Well here I go with my first post and I thought I would take this opportunity to tell all those I know about the events of the last week...which has been the most unbelievable roller coaster of events, disasters and emotions, all in the name of travel.

I have always loved travelling and since I met Brad I have managed to transfer the travel bug to him also. Unfortunately travel generally involves spending money, and seeing as we don't actually have any to speak of, this has been a cause of immense frustration to us. However, we have never given up feeling that somehow, some way we can get to travel despite this fact. We finally thought we may have found the answer a few weeks back...housesitting/petcare for people who are going away and need someone to stay at their house. There are lots of agencies that put would-be housesitters in touch with people who need to find a home/pet carer and vacancies are available all over the world. For the price of your airticket and some good marketing of yourself plus references you can see the world.

When my parents and I went to live in South Africa for a year, we had a couple who came to stay in our house on this same basis. The relationship was great...they got to stay in a lovely house in the countryside free of charge for a year, and we got a secure house and cheaper insurance whilst we were away. Excellent! No burglars, dead houseplants or burst pipes for us and a spacious rent-free home for them.

So Brad and I joined a couple of housesitting websites a few weeks back, spent ages designing our advert, included pictures of ourselves and explanations of how carefully and responsibly we would view the task of caring for someone else's home and pets, and waited to see what would happen. I didn't hold out too much hope of offers as there were literally hundreds of other adverts, but the very next afternoon I got a phonecall from a lady in France....

Would we like to come and stay in her beautiful home in Southern France for 3.5 weeks whilst she went to Canada for a family wedding? She said she lived in a lovely converted mill beside a river in a national park. There were 3 bedrooms, a garden, full use of her laptop with internet connection, satellite TV, and a balcony overlooking the river. In return we would care for her little terrier dog and feed her two cats. She was a vicar's wife for 20 years, could supply references and was looking for someone who she could use in the future again if required.

Errr, would we like to??? Yes please! We had many phone conversations with her over the next 3 weeks, during which time she enthused about everything, from the peaceful area, the beauty of the surroundings, the local food, the lovely house she lived in etc etc. Finally after 3 days of organising medication, packing and tying up loose ends, we boarded our flight last Thursday headed for Toulouse. Ahead lay 3 and a half weeks of peace, sunshine and rest. I planned to use the time to catch up on all my Open University work whilst sitting in the garden and also continuing to work on the LLTGL campaign. Brad planned to spend his days experimenting with French cooking and searching the local markets for the freshest ingredients.

We should have known that a disaster was on the horizon the minute we arrived at the hotel on the first night. We had decided that we would stay over near Toulouse the night we arrived and then make the 90 minute journey to the house fresh the next day. We had booked it through Expedia and it was guaranteed for late arrival. At 10.15pm we turned up, parked and proceeded to reception. The door was locked. Reception was closed. Hmmm, interesting style of hotelier welcome that. I was wondering why there was a cash point outside reception when Brad helpfully pointed out that it was an automated check-in system for use after 10pm. All you had to do was enter your reservation number or the credit card that you had used for your booking. Simple!

It didn't like the booking reference number. It didn't like any of the 10,000 numbers we keyed in that we found in various parts of our printed booking confirmation. Nor did it like our credit card. We put it in the machine, it thought about it for 3 seconds, and then it emphatically spat it out half way across the car park. I could almost hear the distain in its voice "Ze English credite card huh? Phuuuf! C'est disgusting!" Every time we pushed it in, it shot it back out across the car park with greater force.

OK, so it was now it was 11pm, we were in the suburb of a foreign city and we had nowhere to stay. Plan B was called for and we set off to find another hotel. For some bizarre reason most hotels seemed to have locked their doors and turned out all the lights at about 9pm and the only ones open clearly saw two rather exhausted looking foreigners desperate for sleep and decided to quote £100 for a basic motorway motel room. Finally at nearly midnight we arrived at the last possibility..."Ad Cyber" motel. I instantly liked it due to the fact that despite its location in an industrial park it clearly had aspirations....blue fake wooden shutters and even fake blue wooden balconies for surveying the various industrial plants of the area.

We rang the bell and a man in his pyjamas came pottering out to open the door to reception. Clearly the French like to get to bed early, since not only was he in his pyjamas and slippers but I could see through the open door beside reception that he actually had a full bedroom out the back and had just been climbing into bed when we arrived. Thankfully he had rooms available and we were shown to probably the smallest room I have ever stayed in. But it was clean and it had a bed so we really didn't care.

