Tuesday 24 August 2010

'La belle endormie'

I've looked at hundreds of properties on the internet in my search for a future home. I seem to be having enormous difficulty in finding a property that meets all of our quite demanding criteria. Last weekend, I stumbled upon this fairytale property.It is exactly the style of property that I have always dreamt of. We visited it yesterday. It was clear that major work would be required to make it habitable - it really was in a sorry state, neglected and left to fall to ruin. But my goodness, what potential! We were there for over an hour. We left the house to have a meander up the little chemin behind the house to look at the land that was part of the deal. Suddenly, loud loud classical music came blasting up towards us from the house which is adjacent to our 'sleeping beauty'. I mean seriously loud music. Well, that was it, decision taken - no way could we consider living with such neighbours. The overriding criteria now has to be NO NEIGHBOURS!

In the meantime, issues with vehicles are plagueing us and starting to cost a small fortune. The worst culprit is the Astra estate on which, last month, we replaced all 4 very worn tyres and a wheel bearing plus the alternator. That was bad enough. But other issues have started cropping up including sudden losses in power when travelling at 110-130kmh (on the autoroute or dual carriageways, I should say!), a cream cheese texture and oily coating to the engine coolant bottle contents and strange but dramatic noises from the wheels from time to time. We dropped it down to the Opel garage in St G this morning and received a call within a couple of hours to advise that the discs and pads on the front wheels needed to be replaced, the radiator likewise plus some other part that I can't remember which is linked to the drop in engine power. In short, a stonking bill awaits us on Thursday :-( Just to add insult to injury, on our way back home yesterday, the Rav started experiencing worrying losses of power when the revs approached 3000 rpm, which is not unusual if you are ascending a col and asking the engine to pull. Looks like we will have to find a Toyota garage sometime soon to sort that problem too!

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