We’ve made it to France!
After finishing our trip around the country: Chasing Slow – Exploring Australia (see the last blog post), we’ve decided to say goodbye to the great southern land and spend a while on the other side of the world.
A side note to our Australian customers: Don’t worry, we’re still managing the WAY&FARER Camping Shop as usual and we now have an Australian team managing the distribution from the Grampians in Victoria.
With all of our belongings stored in Geelong, a quick and easy sale of the car and caravan, it was a relatively painless move, made even easier as France is where Eva grew up, so a third of us (Eva, Papi & I) were more-or-less moving home.
Eva’s family greeted us in Paris, her brother, Ruben had a striped t-shirt for us both, so we’d fit in, and with a croissant in our hand, we made our way to her parents home at Le Blanc, a few hours drive south.
Le Blanc is a beautiful old city on a river that’s surrounded by forests and farm land. It’s the capital of the Le Brenne district, known for its lakes, nature walks and the famous Haalebaas goat cheese.
Eva and her family grew up in the area. Her parents had a goat farm on the property and produced amazzzzing cheese. They recently sold up and are now renovating a place just out of town. It was the perfect spot for us to take it easy and start adjusting to life in France.
Eva’s parents would often have something planned for us. From riding bikes into town on an old rail trail, to visiting markets, we were treated to a whole bunch of experiences, including a nearby town festival, lunch in an old castle, hiking, drinks with all of the neighbours. We even went to a plant market and I purchased the best looking fern this side of the Otways.
When we weren’t relaxing at home, getting through some admin and organising or working on the website, I spent a lot of my time digging holes in the garden, then Eva’s mum, Anneke bought a ping pong table and put it in the barn, so then I was busy teaching everyone a lesson or two.
We went on couple of different hikes.
We ticked off our first hiking trail in France and it was stunning. The trail started at the ruins of an ancient castle, Forteresse de Crozant, then followed the river below the forest’s canopy.
Read more about Forteresse de Crozant River Walk here.
The second hike was in Le Brenne, another good walk, although the experience wasn’t quite worth documenting.. The trail was nice and we had a good time, but after a bit too much chatting and not paying enough attention, a few kilometres into the hike we realised that we had gone the wrong way, so we backtracked to where we started from and retreated château Le Blanc.
After a few weeks of living the slow life in the French countryside (which we would have done for a few months without complaint!), we ventured south to Bordeaux, the wine capital of the world, where we’d be residing for the foreseeable future.
We started off by staying at an AirBnB and Eva came across the perfect apartment for us. It’s in an old building with a garden, close to the river and not far from the skatepark, in the fancy part of town. We didn’t really hedge our bets and it was the only house that we applied for, but luck was on our side and we were accepted.
Bordeaux is an amazing city and we’re very happy to be here. If you’ve been to Bordeaux or somewhere else in the south-west of France, let us know some places that we should take a look in the comment section below!