to create a multi lingual site for me.
It cost over £3000, but I felt that it was a necessary expense, as it allowed people to find us on the internet and book direct, which is so important these days.
The next crisis came when we received the news that my parents had to be out of their property two weeks before the final signing date for the hotel. We were unsure of what to do and asked the owner of the hotel if we could bring things forward two weeks to coincide with my parents’ house sale. We were told this would not be possible, but that we could take up residence at the hotel as his personal guests for those two weeks, if we didn’t mind our furniture being stored in the garages there for that time. We agreed to this, as it seemed to be a good solution and would not cost us anything extra, so the moving date was fixed.
Lorry
On the 6th of March 2006 the removal lorry came to collect the furniture from my parents’ house and we had just six hours before we had to leave to catch our overnight ferry.
Our own furniture had been in storage for months now and it was hard to believe that we would finally get to see it all again. The volume of furniture for the removal had been estimated by the removal company and we had agreed on a price (we had had about five quotes and it was the least expensive we went with), but when they took the furniture from my parents’ house we were told there was more than they had estimated for and that we would have to pay the difference, probably a few hundred pounds - they said……
This seemed rather unfair to us, as we were relying on them to estimate the volume accurately, because our budget was tight, but there was nothing we could do about it now, we had a boat to catch. The total quantity of furniture including our own was a massive 90 cubic metres, enough to completely fill a huge articulated lorry floor to ceiling.
That evening we waved goodbye to our friends, family and my two older children - it was probably the hardest and saddest thing I have ever had to do. We drove the three hour journey to the ferry port in Portsmouth to start the two day trip to our new home. My brother Martin had also decided to join us, as he had worked in the building trade and his experience was invaluable in getting the hotel ready to open at Easter. He could do the house conversion for my parents too.
So, there was a convoy of three cars, my mum’s car, driven by my husband with our two dogs in the back, my brother’s car - full of odds and ends that hadn’t quite made it to the removal lorry and our car complete with my five year old son, mum, Harry, their 14 year old golden retriever Kandy, Harry’s wheelchair, me and more odds and ends.
We finally made it to the ferry port, getting there by the skin of our teeth. Our dogs had all been fully passported, a process which takes around six months (it’s important to plan ahead). The dogs had to stay in the car during the crossing (on longer crossings dogs are put into special kennels provided on the ferry – these must be booked well in advance as availability is very limited), luckily it was a very smooth crossing for them.
I booked a commodore class cabin for my parents, so they had two good size single beds on ground level (a standard 2 birth cabin has narrow bunk beds), they also had a good size toilet and shower room, a sitting room area with TV, and a continental breakfast served to their door in the morning!
We first arrived on French soil on the 7th of March and drove down to Limoges where we stayed overnight in a hotel. The dogs were fantastic, we stopped every two hours for them to have a break and some water, but they didn’t make a peep the whole time. They spent the night in our hotel room with us (not unusual in France). Luckily the hotel was situated in a large park by a lake, so there was plenty of room for them to have a good run around.
Articles 
