In Which We Move, Lock, Stock and Barrel to France – New Adventures Galore

After living very happily in Amsterdam for some 20 odd years on the Water Rat and becoming Dutch citizens, making lots of very good friends and generally having a very positive experience in that most friendly and beautiful of cities, we decided to follow an earlier dream and move ourselves to France.

It had long been our plan to move to France once Jake's schooling was over – And this happened a bit sooner than we had anticipated, so we felt free to move on with our plans in about 1996 or 1997.

First we had to sell Water Rat in order to free up some capital, so, hurriedly finishing the 20 year process of making her habitable, we put her on the market.

An interesting experience to put it mildly, about 90% of the people who wanted to have a look at her had no interest in buying her, but were merely interested to see what the inside of a house boat looked like. So we found ourselves showing these rubberneckers around our home, and had to put up with all manner of idiotic questions about rising damp (!) and similar sillinesses.

Happily though finally an extremely gay German designer decided to buy her. A pleasant guy in himself, but about as technically competent as a 6 month old baby. This matters on a house boat, as it works thanks to a lot of moderately technical systems – pumps, generators, engines and so on. But we felt this wasn't our problem, so merely pointed out to him how everything worked and took our money and left him to the fun of sorting out how to keep all those systems working.

I am happy to say that we sold her for much fine money, making a huge profit on her, no matter how you look at it.

Later we discovered that he didn't manage to come to terms very well with the technical side of houseboat living, and had sold her on, curiously enough to a friend of Ivo de Wijs.... Truly a small world.

Anyway, with the help of a number of our Dutch friends, we packed everything up, and piled it all onto a truck that belonged to one of our friends and set off to the depths of the French countryside to begin our new lives down there. By we, I mean Lotty and I, Jake having his own life in Amsterdam to pursue, and he had no desire to move to France with us.

We headed for the small Vosgean village, actually legally a town (more about that side of things later) called Fontenoy Le Chateau, which is about 40 km from a largish town called Epinal in the Low Vosges in North eastern France. Alsace Lorraine to be exact.

This area is called the Low Vosges to distinguish it from the High Vosges, reasonably enough, as it is relatively flat, well, hilly, the High Vosges is mountainous.

Fontenoy is about 400 meters above sea level, and our later house was exactly 435 meters above sea level, so not really high.

This is the street we lived in

Fontenoy le Chateau is a town of some 700 inhabitants in the valley of the small Coney river, which sort of winds its way through the centre of the town, and the Canal de L'Est, which is the chief canal joining Germany and the western parts of France for barges of up to about 38 meters long (The size of the many locks along the canal dictate the maximum size of barges that can work on it).

Back in the 11th century, Fontenoy was a very important place, with a castle and a major tax point, as the river was the main artery for goods between Lorraine and what was then France.   So it has been a town of some importance for about 1000 years, not bad for such a small place I feel.  

We decided to go there as Roger Bowman – Our mate from Amsterdam days – had bought several houses there as his form of pension and he had agreed to rent us one of his houses for us to live in, and one of his shops to store our stuff in while we hunted for the sort of property we wanted.

Our plan was to set up a sort of field centre in that general area of France for kids from international schools in Europe (and this part of France is as near as damn it the centre of Western Europe, so easy to reach from any part of Western Europe).

So, finally there we were.

We then spent several months driving around that area looking at run down farms, ruined and huge houses, old factories in forests and all manner of weird and wonderful properties, all of which were either way too expensive for us, or not suitable to set up a field centre in for one reason or another..

After several months of this we began to get rather depressed and to wonder if the whole idea was a terrible mistake, and then one fine day, Bernard Scandella who was the Mayor of Fontenoy le Chateau asked us to come and talk to him about our plans... Which we were very happy to do,

As a result of this meeting with him things began to move forward finally.

More of this in the next installment.