We got up early the following day (Friday) and headed for our paradise home for the next 3.5 weeks. We had arranged to phone Anita (lady who owned the house) from the nearby village, from where she would give us directions to her house. On arrival at the village we started to wonder if we had arrived at the right place. Anita had described it to us as a vibrant place, with plenty of shops and activity. Yet we were in what appeared to be a ghost town....the only traffic in the ten minutes we were there was a solitary tractor and the only shop we could see was a closed pharmacy. If a tumbleweed had gently drifted across the market square the image would have been complete. There was no mobile signal either and we struggled to use the payphone. Finally we got through to Anita and she gave us directions to her house, saying she would meet us on the bridge at the end of her road.

You get images of people from chatting to them on the phone. Brad and I had discussed what we thought Anita looked like. Both of us basically held the image that you would have of a vicar's wife....grey curly hair, hands weathered from years of baking Victoria sponge cakes for the church fete, probably a pinny on from where she had just taken a break from making some nice strawberry jam, quiet and neat, etc etc.

Our first view of Anita blew all that away. For a start I would expect a vicar's wife to have at least bothered to put a bra on to meet her new housesitters, rather than just a flimsy white t shirt, the oldest pair of green terry towelling leggings in the history of the world and dirty slippers. And she was not of the proportions we were expecting either. She was rather...erm...huge, to put it mildly. Anyway, I convinced myself that you should never judge a book by its cover and tried to assure myself that everything was going to be just fine. We squeezed Anita in the car and set off down the road.

When we got out the car, the first thing I noticed was the smell. And unpleasant smells were something that was going to feature highly about this place. I wasn't sure exactly where the smell was coming from, but it was undeniably disgusting. Poo. Never an enticing smell and a long way off from our image of freshly baked bread.

Climbing up the steps to the entrance to the house we got our first glimse of the raised terrace/balcony that we had heard so much about from Anita. It was covered in dog shite. Nice. Little squished piles of it dotted around, offsetting the attractive furniture of the balcony which consisted off an old broken TV, and a pile of rubbish with flies around it and an huge old dog bone.

Stepping into the main house from the terrace was also an eye-opener. There was just one main room. In the middle was a large table, there were a couple of sideboards and a bed with an grubby old blanket on it. A door at the back of the room opened onto an incredibly basic and tatty kitchen, off which was a bathroom which we were advised "whatever you do, don't look in the toilet"......Oh dear Lord, this was a nightmare!!!! A tiny set of stone steps led from the main room down. We squeezed down these after Anita and found ourselves in a dark, cellar-like place. There we saw our "bedroom"...a cold, dark space with nothing but two unmade beds and a chest of drawers. Beside it was a small room with just a toilet and a tiny sink, again dark and cold.

Our entire image of our holiday had disappeared in less than 5 minutes. Returning upstairs I clung to the hope that the garden would be gorgeous and that at least we could minimise the time spent inside. But I couldn't see a garden, and when I enquired Anita simply pointed towards a miniscule patch of overgrown and boggy ground that was pretty much just the verge of the road. And everywhere was that unmistakable smell of crap. Crap was clearly the highlight of the local area, as it was everywhere. The toilet was covered in it, the terrace was covered in it, the man next door had a great stinking pile of it by his house. And it was cold....SO cold! I had asked before we accepted the house-sit if there was central heating in the house and had been told there was. It now appeared that this was a big fat lie. The house was freezing even at midday. There was an open fire which gave me some hope, until Anita informed us that she had no firewood and wouldn't be ordering us any as she couldn't see why we would need it..... after all, she said, I could always wrap a blanket around myself if necessary.

It was fast becoming apparent that Anita was not the sort of person we had expected. She was very selfish and talked only about herself and her own interests. She never asked us anything about ourselves and although she already knew about my CF, she only talked about her own assorted ailments. She was mad about history and I nearly fell asleep during her lengthy discourses on things that I had no clue what she was on about. Some guy called Henry Smith who led an army in the 1700's and some historic debate about the existence of a hexidecimal universe seemed to make regular appearances and I was rapidly growing exhausted.

Neither Brad nor I knew how to deal with this situation and were swept along being terribly British about everything, acting as if we were totally non-plussed by it all and as if this was the sort of place we were invited every day. But inside I was dying...there was no way I could spend nearly a month here. There wasn't even any living room furniture to sit on (other than the grubby bed), she informed us that the TV didn't work, there was no garden to sit in, and no furniture to sit out on the balcony on (even if we had been able to remove the dog poo everywhere). The more Anita talked the worse it got. It was to be expected, she said, that the dog would mess itself everywhere in the house. She hoped we liked dead things as the cats would deposit plenty of them inside for us. There were no local markets anywhere in the area and very little to see or do.

