Our adventure in France started in August 2010, while visiting Australian friends Kaye and Peter Coates in Talairan, just south of Carcassonne. One day, to get out of their hair, Rita and I went on a bike ride along the towpath beside the Canal du Midi. Along the way, in the town of Homps, I saw a Dutch Barge for sale and jokingly said to Rita "There's one for us!". While not taking it seriously at the time, one thing has a way of leading to another, and by the end of October 2010 we were the proud, if slightly puzzled, owners of a Replica Dutch Barge, soon to be re-named "Kanumbra".

Since then we have visited France each summer (i.e. winter in Australia) to cruise the canals and rivers in the south-west of France. Before buying the barge, we had investigated the option, like our Australian friends, of buying a house in France, but eventually settled on a barge, as a way of providing a place to live and also move slowly around the French countryside. Along the way, however, we kept the idea of a house in France on the back-burner, as a possible way of having friends visit us in France without having them stay on the barge for extended periods.

On a couple of occasions, we took the house-hunting idea a little further. For example, on 16 August 2011, just three weeks after we started cruising on the canals, we considered a small house on the central square in Damazan. Although the house looked small from the outside, I must admit we were more impressed than we thought we'd be, and were on the verge of making an offer when in walked another woman who said she had signed a contract earlier that morning! Talk about having the rug pulled out from under your feet!

After recovering from the disappointment of missing out on the house in Damazan, we forgot about house-hunting and for the rest of the year we just got on with enjoying our barging. But back home in Australia, the steelband that we had created after the 2009 Victorian Bushfires was gaining momentum. The group was becoming more skilled, and we were playing at more public events. Each year we challenged ourselves to get out of our comfort zones, and do performances that we thought were beyond us. Each time we surprised ourselves with a performance, we started looking for the next challenge. So while we were planning the next challenge of staging the 1st Australian Steelband Festival in our town of Marysville in April 2013, we suggested to the band that perhaps we consider a Tour of France in 2014 with performances in various towns. We were somewhat surprised at the reaction. Nearly everyone in the band took it on as the next big challenge, and so the idea "grew legs".

During our 2012 cruising season, therefore, we scouted out various locations where we might perform, but also started to think about the logistics of staging such a Tour. Apart from the transport of people and instruments from Australia to France, we started thinking about were we might house the band members while they were in France. And so we started to look at "à vendre" signs again.

At the end of the 2012 cruising season, just after Rita had left to go visit her family in Switzerland, a house came on the market right next to the port in Moissac where Kanumbra was moored. On the afternoon of 24 August, I went over to Kaz and Iain (the Port Capitainerie) and talked about the procedures for buying a house in France (we had also looked at a variety of websites about buying property in France). When I explained the situation to Kaz and Iain, involving being able to host visitors from Marysville, Australia and Switzerland, it was interesting that they said we should look for an eclusier's cottage. But they are hard to find available for sale, so I went into town to Maury Immobilear to see about an inspection of 4 Bassin du Canal. No one there spoke good english but with hand gestures and a mixture of languages, we managed to communicate, and I got an inspection within 10 minutes. By the time I walked back to the port, the agent was there opening the shutters. It looked pretty reasonable inside and out, with many recent renovations. That night I sent details to Rita. But after a lot of consideration after we returned to Australia, we decided that the house would simply not be suitable for our intended use for the band members when they came to France. In particular, there were only three bedrooms and there was only one bathroom (on the top floor) and one toilet (on the ground floor), and we simply couldn't see that working.

However, the agent who showed me that house (Maury Immobilear) also had another property on the market, just a bit further down the Canal to the west. From the internet ads, we thought we recognised it as a house we had seen for sale when we cruised back into Moissac at the end of our barging in 2012. We remembered it particularly because of the roses in the garden, and hence it became known to us as the Rose House. We checked StreetView in GoogleMaps and found the house on the canal where we remembered it to be, but the picture must have been taken when the roses were not in bloom, so we were never quite sure that it was the same house. However, it sounded the same from the descriptions we read, and it also sounded like it might be suitable, being a bit bigger than the house I had already inspected. So, we asked our good friends Kaz and Iain Noble, from the Port Capitainerie at Moissac, if they could go have a look at the house, take some pictures, and give us their opinion of the property (as long-term residents of Moissac).

They reported back that the house was fabulous and an absolute bargain, given it's size and what they were asking for it (195,000euro). A selection of their pictures shows that the house was much bigger than we anticipated (3 stories, 6-8 bedrooms, 300m2) and also in pretty good condition inside on the lower two floors, but needing a bit of work on the upper floor.

Given the size of the house, however, our thoughts turned from just having a house for friends to stay at; we could seriously consider turning it into a B&B, at which we could run various types of workshops. Now that our transport survey activities had involuntarily ground to a halt in Australia, we could start considering other options. The most obvious was to run some steel pan workshops at the B&B. But then we started talking with friends, and realised that the band contained a number of chefs, and so the idea formed of also running cooking workshops. The name "Pots'n'Pans" started to form in our minds. A bit of Googling found an organisation (Getaway Guru) that coordinates B&B bookings from Australians wishing to stay at B&B's, Houses and Apartments owned by Australians in France and Italy. Given that about a million Australians visit France each year, that seemed like a reasonable market on which to draw. It was also attractive that Getaway Guru did lots of the marketing, and also handled all the business details in Australia.

So, like I did with the barge purchase in October 2010, I decided to make a special trip to Moissac in November 2012 to check out the house in person and, if satisfied, sign an initial contract and pay a deposit. This time, however, I took Nico Murat (a French backpacker/carpenter who had been living with us in Australia) with me, since he had agreed to do lots of the renovation work on the house if we were to go ahead with the purchase. So, we came, we saw, and we purchased. When we inspected the house, we saw that there was a lot of old furniture that complemented the style of the house really well. Since the children of the deceased estate did not want to remove the furniture, we made an offer to buy the house and all the furniture for 195,000euro; that is, knock 10,000euro off the house price and pay 10,000euro for all the furniture. We were somewhat surprised when the agent came back to us to say that the owners had accepted the offer, and would sell for 190,000euro; 5000euro less than what we had offered! Go figure!

The deal was sealed in February 2013, and we took possession when we returned to Moissac in May 2013.

La Maison de la Rose is located on the western edge of Moissac, just after you enter the brick-lined canal through the centre of the town. In the aerial photo below, it is at the top-right of the photo on the right of the canal, just before the canal bends to the right to leave the town.

I can think of no better way to summarise our feelings about the location of La Maison de la Rose that to quote Rick Stein in his famous French Odyssey video as he enters Moissac past our house, "This is the way to enter a town!".