Montigny-sur-Loing: our Home in France
We’re here, and so far, everything’s gone just fine!
The flights over passed the test for successful travel these days: they were uneventful. I know that’s a rather low bar to success, but given the quality of air travel these days, it works. Both flights were on time, all our bags arrived with us; that’s success!
We did have one little last minute glitch: at noon on the day we left, we decided that maybe we should weigh the four suitcases, since there is a 23kg limit (51 pounds) for each. Surprise: three of the four were overweight by about ten pounds total. We did some rapid re-packing and adjusting, and left a few things behind, and re-weighed. Looked good, so off we went. Official weights at the airport: 22.6kg, 22.4, 22.4, 22.2. Phew - a total of about 4 pounds on the light side. On the other hand, I don’t think the woman checking us in even glanced at the weights, so maybe we would have gotten away without the re-packing panic.
We stayed with Mary & Gilles the first night and came to Montigny (pronounced “Monteenyee”) the next day. The house we rented here is fine, but clearly showed signs that it’s occupied only a few weeks a year. So the first day was clean and dust and clean some more and get the cobwebs down. Now, after a couple days, it’s really starting to feel like home. The boulangerie two hundred yards down the street is - as judged by our friends here - an excellent one, and I am not going to argue that. I went this morning for croissants and didn’t make a fool of myself. We’ll be known there in a few days, for sure.
Yesterday we got a phone. Mary had just bought a new phone and we got the old one. It’s a decidedly non-smart phone, but perfect for our needs. We signed up for a pre-paid plan - through the post office - and get 3 hours of in-France phone calls for about \$40. We can receive international calls, but not make them, which is just fine with us.
And we’ll have Internet in the house next week (or maybe the week after; after all, this is France). It’ll be about \$33 per month including a bunch of television channels. Until then, we get 15 channels, all in French, which does us little good! When Internet arrives, it’ll be a whole lot easier to post and use email.
And tomorrow we pick up our car, a Renault Clio4. It’s a sporty little car and should get over 40 mpg on diesel. Diesel is cheaper that gasoline here, but I think it’s still about $7 per gallon.
France has had the coolest Spring ever recorded (and I’m not talking about “coolest” in the ‘hip’ sense, but temperature sense) and that’s the way it’s been since we arrived: cloudy and cool. We’ve gotten out for a few walks already, and ventured into the Fountainebleau forest this morning. Montigny borders the Fountainbleau forest, which was a preserve of French kings since Louis XIV in the 16th century and has been kept as a government-owned park. It has over 650 miles of marked paths and many more miles of informal ones. We’re not going far into there without a map of the forest and our GPS! Otherwise, I can guarantee we’d get lost and probably never be seen again.
So that’s it for now. I think it is really sinking in that we’re going to be here almost five more months. Guess I’d better call that woman we know about French lessons…<
A tout a l’heure!