Barney & Lauri's Burgundy & Beyond Adventure

Just a couple days left, and Lauri and I will be taking off with a one way ticket to Paris. What we know is that there should be a Peugeot waiting for us at the airport, – I am excited about our new French car! After a couple days with Werner & Nathalie in a suburb of Paris, we will drive southeast.

What we don’t know, is where we are moving to. To find that place, will have to be part of our adventure. We know that we want to find a place in Burgundy. Whether it will be Dijon, the vibrant capital of Burgundy, or Autun, the beautiful and sleepy old Roman town in the Moravian hills, will have to be determined.

To determine the winner of this game of line pulling, we’re staying the first week in Autun and the second week in Dijon, hoping to find the right apartment for us in either one of these places.

This will have to do for now, as we still have a lot of other things to take care of first, besides learning how to blog and post…

A bientôt

Friday November 3rd 2023, Emmerich Germany

Sorry guys. Maybe in a very bright moment, when the stars align right, I’ll figure out how to get rid of the annoying template features of this posting site, …. like “Donate”, or our “Latest Trips to Laos…”. We’ll have to live with this for now, but I think it is time for a new post:

Thank you Tracy & Denys for taking care of us for the last two nights in the US and bringing us to PDX!

After a smooth flight, we landed in Paris with our 4 suitcases and bicycle box. My cousin’s wife Nathalie picked us up with a smile and got us to the place where we could pick up our brand new Peugeot rental car. 

For 2 nights we stayed at Werner’s & Nathalie’s place in Quincy-Voisins, a suburb east of Paris. We were so exhausted that we slept right through our jet lag/time adjustment. Thank you Werner & Nathalie!! Werner works for American Airlines at CDG and brought over 4 suitcases for us in August. Nathalie owns a cute little lunch restaurant in the neighboring town of Meaux . A couple of years ago, their son Axel stayed at our house for a couple of month and went to WF West. 

After sorting through our 8 suitcases of luggage and packing what we wanted to take with us to Burgundy, we left my cousin’s place and drove to Autun on Oct 4th. Our one week stay at the very quiet and nice VRBO in the old part of Autun provided us the perfect recovery.

Autun, the old Roman town with its beautiful medieval centre ville, magnificent cathedral, and picturesque setting next to the rolling hills of the Morvan, felt again like the perfect place for our French adventure.

We spent one day visiting Bibracte, the 2000 plus year old Gaulish hill top town on Mont  Beuvray in the Parc Naturel Regional du Movran. This old ring fortress with all its archeological digs and museum was even more interesting than the Roman amphitheater, gates, and digs in Autun. Lots of ancient history in that region! A place where Asterix and Obelix, the famous French comics, come alive! 

We booked a VRBO for one week in Autun, and one for one week in Dijon to determine which town we’d prefer, yet, as it turned out, personal preference of location was a non issue. In Autun there simply was hardly anything available in terms of rental apartments or houses, and clearly nothing that we were willing to rent. So after a very enjoyable time in Autun, we drove the 70 minutes to Dijon, expecting to find lots of interesting properties to rent.

We lucked out with another great VRBO within walking distance of downtown Dijon, yet during our first week in Dijon, from the few interesting sounding properties on the market, we did not find a single apartment or house for rent that we liked enough to apply for. That even included a nice apartment just below the birthplace of my name saint, St.Bernard, in the picturesque old village center of Fontaine – les – Dijon, a suburb of Dijon, since despite it’s meant to be sainthood, the apartment didn’t offer any storage space for my bicycle…..

Prior to our move to France, we often stated that we were lucky to not have deadlines for finding a place, and if nothing materialized, we could fall back onto family and friends in Germany to wait until the right property became available, yet we didn’t really anticipate that this is exactly how it would turn out. 

On Oct 18th we left Dijon and visited our friends Joachim & Antje Olleck-Zillich in Weilburg Germany, before heading to my brother Ulrich’s place in my home town of Emmerich. Ulrich is a watchmaker master like my father, and took over my father’s store and house. We are fortunate that this is still our Kreutz Family home base, a place where all of us 6 siblings can gather to visit and feel connected to home.  

While in Dijon, we learned that one of the apartments we were interested in could not be viewed for several days and we made an appointment for viewing at the next available date in the afternoon of Monday Oct 23rd. That apartment looked somewhat interesting on the website, and after receiving the actual address information, the location, in a quiet part of the old city center of Dijon, certainly appeared promising. With no other promising properties listed on the web, we were however wondering, whether it made sense to drive for 7 hours back to Dijon to look at only one apartment.

