Happy New Year!

We have just spent New Year at La Matha with some friends - fine wine, good food, excellent company: what more could one want?  The weather has been great as well - clear and crisp in the most part.  I've taken many frosty pictures, as you can see.

We have planned the improvements for this year - mostly they will be hidden, as it is sorting out some plumbing quirks.  We will have a sink installed in the utility/store room as well. Other improvements will be just tidying things up.

We're not sure when we'll be back here next - work and other things will be getting in the way - but we hope to have some time in the spring.

A long time since my last Blog

I've not done very well with this recently.  We went over to La Matha at the beginning of December last year - the weather was really good: crisp but bright and sunny.  We had a fantastic time, visiting the Christmas market in the cloisters in St Emilion, eating at La Terrasse in Duras (which has come good again), and in Chai Pascale in St Emilion.

We bought a new television, which highlighted that the satellite digi-box is poor, so I'll be replacing that.

We also went out for my birthday - something we've now done for the last three years.  Again eating in La Terrasse was good.  We also went to La Table Rouge, which we went to back in September.  A delightful little restaurant by the Dordogne near Castillon.  That has definitely proved to be a really good find!

Next trip is at Easter, and sometime after that, we hope Chris will be rendering and tidying up the back of the house - it does look a mess at the moment, but with the stonework in the "pierre apparente" finish, and a new fuel tank stored in the lean-to, it will be a big improvement.

We have most of the summer booked up - only one week in July and a bit in June free.  Let's hope we have good weather in the summer!

September Trip

Last weekend we were over in La Matha with Bill & Shirley for a brief stay, which went very well.  We arrived on Friday and decided that we'd try La Terrasse again for dinner.  If you've read previous posts, you'll see that we'd all but given up going there, as it was always closed when we tried.  When I phoned to book, it was answered by someone new; table booked.  It turns out it now has a new owner, who took over in mid-July.  He's a local man who had sold a restaurant nearby some time last year, and ended up buying this one.

The weather was lovely and warm, so we ended up eating outside.  The menu was not like under the Belgians, where they had three or four differently priced menus - this was a single menu with a bit of blurring between starters and main courses: some dishes could be either, and it was limited to about a dozen items.  Food turned out to be very tasty, and the price not too high - about €120 for four, not including drinks.  Normal service resumes - let's hope it lasts!

On Saturday we shopped tn the market at St Foy, as we had guests for the evening.  The guests were people we'd met at Le Moulin restaurant in Les Lèves back in July.  Before the guests turned up, we had a massive thunder storm - see photo below of the river going past the terrace!

Dinner went well, although the son of our guest had a disastrous evening - lightening had set fire to his hay bales, and he'd lost 200 of them just over in Riocaud!

On Sunday, we had a trip to Les Jardins du Sardy between St Foy and Castillon - well worth a trip.  Afterwards, we headed back over the Dordogne through Pessac to Flaujagues - I'd never been there before, and we found it very pretty.  At the recommendation of a guest, we then went on to find La Table Rouge - a delightful restaurant on the road from Flaujagues to Castillon, overlooking the river.  The owner let us eat a late lunch, which was really good.  La Table Rouge is another decent restaurant to go to!

Table Tennis under the Pergola

Our idea has finally been realised.  The table tennis table fits neatly under the pergola, and the columns don't interfere with playing!

After this photo was taken, we moved some potted climbing plants round, so that it doesn't look quite so clinical.  It was a bit windy on Monday, so, with the table collapsed into storage mode, we pushed it up against the house wall, as we don't want it blown over - I suppose it's a balance between that, and, at the moment, having it down and collecting rainwater whenever it rains.

One thing we did with left over paving slabs was to make stepping stones across the gravel from the terrace to the pool - I'm sure this will be welcomed by everyone!

I took some photos around the pool, as there is one photo I've been using on the website which is very out of date.  Here are a couple of them

Gensac or Balllykisangel?

We were confused.  On Friday evening, we went to Gensaké restaurant in Gensac for dinner.  We hadn't booked, thinking there wouldn't be a problem getting a table, but when we arrived, it seemed very busy.  We did manage to get a table, and had a very enjoyable meal.  However, there was a large party on a big table at the back, and it would appear it was full of Irish people.  Then it turned out that most of the people on that table knew people on every other table (apart from us - we did feel left out!).  All the other diners appeared to be Irish too.  Now had we gone through a worm-hole and ended up in Ballykisangel?

It turned out that there was to be a wedding in the village over the weekend, and Gensaké was full of wedding guests.  As we left, we noticed that Café de la Paix, which is normally closed in the evenings, was open and doing good trade as well.  Big drinkers these Irish!

Website

I've written a couple of posts in the past about our website www.la-matha.com.  The site has always been simple and straightforward.  Upgrades I've put in place over the years have been restricted to a new "flashy" new photo gallery written in HTML5 rather than Flash, and the introduction of buttons which change when the mouse hovers over them.  Our thinking was to just keep it simple, and let the property do the talking.

Talking to a Google advertising re-seller, I realised how poor the site was as a marketing tool, compared to what it could be.  That was perhaps borne out by the fact that we have had no lettings directly from the website.  The re-seller wanted me to buy his web-design service, but that would have meant me losing control of the content, and I didn't want that.  I found that his service used an on-line tool called Wix, which can be free, if you want their advertising on it, or you can pay for an unbranded site.  However, studying a site that had been produced using it, it became clear that even with the paid for service, a lot of the content and coding was retained by Wix - losing control again!

So, I set about re-writing the site loosely based on a Wix design I had been toying with.  The result, if I say so myself, is a big improvement.  It may not have the slick sliding progression as you move page by page (I think done by HTML5), but I have got a small slide show on each page, drop-down menus using CSS, the menu and formatting are all on separate files, so if I want to add a page, all I need to do is to change the menu once, and the change appears on all the pages.  I've now even updated the French version of the site, so that it is the same, albeit in French!  I have just finished adding a form for visitors to use to contact me - possible now, as I have had to upgrade the hosting so that I can use PHP, a relatively new programming language which allows for the menu to be on a single page which is referred to by all the others.

Anyway, check it out - I hope you like it!

Pergola - the Pictures

Here are some pictures of the construction of the pergola:

 Bill and Ali help with getting the first of the poles up:

 

Bill helping me with the cross beams, and then fixing the cane canopy:

 

And finally, the finished pergola, with a lot of the gravel in place.  The slabs under the pergola will be laid by Chris, our builder, in the coming weeks.

(Thanks to Shirley as official photographer!)