It's been two years since we visited France.  We loved it.  We thought, somehow, that all would fall into place with our plans.  We ran into red tape.  Infamous, gnarly, defeating, French red tape.

We're only just talking about this grand plan of ours once again.  D has been leading hikes with the AMC for two years, building experience.  G has built a homeschool community and is busy with the boys.  The boys have grown and grown and grown.  They are now 8, 6.5 and nearing 3.  We've moved house, lost teeth, broken bones, learned to read, and begun to speak French.

One of our very favourite pictures from that trip:

My Dad with the three boys sitting in front of the bread oven in the middle of the courtyard.

Radio silence!

We've been a busy family lately. We're planning our trip to France, making dates to try things out and meet with people who we hope to do business with. We've been celebrating....a certain special someone just turned 6! We've been battling a yucky virus. We've been savouring August and the last weeks of swimming lessons and tennis lessons.

We've also been doing lots of brainstorming and fine-tuning ideas about The Outdoor Enthusiast. We've had some super feedback from friends again...keep it coming.

We'll post soon about new details.

Hope you, too, are enjoying the Summer.
The MacCs

Summary Thus Far

New readers have had some questions, and here are some responses to that feedback:

If you are a new reader, we suggest you start with our first blogs from July of 2010. Blogs archive from the most recent backwards, so if you jump on in at the latest blog, which is the one that shows up on the home page, you may be confused.

First, remember that this is not the business website! This is our family's blog documenting our journey into business-ownership and our move to France. Once we've been on our trip to France in September and we've had a chance to meet in person with all the existing businesses that we've so far only been in touch with via email or through G's Dad, we'll have enough information to launch an official website. We are using the blog to run new ideas by folks we know (especially those who love the outdoors as much as D does). Ever since we started to 'come out' to our friends, we've found that we talk about very little else at social gatherings and we're finding it's easier to just direct people here rather than explain the latest idea to everyone one by one.

Second, here's a quick overview of where we are:

We're in touch with officials in France (for residency, certification, tax and small-business paperwork purposes).
We're in touch with a number of existing businesses in Aveyron with whom we'll establish a business relationship while we get going.
We're headed to France next month (!) to scout all this out in person.
We have some very practical and very useful help in the person of G's Dad, who lives in the area, is fluent in French and who is acting as a business mentor as we get going.

After our trip, we'll put all our numbers together and launch the official website and begin to advertise.

Next June, D will lead two one-week tours (ideally populated by word-of-mouth contacts who will commit to being very frank with us about feedback).

Based on the success of those two trial trips, we'll move to France next August, having advertised as much as we can and, fingers crossed, with most of the rest of the season all filled up.

To read about our goals for the business and what we hope to see it looking like in a few years, read this post from last month. To see what a sample week travelling with us will look like, read this one.

Hope that helps.
The MacCs

Haute hiking

We've been brewing another idea generated by yet another friend. We're thinking of offering private week-long adventure packages for a single or a couple (or a few!) people who want to choose their week a la carte and employ D's services privately. There are several very nice hotels nearby where we could lodge folks who want a more luxurious stay.

Chateau de Lunac is one. Mme Revalor speaks 'un peu anglais' and she means it....she offers rooms with 'antics' on her website (!). There is a swimming pool and each room has a fireplace along with French 'antics'. Here's a new-ish hotel that we know nothing about yet, but which we'll investigate in September.

I can't wait to do our investigative visit to France and finally be able to put numbers to all of this. It's been a little frustrating to make an Excel sheet full of items with no numbers to plug in. It will be very satisfying to finally be able to tally everything up and see what a week's adventure will cost.

I was digging around online the other day and I found a similar business to ours in the next town over. They offer a food-based tour in a chateau hotel. The tours are midweek, for only 4 days and you have a chance to spend time with the chef in the kitchen and out at markets and vineyards. Included in their price is a rental car, which I think it a fabulous idea. We were a little uncertain about how we'd manage to pick everyone up each week. This solves that problem and gives our guests some flexibility to spend their evenings doing what they please; visiting local food or music festivals, dinner, a scenic drive.

We got our passports all sorted out yesterday. Baby P has the cutest picture for his and I got out the older boys' ones which are more than three years old. They've changed so much!

We're getting so excited about visiting Aveyron and Grandpa (or Grandpere as we're calling him these days!).
The MacCs

Fun and Nonsense

One night recently, while the MacC family was on Summer vacation at the shore, baby P was wakeful and vocal and Dadda D very kindly took him out to the living room to allow Mamma G to sleep a little (thanks, honey). Dadda D spent some time surfing the cable channels, a novelty as we don't have cable at home. He stumbled across a History Channel show about an out-there theory that the Knights Templar had visited New England in the 14th century, leaving an incised stone in Westford, MA, a neighbouring town to ours.