I gritted my teeth and used the toilet (not pleasant) but realised that since the sink was full of books it was unlikely it ever got used. I asked Anita if there was any soap I could use but she said she had none "though you can always buy some". Fab. She showed us the pantry which she had said she would stock up for our arrival. It appeared that "stocking up" had consisted of buying 6 small bottles of UHT milk. Her We went out onto the balcony to get some air. I was busy trying to steer brad around the dog poos but Anita seemed less fazed and happily walked through them in her slippers and back into the house. I was panicking inside. I felt totally trapped in this hell hole and I knew that once Anita flew off tomorrow we would be marooned here in this freezing cold and utterly miserable stinky hovel for almost a month..unable to leave because of the animals needing our care. But I had no idea what to do about it and the longer the time that we tried to pretend everything was fine, the more impossible it was ever going to be to escape.

Finally I felt exhausted and went for a lie down. The bed was unmade but Anita had left us a thin duvet and a duvet cover out for us to make the bed up ourselves. There was no sheet to go over the mattress and when Brad asked she said she didn't have one, though with persuasion we eventually managed to find a single sheet that covered a portion of it. I lay in the dark, freezing cold and damp cellar room and cried my eyes out. This was an utter nightmare and I couldn't see any way out of it. I haven't self-harmed now for some time but suddenly I felt the overwhelming desire to cut myself again and I was frightened that all the progress I had made was going to dissolve into nothing. I couldn't escape. We had her animals to look after. She was going away. We had agreed to this. But then at the same time, a housesitting is supposed to be a mutually beneficial experience. There has to be something that the housesitter gains in return for a month of responsibility and petcare! What was in this for us? Why did I feel I had to allow my physical and mental health to go under just so that this woman wasn't inconvenienced? She clearly couldn't care less about us after all. She wouldn't even buy us any firewood. She had lied about everything. She couldn't even be bothered to get us some bed sheets or soap. In a months time I would be a wreck and for what?

I now knew I had to get out and I was going to get out of this somehow. I got up, pulled myself together long enough to suggest that Brad and I went for a walk to explore the local countryside, and escaped the house. Once out of eyesight I broke down and sobbed. Thankfully Brad said he had also decided that there was absolutely no way he was going to allow us to stay there. Apart from the fact that he himself couldn't stomach the idea of being there, he said he hadn't got me this far over the last few years to watch it all disappear in a puff of smoke.

The problem was Anita clearly wasn't the sort of woman we could discuss our feelings with and we just knew from her manner that she would have gone ballistic if we had tried to back out now. But we needed to work out how to extricate ourselves. I was utterly serious in suggesting to Brad that I should accidently-on-purpose fall off the balcony and break my leg! I think that was an indication of just how desperate I was. I really would have done it too if necessary! Strangely enough though, Brad thought this wasn't the wisest suggestion I'd ever had....

I rang my Mum and at the sound of her voice I disappeared into an incoherent panic attack, unable to breathe or speak through my crying. When Brad managed to explain things to her, she was adamant too, we had to get out. Between the three of us we formulated a plan. We would return to the house and tell Anita that we had received a phonecall whilst out saying that my Mum had been in an accident and we needed to fly home. The fact that my face was already red and puffy would even help to add to the plausability of this excuse. I don't like the idea of lying, especially over something so serious, but we were now into survival mode.

We returned to the house and explained thie "situation" to Anita. She was more interested in the mess this left her in to be honest. She immediately started to make phonecalls to her friends and couldn't even be bothered to offer a cup of tea to someone apparently in "shock"! I was actually glad in a way...it proved what I already knew, that her interest in us was over once we were no longer useful to her. I didn't feel at all guilty that we had lied to her. At one point when Brad was supposedly phoning the hospital to find out how my Mum was, she even said "so this is my quiet and responsible house-sitting couple?!".....like people who are quiet and responsible don't have families to think of. I felt like turning to her and saying "so this is the stunningly beautiful 3-bedroomed converted mill with a garden, central heating and satellite TV is it?"

