House #12: Yup, that's a ruin

Christine was a nice enough estate agent. But a bit strange. Not that that matters, after all, we must seem pretty strange ourselves, driving around the French countryside with our 2-year-old examinging piles of rubble. But she was strange too. Maybe it was the fact that, here in full springtime she wore a huge quilted down coat reaching all the way to her feet like a giant nylon sleeved comforter. Maybe it was the way she kept sniffing and rubbing her nose, as though everything around her stank, and made huge boogers well up within her sinuses aching to be picked. Maybe it was her tendency to be a nervous passenger, clinging for dear life to the passenger door handle around even the mildest of turnings, and actually bringing her to specifically verbally correct my driving style on more than one occasion. (A little rich, I thought, considering that the reason we were driving her in the first place was that her license had been revoked). But still, friendly. We chatted. We passed the time during our beautiful drive out into the middle of godforsaken nowhere, past cows and grass and cows and grass and cows. And pylons. To our next property.

A beautiful little hamlet. le Viala de Dourdou. Say that ten times fast. But pretty enough. Everything built of gorgeous red rock. Local stone full of iron. Set on a hilltop overlooking the farmland vista. The nearest shop and school were way down the hill but even so, this was a very chaming little hamlet.

The house itself was very pretty red stone too.

It was a small thing, though. One big door on one floor, and one little door on another...

...with one room inside each. And in ruins. Here's the view of me looking in through the bottom door, through a hole in the floor as viewed from the top door:

No doubt this could have been made into something spectactular. The creepy perfect-english-speaking overly-talkative next-door-neighbor-lady said that her beautiful house wasn't in much better shape when she had bought it. "And no," she added (didn't I say she was creepy?), "it's not for sale."

The house's garden was very nice and green.

...but not nice and green enough to sell us on a tiny stone box with a creepy neighbor in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.

And so we got back into our car -- Christine very nervously so -- for the drive to our final property of the day.