Seriously, read the link, there's folks out there who buy this kind of stuff!

Well, Aveyron just happens to be in Templar Country, as well as near the heart of where the Cathars flourished, were persecuted and eventually wiped out by the Catholic Church. In the wake of 'The DaVinci Code' and other books, these groups and their history have been popularized. We can't wait to explore Cathar strongholds and see where the Templars lived and worked in Aveyron. We're hoping that, along with the draw of the fantastic natural beauty of this place, the alluring history of these peoples will draw visitors to our business and Aveyron. Maybe we ought to start an online book club, reading books about- and set-in Aveyron?

Now, fantasy aside, we like the idea that we're travelling back along the footsteps of the Westford Knight, back to Aveyron.

G

The Simple Life

Our website (TOE Adventures dot com, we think) will be all-business, all the time, but this blog is meant to be a record of our family's adventures as we head towards owning our own business and moving to France. In keeping with that, a word about why we want to uproot our family and move to France. We've already covered the draw of actually earning our keep by doing something we love. There's something else, too. It's all about the (at least perceived) idea that Europe is a slower place to live. Closer to the land, at least in rural Aveyron. Further from the all-pervasive consumer culture here in the US. More about families eating together and taking real, long, relaxing vacations together without dragging their work along with them via Blackberry. More about living than making a living. And we've talked about food. Real food. Aaah, to live in a place where the regional specialties are carefully crafted cheeses and not 'all-you-can-eat'! Much more about food later, I suspect.

I've been reading a couple of other blogs lately. Three are by families who are living and homeschooling aboard sailboats. They are Zach Aboard and Cailydh Sets Sail and A Family Aboard. These families are largely stuff-free, they spend most of the day outdoors. They spend lots of time together. They value experience over running the rat race and loading on the possessions.

I want that, too. As a pack-rat, granddaughter of a pack-rat and before her a long line of pack-rats, this is a challenge for me. I see living clutter-free as something desirable but vaguely forbidden and certainly exotic. But we've been on a major purge lately and it feels so good. As we're heading out to France on our own, without the benefit of a corporate moving allowance, we're not taking much. We'll ship one load and pack it with special toys and our pictures and movies. Our special things. A few heirloom pieces of furniture and pictures. A very pared-down wardrobe for each of us. That's about it! It doesn't make sense to ship things like dishes that we can buy there (there's an IKEA in Toulouse...yay!) for cheaper than the shipping. Plus we'll be in a furnished gite for a year or two, so there's no point in moving stuff just to store it in Dad's barn.

I'm looking forward to finding things for our (eventual) new house that are really well thought-out. It's taken me a long time to come to a sense of personal style...I've always copied my Mum's very elegant and formal style, which I love, but which fights against our lifestyle instead of letting it flow. I want a house that has cubbies and shelves and a place for every thing to live. I want a homeschool space with storage and practical, cleanable, indestructible surfaces. I want simple lines and natural materials and colours. I want baskets of toys and games in the living room, because why the hell call it a living room if only 2/5ths of the family are welcome to live and play there? I want a dining space that's family-friendly and clutter-free, but also looks OK with the Special Occasion Stuff; silver and nice dishes and candlesticks. Mostly, though, I want a house filled with only the things that we choose to fill it with. I want our 'stuff' to be well-considered and purposeful.

The other blogs I follow are mostly ones of other Waldorf/Steiner homeschoolers. Three favourites are The Parenting Passageway, Soule Mama, and The Magic Onions.

I can't say enough how inspiring it is to read about other families who value the same things we do for our kids. It's Waldorf that inspired our first purge of the year. We got rid of 6 big black trash bags of toys and haven't missed a one. This community has inspired in me the most creative season of my life since college. I've made the kids a living playhouse in the garden, a Fairy Garden, a wooden swing, a legion of dolls from simple peg-people to J's beloved Jolly Molly, sewn curtains and pillows and clothes (even some for me!). I made Driftwood Cottage, a home for our fairy friends when we're at the shore. I've learned how to needle-felt and am learning to knit. I'm writing a curriculum for next year's learning. And I'm loving every second of it. Following a Waldorf-inspired rhythm to the day and focusing our creative energies on painting, story-telling and exploring the outdoors has also made me enjoy my kids a lot more. I've always loved motherhood, but living so purposefully has given me a real vocation.

