In defense of Lodeve

Sometimes I get down on Lodeve. But it's not so bad really.

Lodeve has its drawbacks, but it is in a spectacularly beautiful part of france. At the confluence of two rivers, just between where the plains meet the high plateau, less than an hour to the Mediterranean, less than an hour to the mountains. Wild land. Wet and dry. Figs and lemons and olives and roses in the same place. Really cool. So I guess that's one thing that draws us to it, not so much the town per se, but the whole surroundings. When you're up in that house, it's like you're removed from everything anyway. But for daytripping, there are mountains and sea and poppyfields and irises and lakes and vineyards and grass. It's amazing around here, and somehow these attractions keep convincing us to outweigh our problems with the town itself.

Lots -- way way too many -- brits and germans and dutch and belgians buy holiday houses here. They love it. And though I don't, it's not hellish, certainly.

Also, I keep having to remind myself that we're only planning on staying 3-5 years here. And we're not planning on necessarily selling when we go. Then we'd keeping the place for friends and summers and future fun. So a cottagey place is certainly lower maintenance than the sprawling barn we had originally planned on. And when we leave someday, we'd get at least 1000 dollars a month rent for it :)

We also have to keep in mind that his zone of France is in the sunshine belt. Any closer to the sea, and the prices shoot way up, as we've seen. Any farther inland gets more rain and is colder in winter. We've seen other properties online, an what few of them are in the price range are in the sno-zone. So there has to be some compromise, I guess.

And the things I miss in Lodeve itself are available nearby. It may seem like a pain to drive half an hour to another town for a better saturday market... but that's how far away Whole Foods is in Chicago, and that never seemed like a big deal. So, really, though perhaps not in walking distance, everything is available here.

Another consideration: there is the opportunity to spend vasts amount of money here. But we want a project, not an easy go of it. We could find a huge dirt cheap place in the middle of a forest, or a tiny expensive place in the center of a city. This is right in between; a touch of country in the town. Plus the cheaper our starting point, the more money we have to pour into making it supercool, not to mention other projects down the line when the France life is over.

It's a big tricky knot.