Our guests have been enjoying our special weekly BBQ and games evenings. It’s a great chance for everyone to get together, find out more about each other and let us do the cooking.
They have all enjoyed the variety of food on offer, especially the home made desserts, often featuring fresh raspberries from our garden.
After eating well and consuming plenty of French wine and beer, everyone has been ready for a game of boules or giant Jenga.
Our friends Kay & Jim run a smallholding about 10 minutes from us and are starting up a little business running Hog Roasts. We along with some of their other friends were recently invited to the trial run of Jim’s specially manufactured roasting equipment. The pig had been running about in their fields until a few days before, living a happy, healthy life as a free range, organically reared pig.
The pork was fantastic, especially the crackling which was gorgeous. This was a real treat for the British as the French think that eating a pig’s skin is disgusting - somewhat rich considering some of the things they eat!
Normally resident at La Vieille Fromagerie are the two of us, Janet & Dougie, the two dogs who came out from the UK with us, Bella & Charlie, and our four cats who adopted us last summer, Marge, Little Marge, Fluffy and Ginge.
Bella and Charlie love life in France with several acres to run around in - much better than the postage stamp garden in Wales.
Marge the cat adopted us last summer when she hid in our barn and had her litter of kittens. After feeding her up, we had her spayed as we didn’t know where she had come from and we weren’t ready for more kittens. On her return from the vets, one of neighbours recognised her and said “Nafnaf” belonged to someone else in the hamlet. Oops, but from that day on Marge has not strayed form us and shows no interest in her old home - too well fed probably. The cats do earn their keep, particularly the Ginger Ninja, by keeping the field mouse population under control.
You’ve no doubt seen TV programmes, read books and magazines selling the dream of living in France and making a living from B&B and/or gites. Well. we were like everyone else thinking about it and then in February 2006 took the plunge and moved to Brux. Our new home is in the heart of Poitou Charente in sunny SW France.
That was 2 1/2 years ago, now we have a thriving 3 bedroomed B&B and also 3 beautiful, luxury gites. A lot of blood, sweat and tears and more money than we ever imagined or budgetted for have gone into creating our dream.
We still have more plans for developing our business and you will be able to read about them here first!
