A bit more about Angouleme

Angouleme (about 45 minutes south) is the capital city of the Charente.
It is known as the capital of the ‘Image’ especially comic strips or ‘Bandes dessinées  and has a museum dedicated to this. Every year the City hosts the International Comic Strip Festival in January. Cartoon characters appear over more than 20 walls and even street names are contained within a cartoon bubble.

Angoulême also hosts the Gastronomades festival at Christmas, Music Metisse in May and Piano en Valois in October.

The streets of the old town are quaint and in summer it will be lovely to sit in the squares and cafes and watch the world go by. There are so many places to eat and drink - it will take us years to work our way through them all.

Here are some photos to whet your appetite

Cathedral - over the entrance

All post boxes should have character like this

Bust of Herge

Relais d'Alsace - Angouleme -reat food and service!

Some of the street art

Missed deadlines and first guests

Well our deadline of 1st April for an open day was abandoned.
we were putting ourselves under far to much pressure and we didn't have any bookings so we have decided to postpone until Phil gets back from the UK. He has popped back for a service.

We have been so busy on the social side.
Friends Simo and Meg visited from the UK and Simon has popped two coats of stain on the floorboards in Bedroom 3. Just waiting for me to varnish now.
The walls have been plastered where necessary, painted (3-4 coats) and the window painted. Also the beams have been painted.

Walls plastered

And filled

Walls and ceiling painted

Beams being done

Window satinned (is this a word?)

Floorboards going down

In the meantime I went to a brilliant hen night in La Rochelle. Really should get away more often. Then last Monday I picked Rich and Emilie up from Limoges airport before rushing back here to go to a wedding. John and Helen's MP3 player provided music and Rich sang a couple of songs as the 'entertainment' let the couple down at the last minute due to sickness. Rich was brilliant and I was so proud.
We had a lovely few days with them even though the weather could have been kinder. We had a lovely few hours in Angouleme (our first visit) and definitely recommended. Yesterday Phil drove them back to the UK - great for him as paying the tolls in a right hand drive van isn't the easiest of tasks.

Whilst I was in La Rochelle we had an enquiry from a family who found ud on google (I added the business a couple of weeks ago). Great that google is doing more for us than any of the other sites I have registered La Cour with.
Anyway - it seemed silly to turn the booking down just because we have postponed opening and they wanted to arrive the same day Rich and Emilie left. That gave me something else to think about! The upstairs room is ready and I had two Z beds for the two children so our first guests have arrived!
And what a lovely family they are. They are with me for 3 days and then I will be getting to work on varnishing the boards and starting to put Bedroom 3 together. Hopefully Phil will be back after doing some jobs of his own back at Evergreen.

I am looking forward to some warmer weather - I think it is forecast for the coming week and then we can celebrate the end of the first part of the project. Having said that - there is still loads to do outside but I am hoping that we can start to enjoy the sunshine and locality a bit more in the forthcoming weeks.