Another thing I love about Waldorf (and which we already were practicing to some degree) is the reverence for living rhythms that it encourages. Singing grace at mealtimes, celebrating festivals sacred and secular all year round as part of the curriculum, structuring the week so that the house runs smoothly. Stopping to offer thanks and ask for grace. Stopping to celebrate moments both humble and momentous. These are things that are becoming an endangered species. What a pity! Running a weekly-based business will certainly help us to keep a rhythm; cleaning day, market day, baking day, sewing and mending day, gardening day. It all will need to be done and done with willing hands and happy hearts.

I really believe that moving to France will enhance our lifestyle. We'll be in the country, close to our food sources, with space to grow lots of our own food. We'll have a family focus on the business....no more watching Dada go bye-bye to work for someone else every day...work will be something we all pull for together.

We're not going to live on a boat, but we will be in a sea of cultural and linguistic newness and I suspect that we'll have an experience of drawing in together for support and familiarity. Home will truly be our little island. I'm really looking forward to homeschooling and being a Mamma in France.

Today, the boys and I went to a favourite coffee shop for breakfast and then, when the baby fell asleep in the car but we were an hour early for swimming lessons, we decided to drive around a bit and look at all the gardens and make a wish-list for our garden in France. We want a pool (and not just for the guests!). T, my giving little fellow, wants an herb garden with arches and a willow tree. This is because he saw how much I loved the knot garden at Elm Bank and knows that I have an enduring fondness for big, weepy willow trees. He also wants a tree to put our swing in and a veg garden just for himself. J wants a sand pit and a playground (climbing structure?). I want to try my hand at a big, lush, English perennial garden full of roses and hollyhocks and foxgloves and peonies. I also want to grow food and medicinal plants....a life-long study that I'll be coming to pretty darn late! We all thought it'd be cool to grow things that we could use to dye wool and fabrics. I love that we all got so excited about something so simple and far-off like gardening in France.

We're already enjoying the journey. How satisfying.
Bessings,
G

A Few Details

We've had some questions from folks. In response, here are a few more details about how we see the business working.

We'll advertise specific weeks with a full week's activities planned for each. Some weeks we'll cater to those who really love hiking but don't want to mountain-bike, or maybe plan a week with lots of paddling. Maybe some weeks that have more cultural adventures and fewer exercise-based ones. (But our focus will always be the outdoors.) We're also probably going to come up with some kind of internal rigour-rating system and aim weeks at different ability levels. We'll also rely on feedback from people who take our trips as we get going. When we post a calendar on our website (in progress), people will be able to compare different weeks' schedules side-by-side and plan to come for a week that suits what they are looking for. There will be a description of each activity and a recommendation about the technical-difficulty of each to make it easier to find a good fit. They'll have a way to contact us for additional questions, too (obviously!).

We'll also need to figure out a way to 'manage the girlfriends', as one of our friends puts it...if there are couples of differing abilities or interests travelling together, we'll have to take that into account. Maybe folks who fall into that category might be encouraged to rent a car so that the less-outdoorsy person is free to explore independently. Ideas?

Who will be our clientele?
We at first imagined people a bit like us; headed towards middle age, outdoorsy. Well, like D anyway. G is the indoorsy, homeschool-the-kids, keep-the-home, write-the-business-plan partner in this enterprise (also the design-and-execute-the-renovations partner when we come to that...can't wait!). We've had some great brainstorming sessions with lots of friends and some of the ideas so far have been to market to: Retirees, corporate teams, college students, homeschool families, singles, GLBT, church groups. At the moment our focus is on an American market. We see our company catering to people who like to travel and love to explore the outdoors, but who don't want to put the time and effort into finding where to rent mountain bikes and kayaks or spend days researching where you can put in to the rivers. And we know how valuable a service this is in Aveyron because we're doing some intense research with my Dad on the ground there with a fluent ability with French and it's STILL taking a very long time to find all the local resources that we're looking for. We'll take care of all that for our clients!

We're thinking that 5-8 guests at a time is ideal, depending on the week's activities.

Some marketing ideas that have come up:
* Play up the health of our trips. Not only will people be outdoors exercising nearly every day, but will be eating healthy, local, fresh French food. (Not to mention the heart-healthy French red wines, right?!)
* Green business/eco-travel. Now, no-one flying in a passenger airplane to Europe is going to be completely green, but we plan to emphasize a 'take only pictures, leave only footprints' philosophy. Once we buy a place, we'll make every effort to renovate using green building principles (which we'd do anyway...we want our kids raised as chemical-free as we can manage). And the local food thing is green as well as yummy and healthy.

Advertising ideas have ranged from taking advantage of social networking, registering our trips with existing companies, and making a table of info to take to travel shows. We're relying at the moment on word-of-mouth to get up and going. After our trip in September we'll have a lot more information and something more tangible to market, so we'll aim to really push advertising then.

Again, if you have an idea, feedback, comment, just make use of the 'comment' box below. We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks,
The MacCs