March at Le Shack

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on Sunday March 15^th 2026.

We passed a milestone on Wednesday of this week. We said a sad goodbye to our old campervan.

It’s been three years since we decided to no longer use it, three years of getting around mainly by bike and train with a hire car for the odd week if we need it, and it has looked more forlorn with each passing year. The tyres and batteries have gone flat, the paint is dull, rust is spreading and the mice and spiders have turned the inside into a film set for a ghost movie. We’ve been thinking for a while that we should do something about getting rid of it, but Storm Nils came along a few weeks ago and made the decision easier. Winds gusting up to 146km per hour picked up the van shelter and threw it to one side as if it was made of balsa wood. Unfortunately, with the whole of the field to land in, it decided to fall on our hire car, carefully parked to be free of any falling trees.

We only had this hire car because, whilst we were feeling better after our coughing bug, we were still not well enough to cycle everywhere for our food. The irony was that we were supposed to take it back that day, but had delayed because of the storm. The same storm felled a tree right across the entrance to the field so we couldn’t get out at all, adding insult to injury. But it could have been worse. The wooden uprights of the shelter were set in concrete buried in the ground but the wind picked them up and tossed one of them 10 metres away. It was so heavy that Michael could barely move it by rolling it, let alone pick it up. If that had landed on the hire car, the damage would have been even worse. Nature is terrifying when it lets rip.

With the van no longer protected by the shelter, it seemed like a sign for us to commit to getting rid of it. We have many happy memories of camping trips, but it was time for it to go. And the wood from the shelter is being recycled into a bench.

March and April are some of the loveliest months at Le Shack. The weather is warming up so we can sit and work outside and the garden is at its best at this time of year. The daffodils are out, the bluebells are on the way, the plum blossom is a joy to behold as are the pollinating insects that swarm upon it, the wildflowers are poking up in the hedgerow and each day more green leaves appear on the trees.

The pond is full of newts and salamanders and yesterday I actually watched the resident grass snake eat a newt, a bit of a David Attenborough moment. Or at least I think it was a newt as I just saw the back legs disappearing. It was pure luck that I saw a flicker of movement. It was so well camouflaged that I would not have seen it otherwise, just its head poking above the water, the rest of it completely submerged.

It’s interesting to note that my feelings about the seasons are changing since we moved to France. Back in Wales, I always enjoyed spring and autumn, but it was the summer I longed for, the long days, warm sunshine and blue skies, when they deigned to appear. Summers on the continent, and in the UK, have been getting hotter and certainly down south they are too hot for me. A summer rarely goes by without it reaching, and even exceeding, 40 degrees, a figure that used to be the exception rather than the norm. And so I find that spring and autumn, the shoulder seasons, have become my favourite time of year. Great for gardening, for cycling, for walking and for sitting outside with a cup of tea and a slice of home-made cake. Heaven.

We normally head back to the boat late April but this year holds uncertainty for us. Our Brexit card, which allows us to live here, comes up for renewal in June. It should be a formality so we won’t have to provide the usual mountain of paperwork, but it will require two visits to our prefecture in Pau, 47 kilometres each way on a bike. Our initial application can be sent in the post next month and then we have to wait to be notified of our first appointment, where we take in our passports etc and also receive a vital document that will allow us to travel abroad while our replacement card is still being processed. Sod’s law says that if we head back to the boat to begin our season as usual, that first appointment will arrive when we are miles away. And the same applies for the second meeting, where we get our new card, and which is quite likely to be after our card expires in June. It will be costly to keep coming and going for these meetings, plus we will have to leave Olivia Rose somewhere and summer moorings are expensive. We can’t get our heads around it and so, as there is no obvious way forward, we are going to do nothing for a while, just send the forms in and delay going back for a bit in the hope that something will be sorted sooner rather than later Of course this is France and things sometimes move slowly but even if it disrupts our year somewhat it is a price worth paying because it means we can stay here.

So that’s it for now. We have quite a few cycling trips planned as the weather is getting warmer so the next blog will hopefully be back out on the road and heading towards the Med!

Hope all is well with you and see you soon.

MJ