But does it have a pool?
A holiday home in the south of France really does need somewhere to cool off - but it took us roughly ten years to get to here
I have just returned from a short four day trip to La Maison Blanche with my best friend and our teenage sons. We jumped on a flight to Lourdes for next to nothing on a bit of a whim in an attempt to stop our boys playing on X-box all day of the summer holidays. It’s an extreme way to get them out of their bedrooms but it worked.
My friend Lorraine has been coming with her family to our french house since it was pretty much derelict. In fact her husband James was the first visitor to the house as he went with my husband, Peter to install urgent windows, floors and walls to make it vaguely habitable for the rest of us. And she has never complained or passed comment on just how basic the living conditions were and when our kids were little they seemed to think it was perfectly normal to sleep in rooms with no floors or heating. We would tuck them in with hot water bottles and wrap them in blankets and then retreat to the kitchen with the fire on and sample the local cubivins (a wine box essentially but OK cos you’re in France and thats what everyone does!)
It also worked out that for some reason they always visited for Christmas/New year or at warmest - Easter so had never experienced Gensac in the sun. Which is odd because my friend Lorraine loves to swim. She lives to swim in fact and seeks opportunities to take to water where-ever she goes. And yet in France we had never done this because as the blog post I did below details - the french are fair weather swimmers. Wild water swimming is not a thing in France where venturing into water after August 31st would be considered ‘wild’ or indeed ‘insane’. Lakes, pools and even our own pool close for winter so Lorraine had never had the chance to take to water.
But on this trip at a sweltering 38 degrees, we met up with a lovely local lady I met on Instagram (@la_petitegrange) who has been following my renovation diaries and has a house nearby. She, along with a group of other english residents go lake swimming twice a week and she invited us along to join her at Lupiac lake which was so so gorgeous it made us wonder why we didn’t do this even in the winter. We also spent a day at the lake at Aignan swimming while the boys spent three hours in the adjoining rope park zipping across the lake and not even missing FIFA or GTA.
We also lazed by our pool which we had built a couple of years ago after a small financial windfall and as I chronicled in the blog below - the addition of a pool has made our house more rentable and for more money so it does almost pay for itself. It also means that we can lie around it reading books and it feels almost like a proper holiday. And it was so lovely to have Lorraine and Henry visit when the sun was out and the they both had bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms as opposed to the days when male guests were encouraged to go outside as it was slightly nicer than the indoor loo!
But the journey to get here needs remembering and this is where the blog post below comes in. A little reminisce of how we searched for water to swim in and in the early days to bathe in. Sometimes you need to go back to how things were to really appreciate how they now are.
Original blog post 2013
Every holiday home needs a pool. Somewhere to focus the all day lounging. And in the first summer as the temperatures had soared in SW France we had made do with a tiny paddling pool. It was even too small for Arthur but Seb rose to the mini challenge (he was behind on the pain chocolat consumption something he would make up for in years to come!)
We had, by now an exhaustive list of local pools of which there are many but they all only seem to open for one month of the year. When we first bought the house and had no hot water I had the genius idea of going to a swimming pool where we would be able to shower/swim/shower (any other combo would have resulted in us getting thrown out for environmental reasons). And so we spent days in our early first visit on a crazy wild pool chase – finding one on the Internet, driving for miles…. Finding it closed. We finally googled an indoor one in Lourdes where I hoped I could bathe in holy water and come out a size 8 but when we arrived at it – it was the one day of the week it closed. So much for spiritual enlightenment.
Even our little local French villages have amazing outdoor pools but they reserve opening for July and August only. I have no idea how the business model on this works but there is clearly little economic sense in opening before then.
We did eventually find one brilliant outdoor leisure complex in Mirande – only twenty minutes drive away which opens in June. A combination of three pools, slides, table tennis tables, sunloungers and snack bar – we thought we’d hit the jackpot one June half term when we discovered it open. As we paid our entry fee though, the lady behind the counter eyed us suspiciously – “les anglais?” She posed. “Oui” we said excitedly. “Ah” she said as if that explained it all. We were the ONLY people in there. It was warm and sunny outside but not boiling and as soon as our pasty, white, english flesh hit the water we understood why we were solitary bathers. It was FREEZING. As with most french outdoor pools, there is no heating. So if you happen to be there at the beginning of the season when the water has had little sunshine on it – you may as well be in that bit at the end of Skyfall when Bond tussles under the ice with a bad guy. Obviously so as not to lose face we carried on regardless. The kids feel no cold anyway and were thrilled to have the slides to themselves and I shivered in the shallow end praying for it to be over.
Once it IS July or August though there are loads of great local pools to visit in Marciac, Vic-en-Biggore or Plaisance. And best of all in years to come we discover the Lake at Aignan which is a man made beach next to a gorgeous green tinged lake.
And we love the amazing restaurant there with prawns the size of small aliens you can crack out of their shells and get covered in prawny juice but not care cos you are in a damp swimsuit anyway! Best way to eat seafood. Which makes sense really – perhaps that WAS the original purpose of the bikini – to eat seafood without spoiling your clothes!
Of course the easiest way to do some swimming in rural SW France is to build a pool. And this of would have been Peter’s preferred option. In fact he had plans to do this before we even had a kitchen or a bathroom but good sense prevailed – in other words I told him not to be so ridiculous. The truth is, if we did build a pool we could rent our lovely holiday home out for others to enjoy and charge more and find it easier to rent. And readers – I hope in the not too distant – real life we will be doing this, but you’re still a couple of years behind when we had not the finances or the time to do this.
So instead we bought an INTEX pool which takes days to fill, is freezing cold at first and which Rebecca Adlington may find restrictive in terms of Olympic length swimming, but for our two boys it was ideal. At 15ft across there is plenty of room for them to swim about and for peter to float on a lilo with a bottle of beer in hand at around the 5pm mark. We have none of us worked out yet how to take chips n dips in there with us – but if we did it would be just about perfect.