The date to move the furniture is rapidly approaching (13 days), and is a major milestone in our plan to escape the rat race. I have booked a U-Drive Luton Van/Truck and essentially what we don’t get in it will be dumped. Wendy is slowly (because we have the time) getting rid of the no longer required possessions, and buying new things that we are going to need but might not be able to source in France, Including a mountain of bedding and towels which we will surely need to stock a B&B.

I am ferrying boxes when I find them home to be filled – reminds us both of our childhood since being children of service fathers we often packed moved and unpacked so we are pretty good of ditching possessions knowing we are not really going to miss them at the end of the day.

We will also be trailering Wendy’s CB500S this time around so I have it booked for a major service and to de-restrict the bike from 33Bhp to the stock 58Bhp so Wendy will notice a performance increase. In the UK she would have had to ride for another year with it restricted but in France we would be unlikely to find someone who could remove the F1 restriction units and tune it up properly hence the reason for doing it slightly early.

I hope to register the R111 when we are over in July and hope I am as successful as I was with the FJR – I will have all the same paperwork but I am a little worried about the power which considerable exceeds the max permitted in France, but so to did the FJR, so I will keep my fingers crossed and get on with it. It will be a different story with the CB500S as this is pre EU conformance so I will have to go through an inspection process but as yet I am unsure of the process…

Learning French

Learning French is key to a successful transition to living in France - and of course integrating (even a little bit) with the locals is largely dependant on making your self understood and understanding them... Of course you can take the stance that you will only speak English and they can bloody well learn English - but the French are as stubborn as we English and language is really important to their feeling of Nationality so best we learn bloody quick.

To be honest we have found most people very helpful when we have approached them French Dictionary in hand, they have tried as much as they are able to speak English as we have made an effort to try our hand (badly) at French.

Neither Wendy nor I did French at School but we can both speak conversational German (not much use in France I hear you say - and you are right)

Well we have a plethora of books and Dictionaries and CD French lessons but getting the discipline to knuckle down and actually do them is a different story. We were invited for Aperitifs with our closest French neighbour neither of us being able to speak the others language, but we had an interesting 2 hours (*Whiskey soaked) using picture books and such like and we were able to exchange loads of information about them and us and the house and area, even managed to get wood for the burner from his cousin at the local preferred rate ;).

so in order to assist us even further we have bought a new toy: A Franklin -BFQ-450 electronic French dicshunary which has a voice facility to speak the words/sentences, Which basically will interpret any sentence you type in to French and at a key press will even speak it for you absolutely brilliant. . This should help us interpered documents/forms/ etc and also help us pick up sentences which we are likely to use, it is also useful when we are out and about trying to make ourselves understood.