Going places

Well, not really. Not very far anyway. I had a call yesterday afternoon from Sebastien, the tree man, that he would like to do the job today. That meant that in order to give his team plenty of access, I needed to move my caravan and all my other stuff out of the way, so I had to get moving straight away.

I’ve had my eye on a spot at the bottom of my land right from the very beginning so that’s where I decided to move to. I had no idea how long it would take and it was the end of the evening before I got everything down there.

I was up bright and early expecting Sebastien’s team to make an early start and I was right. There’s a little deer that I see most mornings who comes onto the fields on either side of my land for her breakfast. She doesn’t seem to be too worried by my presence so long as I stay at a distance and I’m hoping that she’ll continue doing so in future as she gets to know me. Here are some shots of my new location that I took this morning.

However, today was an exception for the little deer because while she was eating and flapping her ears to shoo the flies off she was disturbed by a tractor with a flashing light that came rumbling down the road and turned onto my land. After a brief discussion the driver got cracking on slashing down all the bushes and small trees that I wanted removed and shortly afterwards the rest of the small team arrived.

They’re still working as I type this and are making short work of clearing the desired area. I have to say that it’s making quite a difference. I don’t think, though, that I’ll be moving my caravan back up there anytime soon. The reason is that the contractor appointed by Enedis to do my electrical connection also came by yesterday, as planned.

So for the first time someone who knows what they’re talking about came to actually look at the job and he showed me what he’d found. I’m told that the previous potential purchaser of my land who backed out two years or so ago paid to have water and electricity connected and sure enough, as I’ve mentioned several times, there’s a water supply on the land.

There are also signs that a trench has been dug bringing a cable from the electrical ‘coffret’ on the other side of the road down to the corner of my land and the engineer confirmed this to be so. However, he showed me that whereas they’d dropped the plastic tube, or ‘gaine’ through which the cable passes, into the trench, there is actually no cable contained in it!

Why would they do that, for goodness sake, especially if as I’d been told, the previous person had paid for a connection? However, it is what it is and the engineer said that it’s likely that it will take several weeks for a cable to be installed and for my own ‘coffret’ to be installed on my land.

In that case, I might as well leave the caravan where it is. It’s closer to my neighbour’s house for my electricity supply and the cable now runs around the periphery of the intervening field and not across it. And as I’ll also probably be waiting several weeks for Véolia to stir themselves and connect a meter and tap to my water supply, there’s no difference there either.

My biggest problem is that although the area on which I’ve sited the caravan looked level, it’s far from it. Once again it’s tilted over towards the front left corner and although we’re not expecting rain for some time, I need to get it levelled up. It’s also very uncomfortable as it is (I had to sleep the wrong way round on the bed last night so my head was higher than my feet) so that will be today’s main task. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep the right way round tonight 🙂