03 December 2020

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.


14 comments:

  1. The first photo is a gem! The house hardly changed in all those years. The family looks quite at home with the goats! The market photo has been turned into a nice painting. Chouette.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That old photo was in a frame hanging on a wall in the Pocé gîte.

      Delete
  2. That’s the problem with California, it’s too far from Europe. Yes, the first photo is a treasure! I can already tell this next series of posts is going to be very enjoyable too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "That’s the problem with California, it’s too far from Europe." Agreed, despite California's many charms, I think this all the time, especially as I get older.

      Delete
  3. What have you done with the last photo? I love the effect!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It was pretty gloomy when I took that picture, so it came out blurry. I applied an effect called Dry Brush to it in Photoshop to salvage it.

      Delete
  4. Old postcards are so interesting. Didn't we buy wine in Pocé or nearby one time?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't really remember the two of us going to Pocé to buy wine, but maybe we went together to the Léonard de Vinci wine co-op in Limeray, which is nearby. It's in the Touraine-Amboise wine production area.

      Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones lives in Pocé, by the way. He's in confinement in his château there, according to a newspaper article I read today. Feu VGE passed away yesterday at his château in the Loir-et-Cher at Authon, just north of Château-Renault.

      Delete
    2. Yes, Limeray is the place. I remember the chateau at Pocé. Oui, j'ai lu que VGE avait cassé sa pipe!

      Delete
    3. I had to google who VGE was. Did we like him? He got into Académie Française so he must have been somewhat ok.

      Delete
    4. VGE was okay, but was considered to be a little pretentious with no grounds for being so. Sort of a light-weight. Later, when Mitterrand was president, he wrote a constitution for the European and it was voted on. It lost in France. Not sure about other countries.

      Delete
    5. I left out the word Union — l meant a constitution for the EU. I think some countries voted for it but my memory is vague. France voted no, and that was a big deal.
      .

      Delete
  5. Ken, I love the last photo as well. It's like a watercolor. Looking forward to hearing about your search for a home.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The obits for VGE mention that he was one of the guiding forces behind what became the EU, so you may have him to thank for your present state of residence.
    Another vote for the Impressionist last photo, and for hearing about The Great House Search. This is much more fun than watching one of those TV shows about house-hunting.

    ReplyDelete

What's on your mind? Qu'avez-vous à me dire ?