About Us

You have a dream and then you wonder how to make it a reality, this was how it all started for us.



In 2016 we decided to go to France for our summer holiday, neither of us had holidayed in France before so the plan was to tour around Brittany in late June. We packed the car up with all the necessary camping gear and travelled by ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe then headed down to Sarzeau (below Vannes) to spend the first night with a Camping and Caravanning Club rally, the weather was good and we could ask for advice on travelling around France.

The next day we headed north to Chateaulin to a campsite that was walking distance along the canal to the town, set the tent up again in good weather and felt rather pleased with ourselves that we were getting used to the road system and signage in France. The next day the weather had taken a turn for the worse and on checking the forecast it didn’t look like it was going to improve in Brittany over the coming week.




So, we made the decision to pack up a wet tent and head south hoping we could find better weather. I found a campsite at Montalivet on the Gironde and we put the destination into the satnav, as we got nearer we couldn’t understand why the satnav was telling us it would take over an hour to do 35kms until we turned up on the quay at Royan and realised we had to do a 20 minute ferry crossing to Le Verdon and from there it was another 30 minutes to the campsite.

All was good from that moment, the weather was warm and sunny and the tent dried out in no time at all. We stayed a couple of nights there as it was just across the road from a lovely, sandy beach then we headed north of Bordeaux to a small campsite surrounded by vineyards. Again, the weather was good while we were there and we could explore the area and the city of Bordeaux.



We were booked into one final campsite close to Dieppe for convenience as we had to get the ferry home the following day, we packed the tent and the camping gear back into the car, got 20 minutes into our journey and found the rain, it poured and poured all the way back north! We quickly realised that we wouldn’t be able to camp for the final night and started to come up with some possible alternatives.

Happily, we ended up in Saint Valery en Caux in Normandy and found a restaurant with rooms above offering bed and breakfast, our room looked over a carpark so we could keep an eye on the car that was full of our camping gear. We enjoyed a meal and a bottle of wine in the restaurant and a comfortable night’s sleep with breakfast in the morning before heading off to the ferry at Dieppe.



Surprisingly, the weather did not discourage us so we upgraded the tent and camping gear and spent the following year camping in France. This time we did get to tour around Brittany and this is when we started dreaming of the possibility of living in France and more specifically with the planned search being Morbihan in southern Brittany.

In 2018 we spent two separate weeks (one in June and one in August) camping in Brittany and this time our holiday was interspersed with viewing properties in the region. However, we were unable to find anything that matched what we had in our mind. By the end of September we had buyer for our house in the UK and were downsizing to a flat, so in October we decided to transfer our search to Normandy and lined up viewings on as many properties as we could fit in the time available in a long weekend.



The old cliché.......

.......you just know when you’ve found the right place definitely came into force when we pulled up outside this imposing, 6 bedroomed, old granite house. The excitement we felt as we were shown what the property and the land had to offer was clear to us and was something we hadn’t felt with any of the other numerous properties we had previously viewed.

That evening, we sat down and discussed every property we had seen and discounted all of them apart from this one. At 10pm we sent the estate agent a message to see if we could have a second viewing the next morning before we headed back to get the ferry home, within 20 minutes this was confirmed.

Going back for a second viewing we tried to let our heads rule but it was clear to us that this was THE ONE! And back at the ferry port we were in email negotiations with the estate agent to agree a price which was finally agreed on and on the 14th February 2019 we became the proud owners of Le Haut du Bourg in the village of Saint Aubin de Terregatte in the Normandy countryside.


For the rest of 2019 we spent as much time at our "French Home" as we possibly could even though we both had full-time jobs. The Eurotunnel became our preferred way of travelling to the house because we were able to finish work on a Friday and get there before midnight and leave on a Sunday afternoon, making it home by about 10pm.

Much of Jeremy’s time through the summer was cutting the grass and trying to tame the garden, whereas mine was spent making the house a home, decorating the three-bedroomed apartment and making jam from all the fruit the garden produced.

So, what started out as a conversation about moving to France and how we could make it happen has now become a reality and we can now make changes and improvements to our lives.

 We started welcoming guests to the apartment in the summer of 2021 and received 5* reviews and will continue to do so to enable future guests to enjoy Normandy and what it has to offer.