Within an hour we were packed and out of there and I have never felt so much relief in my life. All I cared about was that I was back out in the sunlight and could breathe without wanting to vomit from the smell. And we were FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!! We had no idea where we were going to stay but none of that mattered, the world suddenly seemed the most wonderful place again. We drove all the way back to Toulouse and decided to spoil ourselves totally by booking into the Holiday Inn. I couldn't believe the contrast with where we had been only hours earlier. Everything was so clean! There were crisp white sheets on the bed and not a dog poo in sight! We ran the biggest bubble bath ever and sank into it with a sigh of relief.

The plan had been to get home as soon as possible, as we simply didn't have the money to spend time holidaying here, even if it had been a place we would have wanted to explore further (which Toulouse wasn't!) However a check on the internet showed that it would cost us a whopping £200 each to return by Easyjet to the UK. Considering the costs so far incurred of the hotel accomodation, return flights already booked and the 4 weeks of car hire booked (which was non-refundable) this simply wasn't an option. We would have to find somewhere cheap to stay for at least a week until the flight prices dropped.

The next day we found an advert for accomodation in a small studio in the garden of a British couples' house. We rang them and booked it. It turned out to be the size of a garden shed, consisting of one room with a bed and kitchenette, but it was nicely decorated and very clean so we were happy. The owners advised that since it was Sunday the following day, we would need to get to the supermarket before it closed. We spent an hour in the supermarket, stocking up with a week's worth of food, and drove back so I could have a sleep whilst Brad made some dinner. Just after we got back, the owners called by to say they were going away for the evening and would return tomorrow lunch-time, but there was a contact phone number incase of any problems.

That was at 7.30pm. At 8 pm, just as it was getting dark, all the electricity went off. At first we thought it might be a power cut, but soon realised that there were lights in neighbouring houses in the area. Brad spent ages checking fuse boxes and looking for trip switches but couldn't find any source for the problem. At 9 pm it was pitch dark and cold. He phoned the owners but there was no answer at the contact number. We now had no dinner, no heating and no hot water. Plus all the new food in the fridge was going to start warming up. Fantastic.

We finally decided we would have to eat out, despite the fact we were in the middle of nowhere and hadn't a clue where to find a restaurant. We had also forgotten that our first night's lesson had taught us that the French like to go to bed early and that everything would therefore be closing by now. Finally we managed to find one open pizza restaurant and made it inside on the condition we ordered quickly before the chef left at 10pm.

Then back to the garden shed which was by now utterly in darkness. Being in the countryside there weren't even street lights to add a glow. We soon realised that it was lighter and also slightly warmer outside than inside and sat huddled in the garden in a blanket drinking a bottle of red wine and trying to laugh about the last few days. It was so cold overnight that I hardly slept and the next day we still had no heat, light or hot water. It must be a British thing, but in a situation like that you really start to crave a nice hot cup of tea! Eventually at nearly Midday, Brad finally managed to get hold of the owners who came back within half an hour and switched the electricity back on from inside the main house. Unfortunately by then all the food in the fridge had warmed up and the whole lot had to be binned, leaving us with no food on a Sunday when there are no shops open.

France was rapidly losing any morsel of appeal that had been left from our encounter with Anita. And on top of that my chest infection was getting worse and I was feeling very rough. I was so cross that the hospital had refused me the IV's I knew I needed before we went away. We tried to find things to do over the next few days but the area just seemed dead and everything was extortionately expensive. The people seemed as cold as the weather and the garden shed was becoming claustrophobic. Finally on the Sunday afternoon we found an internet cafe. The keyboards were Greek which proved interesting when trying to type as the only characters that could be typed without using the ALT or SHIFT keys were Greek and the letters were not arranged in the QWERTY fashion but in a seemingly random manner by some drunkard after a night out. However it was contact with the rest of the world and I could even email Emily (with a great deal of concentration and a few random Greek letters thrown in). We also found an alternative flight home, leaving two days later on the Wednesday with FlyBe. Within in 5 minutes it was booked and we felt so much better just knowing that getting home was only 72 hours away!

And so here I am, back home and enjoying the space of a whole house again. It doesn't seem like only a week since we flew to France, it seems about a month has gone by! At least it's made me appreciate what we have more...a clean spacious house, our own garden, telephone and internet connections, familiar surroundings, etc. But it hasn't dampened our travel bug so I'm sure we will be itching to go abroad again very soon. Only this time we are going to be SOOOO careful about where we are heading for! Until then I'm concentrating on resting to recover from the exhaustions of the last week, trying to catch up with all my Open Uni work and getting my chest better. After that, who knows?!