Moving on again

I haven't brought the blog up to date lately as I didn't just want to list the crises and disasters of the last few weeks so I have been waiting for some positive news - and here it is!

The swimming pool now has a liner and the bottom has been flooded to test the seals - all seems to be well and good. The liner is sand coloured - imposed by the Architect de Batiments de France - which gives the water a lovely pale turquoise colour (that may be more blue when we have some blue sky to reflect in it!)

One of the ongoing problems at the moment is the fact that the pump house is not high enough to accommodate the filters - the filters arrived today and are sitting like two forlorn giant chess pieces with no board to play on. We have had numerous solutions proposed over the last ten days but nothing has yet been suggested that suits all parties involved.

Meanwhile, the chapiteau (marquee) arrived last week but we had not yet managed to move chalet 3 out in order to free its designated space. The chapiteau is laying down in bits just inside the entrance waiting its turn.

The heaviest rain we have ever seen arrived on Wednesday evening - just as Richard had finished rotovating the bottom pitches - and we assumed this would delay the planned move of chalet 3.
However our mason, who had found a method of moving the chalet intact, insisted that the machinery could cope with the sodden ground and they arrived on Saturday morning to begin.

It was an impressive operation involving steel girders lifted at one end by the mason's new Manitou and at the other by his brother's tractor. It took a lot of manoeuvring to get the chalet off its base, clear the path for the Manitou to follow through, turn the chalet onto the roadway and then finally to move it to its new home beside the bottom shower block.


It is now going to provide lockable storage for bikes to comply with the French Federation of Cyclotourisme requirements.

While the UK and the rest of France have been baking in unseasonal sunshine we have been enjoying occasional dry spell in between mist, drizzle and heavy rain.
Things seemed to be improving and we had a lovely hot day on Sunday which cooled down quite substantially by evening. At 4a.m. we were all rudely awoken (including one young girl and her dog in a very small tent on their pilgrimage to Compostela) by the most incredible storm. The lightning was constant and the rain, once again, torrential. This continued for well over 2 hours and managed to fill the swimming pool up quite a bit further.

As Richard had begun clearing the site for the chapiteau - it now looks as though it would be easier to move the swimming pool there!