The year started in Sheffield in the snow. Taking Grace to the Pantomime on New Year ’s Day was something special. Having spent a day trekking to the shops then sledging, we decided that as the snow was not too bad down South, we should head off home, so we set off a day early. Stopping at Carey’s for a cup of tea and to collect Jane’s car, we drove south to Canterbury. We spent a day there at Jeff and Rita’s recovering from the drive. Next morning the snow was coming down so we set off early to Folkestone and the tunnel. When we arrived home we got the cars in then we were snowed in for nearly a week.

March brought us our 40^th wedding anniversary. We had the weekend in London and took the close family to see the Lion King. Afterwards we were joined by the wider family at Duke’s where we had afternoon tea.

They all put together and bought us a voucher for Le Manoir de Quattre Saison. So in May we had a fantastic dinner there. It was a night to remember.

One of the things on our “Things to do before we leave France” list was to go to Monet’s garden. Our neighbour, Maryvonne, persuaded us to do it in a day, which we did. It was a beautifully hot day but most of the iris were finished.

We had a much better season with the gite, most of whom were German and they were all very nice and appeared to have a great time. We also had Tony and Mavis for a while and Annette and Bill stayed in the gite also.

In September we took off to Ireland for a week. We stayed in one of our Club holiday apartments. It was rather disappointing, not up to our usual standard. However, the weather was relatively kind and we got around and saw a lot of the local sites. I was pleasantly surprised and had a good time.

 October we had an offer on the gite. It was really low so it took some soul searching before we decided to accept it. Then it was quite traumatic with the buyer threatening to pull out several times.

We set off to England early and spent some time looking at houses, actually doing some viewings. We spent a super Christmas in Sheffield with Carey, Tracey, Paul and Grace. We started the holiday with another trip to the Pantomime with Grace. The down side was that Paul had to work nights over Christmas. The snow came again so we cancelled our visit to Graham and Jane and headed straight back to Folkestone which was in chaos so we had to spen a few hours there before we could get a tunnel crossing.

On the 31^st we exchanged contracts on the house then spent a great time at a party with friends.

So we headed into 2011 with the firm view that it was going to be our year.