Here are a couple pictures from Emmerich with the Rhine, and s’Heerenberg castle, a couple miles from Emmerich across the Dutch border.

Trying to be optimistic that the apartment might be worth the drive, and/or some other options might show up in the next couple of days, we left Emmerich Germany on Sunday morning Oct 22nd and headed for Dijon. Fortunately our beloved VRBO was still available. A benefit for being here in the off season. Surfing the web in search of other options on Monday morning, I found two other promising places. One was a spacious house with big garden, porch, garage and shop in a quiet neighborhood and within walking distance of the center of Autun, and the other was a nice looking, partly furnished apartment in the center of Dijon. 

…. And then, we visited the apartment we drove back to Dijon for, and Lauri and I were blown away! The apartment was way more beautiful and better suited than we anticipated based on the web posting. That evening, with no hesitation, we emailed our application for the apartment to the property management agent we were working with.

The followingTuesday morning, Sylvie, our personable and outgoing VRBO host, had arranged for us to visit an old, small house that friends of hers were willing to rent out. So all of a sudden, we had multiple interesting prospects! However, Sylvie’s friend house turned out to be too outdated and run down and the newly listed, partly furnished apartment in the center of Dijon was located in a noisy, very busy neighborhood, with a jazz club on the first floor and several cafes etc close by. The spacious house in Autun was not to be available until January 10th, with a very uncooperative property management company that made you wonder whether they were actually looking for tenants. 

On Wednesday morning, coming out of Piscine Olympic, a top notch 50 meter City of Dijon pool, we received an email from the property management agent that the apartment owners of the apartment we applied for, had accepted our application package to rent the apartment at “4 Rue Chancelier de l’Hospital”. We were thrilled! Hurray! This is an apartment that we are both excited about about renting, and we got it, despite our our worries that our application package with US income documents, etc. likely looks unfamiliar and riskier to French property owners than typical French employed rental candidates in this competitive Dijon rental market.

That positive news made for a great Wednesday, and it got even better when one of my friends from Germany sent me a WhatsApp that the sixth stage of the 2024 Tour de France will end in Dijon, and the seventh stage, a ITT (i.e. individual time trial for you non-bycicle racing enthusiasts) will be located just a couple miles south of Dijon. – How can it get any better?

On Thursday Oct 26th, we again left Dijon for Emmerich Germany. There was nothing we could do in Dijon, except to wait for the processing of the rental agreement and other procedural steps in the rental process. During the next couple of days in Emmerich we were busy on the web with setting up and finalizing our rental arrangements. We’ve become very appreciative and reliant on Google Translate. Our process has been especially challenging because of the Catch 22 we’re in – we can’t get a bank account without an address, we can’t get rental insurance (which is required) without a bank account, we can’t get the keys after the required inventory meeting (which we have Monday the 6th) without rental insurance. We finally have a plan in place that looks like it’s going to work.

While in Emmerich we also made an appointment with the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, – the equivalent to the US SSA. Both, Lauri & I paid into this German SSA while working in Germany for a few years during the 80s. More administrative paperwork, documentation etc for us, yet with the prospect that the effort will likely cover a couple nice French dinners in the future, makes it worthwhile. 

On Friday Nov 3rd we received our signed rental agreement for our Dijon apartment, and the realization settled in, that our dream of living in Burgundy France was indeed becoming a reality! As you can imagine, we have been on a rollercoaster of emotions over the last weeks of rental hunting!

The approx. 7 hour drive between Dijon and Emmerich, over Luxembourg, through the Ardennes and Liege is becoming familiar to us. In the 70’s I made several kayaking trips in the Ardennes, and in 1984 I worked as a timber faller only a few miles to the east in Germany, across the Belgian border, so it is fun reading a lot of familiar names of towns and rivers while driving the freeway through the Ardennes. We also like, and very much appreciate the French freeways. Yes, they are toll roads and limited to 130 km/h, yet the smooth tarmac and frequent, free and clean rest areas are great and very convenient. Besides, we both very much love our turbo diesel Peugeot station wagon. It handles well, is fun to drive, feels very solid and well built and looks great. Over the 3,000 km we’ve so far driven, we averaged 4.5 Liter/100 km or, to express it in familiar US fashion: We’ve averaged 52 mpg! …. did I mention I like our Peugeot?