Back to the Loire Valley

I've just finished a series of posts — nearly two dozen of them — about our trip to Paris in April 2002. Toutes les bonnes choses ont une fin, and that was true of our vacation. We returned to San Francisco after two weeks in an apartment near Montparnasse. We both went back to work.

A lot happened before our next trip to France. The company I was working for was bought by a San Diego software outfit, and all us employees were moved from Belmont, a town about 20 miles south of where we lived in San Francisco, to Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley, another 20 miles farther south. That more than doubled my commute time, since the worst traffic was south of Belmont. I told my manager that I wasn't sure I'd last long in my job — I had commuted from SF to Silicon Valley between 1995 and 1998, and I dreaded doing so again. It was exhausting.

In June, I finally went for an appointment with an allergist in San Francisco. He told me that I should leave California and go live somewhere else. Scratch tests showed that I was extremely allergic to cypress tree pollen, and the California coast is lined with Monterey cypress trees. I told the doctor about my experience in Paris in April, and his reaction was this: if you didn't have allergy symptoms in Paris in April, it might be worth it to consider going to live there.

To make a long story short, I ended up quitting my job in September that year. We took our next trip to France in December — not for a vacation but to look for a house we might be able to afford to buy and that we'd be happy to live in. We didn't have a plan to move immediately, but I admit that idea was on my mind a lot. On the internet, I found a gîte to rent for a week in the village of Pocé-sur-Cisse, just across the river from the famous Loire valley town of Amboise. By e-mail I made an appointment to see a real estate agent in the Amboise area who sent me a message saying he would be glad to help us in December. Here's a photo of a much older photo of the place where we stayed in Pocé.

Of course, the gîte property didn't look exactly the same in 2002 as it had looked many decades, if not a century, earlier.
It looked like what you see in this photo. That's the owners' house at the end of the driveway.

The owners were Adrienne and her husband Jean (John in English).

They had converted an out-building on their property into a nice little rental house.
That's it below, with the car we rented in Paris for the trip parked in front of it.

We arrived on a Saturday after noon and had time to stop and buy supplies for dinner on the way into the village. Adrienne and Jean said we should help ourselves to firewood that was stored in a shed just outside and make ourselves comfortable.
We were of course completely jet-lagged after the 11-hour flight and the four-hour drive.
The time difference between California and France is nine hours, by the way.

The next morning, we drove down to Amboise to do some shopping in the big Sunday-morning market there.
We had a day of rest ahead of us before our appointment with the real estate agent on Monday morning at eleven.

The weather wasn't bad, considering it was the second week in December.
We had spent a total of three weeks in the area on vacations in nearby Vouvray in 2000 and 2001,
so we were in familiar territory. We didn't know, of course, what the week we planned to spend
looking at houses would turn out to be like. But it seemed like it might be fun.