Getting from San Francisco to Saint-Aignan

Continuing my saga... On this date 22 years ago we arrived in France on our way to Saint-Aignan with a few suitcases and our 11-year-old dog Collette. We had bought a house in April 2003, when we sold our SF place and had the money to send to the notaire in the Saint-Aignan area. He stood in for us at the closing. We had seen the house for the first time in December 2022 and had handed over a down-payment. We had moved out of our San Francisco house in March after having a big garage sale to get rid of everything we could bear to get rid of. We had found a moving company that would come and do an inventory of the remaining items (required by French customs), load everything into a container, and ship the container to France. We had applied for visas at the French consulate in San Francisco.

The house we bought near Saint-Aignan as it looked back in 2003.

As soon as we had handed everything over to the movers, we packed up Walt's Jeep and we drove three thousand miles across the country to stay with my mother, who still lived in the house I grew up in, in North Carolina. We had to wait for our visas to come through before we could leave for France. She said we could stay as long as we wanted or needed to. A few days after we arrived there, we got a message from the consulate in San Francisco saying the visas were ready and we could come an get them. I asked them if they could send them to us and they said no, we had to come pick them up in person.

I explained that we had already left SF and we were three thousand miles away, in North Carolina. I asked them if they could send the visas to the French consulate for our region, which was in Atlanta. They said they could do so if we sent them a pre-paid envelope to send them in. We got all that done, and a few days later we put the dog in the car and headed out. It's a 10-hour drive from the North Carolina coast, where we were, to Atlanta, and we had to appear in person to get the visas. We were at the consulate for 10 minutes at most. We made a three day trip out of it, visiting Charleston in South Carolina and Savannah in Georgia, two cities neither of us had ever before seen.

When we got back to my mother's house, we immediately made reservations to fly from Washington DC to Paris. We wanted to arrive in France on June 1, but that wasn't possible. We ended up flying out on June first and arriving in France on June 2. We had made arrangements and obtained all the papers we needed to get authorization for the dog to be allowed to board the plane and get through customs in Paris. Upon arrival, we picked up a rental car and drove up to Rouen in Normandy to stay with friends there for a few days while we recovered from jet lag.

Arriving in Saint-Aignan... our house is less than two miles from the château.

I think it was on June 7 that we finally arrived in Saint-Aignan and started getting our house set up so we could stay here. The seller had left the place in a mess, and we didn't yet have any appliances like a telephone, a refrigerator, a stove, and a television set, and a washing machine (there was no laundromat in Saint-Aignan). We also had to buy a lawn mower because the house had been empty since April and the grass in the back yard was hip-high. We didn't have any furniture, so we bought a couple of air matresses we could sleep on and some patio furniture that we could use indoors temporarily as a dining room table and chairs. We didn't know when our container-load of furniture and other belongings would arrive. The first night we spent in the house was the night of June 12, if memory serves. We were here!