It was wonderful having the house as the weather had hit a bit of a cold patch, and we were waking to ice on the inside of the truck windows, we had no power so couldn't turn the hotwater on to help with warmth, and the truck isn't equipped with heating. It was now too cold to stay in the truck we couldn't get warm and it was damp from all the condensation.
While at Jackie and Nick's we emptied the truck and sorted all our stuff into, give aways, going home in freight, take with us home, and a sell pile. We had a tremendous amount of stuff accumulated........ and so I spent the next few days scouting around finding cardboard boxes and tape and trying to find a company on-line who could ship our things back to NZ. This filled our time pretty much, other than we had been invited to join a large group of friends of Nick and Jackie's for New Years Eve celebrations at a local restaurant.
Again we were warmly welcomed into the fold, many of the people we had met previously but there were also quite a few we hadn't. Despite a number being solely French speaking we found enough ex-pats who were happy to chat away to us in English, and so we had a very pleasant time. Some of the guests drank far too much and behaved in a way that I may have done 20 or more years ago, but (am usually) way beyond now, so that was a bit of a low, and to tell the truth the food was very average so that was a disappointment especially at 70 euro a head!! however Hilary had a nice time with some other children at a lovely house, watching movies and enjoying English conversation. Also some of the adults joined them at midnight (we didn't realise or we would have gone too) and let off fireworks to see in the New Year. Unfortunately the festivities were halted when 4 gendarmes arrived at the door and said the neighbours cars were in the line of fire and could they please desist. The kids enjoyed that as much as the fireworks I think.
We booked into a hotel in Fontainebleau (20kms from Milly) because none of the local hotels had vacancies, but that meant we were quite remote. At least it was on a main train line to Paris, and only 2 minutes walk to the station, and two in the other direction to a supermarket.
Fontainebleau/Avon scenesWe hung around the local area and did quite a bit of relaxing at the hotel while we waited to hear about the computer and truck repairs, having sent all the information we could to the insurance assessor (but it wasn't enough). Jackie thankfully managed to get the necessary papers from the garage who sold us the truck in the first place, and she arranged them to be sent off to the assessor. Of course the next thing was that he needed to look at the truck again (of course, he hadn't looked at it properly the first time!!!) and so we had to make the drive all the way to Arpajon again, a further 20 kms each way this time.
When we got there (we were told 10 o'clock) it was 0945 and he had already been and gone again (the assessor)- of course the woman only spoke French but we tried our best to convey our frustration to her and said we needed to see him. She tried to phone him, and told us (we thought) that he would come back at one o'clock. We were a bit miffed as that left us 2 and 1/2 hours to fill in, but thought we could probably manage that in the town itself, so drove back there to occupy ourselves.
We got back to the garage at 1230 and there was no sign of anyone, the gates were bolted and a sign said closed until 2pm for lunch.
Finally at 2pm people arrived back and we went in. The garage guy said the assessor had asked him to take some more photos of the damage, so he took some photos of the front of the truck. I said, the damage is underneath too, have a look. He indicated his instructions were only to look at the front damage and nothing else. We were really cross at the thought of wasting more time, and so phoned Jackie again to ask her to check out what was going on. It turned out that apparently the office woman had told us the assessor would be back in one hour, not at one o'clock (I checked with her at the time, but obviously the language difference meant we were both hearing different things and meaning different things.) The garage guy told Jackie it would be at least 4 weeks before they could get parts and that would just be the front panels.
We were very cross because we knew a lot more than that needed doing before we could sell it, and time was passing with nothing happening.
Thankfully Jackie spent the next week chasing them up and eventually got the garage to agree to take the truck and get it properly assessed, and that we would leave it there until it was fixed. It may as well have been, we couldn't use it for sleeping as it was too cold, and we had received a letter from the insurance company saying the truck was no longer road-worthy and could not be driven (though they had asked us to take it to Arpajon three times!!!!) and we had driven it for thousands of kms!!!! Talk about crazy!!!
So Jackie and I took the truck up to arpajon again, and left it there. We weren't really expecting them to say they would take it then, so it was a mad rush to take all the rest of our things out and we didn't get the chance to say goodbye and thanks for having us......
Jackie tells us, they have said it will be ready this week, but we fly out in a day, I have no idea what has been fixed and what hasn't, I'm a bit scared to ask, because we need to sell it as soon as we can, and get as much money for it as possible, and goodness knows what state it is in.
Jackie has offered to do the rest of the running around for us but we don't want it to be a pain, it's enough that she has been our spokespeson and helped us out so much already.
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