13 June 2017

Saint-Aignan in the summer of 2003

June 13, 2003. I found a batch of photos I took on that day, which was our second day in the house where we've lived ever since. Then I thought to look through this blog and I found that I've posted about that day, with photos, several times in the past. We had arrived in France that June, and we had the bought the house, but we were waiting for our container load of furniture and other belongings to arrive. We didn't have even an estimated arrival date from the moving company. Here's a post from 2010 about that time.


Meanwhile, I also found a batch of photos I took a little later in 2003 down in Saint-Aignan. I want to post a few of them, because I think I have never put them on the blog before. We had never  heard of Saint-Aignan, we thought, when we came here in December 2002 to see if we could find a house to buy — or at least to see houses and see if there was anything we could afford or think we'd be happy living in. A real estate agent in Montrichard recommended Saint-Aignan to us. Years later, we realized we had driven through Saint-Aignan on a road trip we took all around France in 1989.


We drove over here from Amboise on a Tuesday morning in December 2003, and this is what we saw. Of course, that was in December, so the town didn't look exactly like what you see in these photos from six months later. In winter, Saint-Aignan can be damp, dark, and kind of gloomy, but we had enough experience of France to know it was the kind of town where we'd be happy to live to live someday.


We had no firm plan about leaving the U.S. at that point. We were just exploring. It was almost a lark, and certainly an adventure. We were lucky to find a cooperative and helpful real estate man, who seemed to understand what kind of house we were interested in. On that December day, we first saw the house we live in now. On paper, we would have rejected it as being too small.


Out of 15 or so houses around the area that we inspected, the one we've ended up living in ever since was the only one that really seemed to have potential, as well as being located in a desirable area: at the end of a dead end road, on the edge of a vineyard, with a big flat yard (not on a hillside), a hedge that gave good privacy, and only 2 or 3 miles from a good-sized town with shops, supermarkets, and services.


That summer of 2003 was quite an experience for two guys who had spent many years in San Francisco, where summer weather is windy, cold, and foggy. (Mark Twain said something like the coldest winter he had ever lived through was a month of August in San Francisco.) We had arrived in France in the year of the Canicule — "dog days", the great heat wave during which thousands of French people died exposure and dehydration — and we endured weeks and weeks of extreme heat. That summer, we were camping in our basically empty house, which of course had no air-conditioning (and still doesn't).


We went out and bought some vinyl outdoor furniture to use as a dining room set while we were waiting for our container to arrive from California by boat. We figured we'd use the outdoor furniture, well... outdoors, after we had real furniture in the house.


And we slept for weeks on the floor, on air mattresses that we bought at the local supermarket, covered in sheets that we borrowed from friends in Normandy. It was so hot that that summer that we feared we might have made a big mistake by buying a house in the Loire Valley. Here are some photos of the San Francisco house we had been living in but had sold.

14 comments:

  1. We completed on ours in April 2003.... and, whilst 2CV friends were roasting in Northern Italy at a 2CV World Meeting at the end of July.... we came here and 'cooked'.... 44C in the sun.... 40 in the shade of our lovely Linden tree.... and, thanks to the thick, stone walls.... a very cold 33 indoors!
    We had very similar thoughts to you and Walt about whether or not we'd made the right choice.... the weather section at the back of 'la Nouvelle République' ran out of ways of saying that the 'canicule' continues.....
    yet in June last year, there were some of the heaviest floods in living memory in Touraine.... and the one here at the end of May!
    Interestingly, this is the same weather pattern as during the Great War.... but around two degrees warmer and four colder and heavier rain.

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  2. IIRC, the first time I saw your house was when you picked us up, Frank and me, in Carteret (Normandy) to bring us to Saint-Aignan. That was in 2004, thirteen years ago!

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  3. It was interesting to look back at your old home selling post. Even with my poor eye for photography, I can tell digital cameras have come a long way since 2003. About then we asked a friend's advice on buying a digital camera. He said, go for broke, get a 2 megapixel camera. You won't need better than that. I think my phone camera is now about 8, but apparently megapixels are less important now. I am reminded of the computer salesman who in the 90s said, 2gb is all the hard drive size you will ever need. I think my phone has 32gb drive.

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    1. If memory serves, the hard drive on my first Mac laptop (1992) was a HUGE 40mb! Most applications at that time were around 300 kb.

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    2. I took those SF photos in 2003 with a Kodak DC4800 camera that dated back to the late 1990s. I could make them better with Photoshop now...

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    3. That was a 3 megapixel camera. I was actually thinking that the photos were pretty good, considering that they are 14 years old or more.

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    4. Yes, they're pretty good; and the camera was pretty good too.

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  4. The wallpaper in the 'air matress' room looks very familiar!

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    1. We took that paper down post haste, painted, and had the room carpeted.

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  5. You've come a long way in 13 years. I bet sleeping on that air mattress would be very difficult at your present age. I know I'd have a hard time with the up and down part of sleeping on the floor like that. Love reading this post from the past.

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  6. E., I think we've done pretty well. You are right about getting up from floor level now — it's not easy. Luckily, we don't have to sleep so low down any more.

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  7. I just read your post about selling in San Francisco. Your timing was so very good, you hit almost the very top of the market. I've found, in the few houses I've sold, that a good agent is worth every penny of her/his commission.

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    1. The house we sold has doubled in value since 2003. Where will it stop? I haven't been back to San Francisco in 14 years, but I think I might have trouble recognizing it now.

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