August 21st - Bon retour

Tigger and Foggy were delighted to see us when we arrived home on Tuesday evening. Bill had been over to feed them and reload the cat feeder on Monday. He warned us that we might need to replace some of our undies, as our little cherubs had been keeping themselves amused by rearranging the washing. But apart from that, and an efficiently shredded box of tissues, they were in good spirits and did not appear to have suffered unduly through our absence. True, we did feel a little guilty that we would only be around for 24 hours or so before we had to return to the UK with the van. We unloaded the contents on Wednesday, carefully storing anything that might damage (or be damaged by) the cats behind closed doors.

Although we had left most of our furniture behind, we had removed a few essential items that we didn’t want the tenants to use: a couple of beds, some dining chairs, a chest of drawers, and my pots and pans from the kitchen. So, on Thursday morning, we left the house early in order to stop at Ikea in Toulouse to replace them. Back in London, we spent Friday afternoon and evening, until well after midnight, assembling flat pack furniture.

On Saturday morning we had an early appointment down in Farnborough, and I had to collect my bike from BMW in Battersea. Then we needed to finish the cleaning in time for Chard’s agent to do the inventory some time late afternoon, when we also hoped to meet the tenants. The fly in the ointment was that one of the tenants had a wedding to go to in the afternoon and so asked if they could come round at midday.
It shouldn’t have been a problem. We didn’t know how long the 70-mile return trip to Farnborough might take, but Battersea is not far from Fulham, so collecting the bike wouldn’t take long.

Indeed, all was going well until we got to BMW. After a brief remonstration with the service department over the amount charged to rectify the electrical problem, I paid up and my bike was wheeled out to me. I put the key in the ignition and ….. nothing happened. I mean nothing. I couldn’t even turn the key!

I looked at the keys. They were definitely mine. I recognised the keys to our cable locks, and the key to my back box worked fine. Feeling a little foolish, I went back in to the service reception. “I can’t start my bike”, I said. “Oh”, said the guy behind the desk.

Having established that I had the right set of keys, the technician agreed that there was something amiss with the steering lock, and pushed the bike back into the workshop to investigate. It was now 11.45am, and the tenants were due at midday. “Quick. Go home now!”, I said to John. He hesitated. “What if they can’t get the bike going. I’ll have to come back and get you.” “It’ll be fine. Go now. They’ll lend me a bike if they can’t get mine going”, I assured him.

Did I mention that we had travelled back to England with only one set of house keys?

A few minutes later, Chards rang me on my mobile phone to check whether it was still ok for us to meet the tenants. “Fine”, I said, briefly explaining the issue with the bike, but that John would be there to let them in. As I hung up, my phone beeped to tell me I had a message. John had arrived home with no keys and no phone, and had had to ring me from a call box at the end of the road. I couldn’t contact him, so I rang Chards back … just as Max, the technician, appeared carrying a large section of the steering lock from my bike. “We have had to drill the bolts out”, he said. “Arghhh!”, I said. “What?”, said the estate agent.

I explained that I had sent John back to the house with no keys and that my bike was now essentially unridable until the steering lock had been replaced. Knowing that we were due to leave for France on Monday, Max promised that the bike would be fixed by the time the workshop closed at 1pm. In the meantime he would lend me a bike to get back to the house. “Do you have your driving licence for the insurance company?” “No!”

Luckily, a quick call to the DVLA in Swansea was all that was required to get me on the road. The tenants had got lost on the way from the tube station. So, as I pulled up at the house, John was just finishing the introductions and apologising for not being able to let them in.

The next blow was that Chards had booked the inventory for 3pm, rather than ‘late afternoon’ as requested. By this time I was almost speechless. As we had had no time to finish the cleaning as planned, they wisely agreed to rebook for Monday instead. In the event, this was just as well, as were still cleaning at 9pm.

On Sunday we delivered odd bits of furniture, tools and decorating materials, that had accidentally got left out of the removals van the previous weekend, to John’s mum, and then returned the van. In spite of the stuff we had now deposited in Betty’s garden shed, we were quite shocked at the amount that remained to load onto the bikes for our final return trip to France. By the time we were ready to leave, I don’t think we had room for an extra sock!

We caught the 12:15 ferry from Dover on Monday, and stopped at Chartres overnight. The following morning we took time out to see the beautiful 12th Century Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres, declared a world heritage site in 1979. It really is quite stunning, and well worth a visit. We arrived home in Montréjeau at about 8pm on Tuesday, August 21st.

This entry was posted on 23/08/2007 at 07:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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