Guests

When the announcement came over the tannoy I started to worry a little bit. It was Saturday morning and I had guests arriving that evening - I had been in London for a week and their suite wasn't yet ready for them. The announcement informed the waiting passengers that the inbound plane for our flight was due to land at the time it was due to take off - an impossibility without the aid of time transport. We were going to be late.

My guests were clients of Lesa and would be spending the day looking at property in the region - I hoped they might take longer than expected to give me some extra time to get things ready for them and get down to the shops for some provisions. As it turned out that is exactly what happened and by late afternoon, after a mad dash around town and a rapid cleaning/bed making hustle, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Very impressively, he managed to reverse his Mercedes Coupe straight through the archway with no hesitation - they had been in the car all day and he probably just wanted to park up and get out. This was to be our first family staying here - our suites are really designed for couples so this meant some furniture moving and re-arranging to fit an extra bed into the Studio. We wouldn't normally accept reservations from families but the the weekend was free and it was a favour for Lesa, who has been unrelenting in her promotion of our suites.

What has been really interesting for me so far is the real diversity of our guests, their backgrounds and why they are here with us in Carcassonne. I guess I expected a lot of the same sort of, perhaps, London based people enjoying a carefree weekend break but that is probably a failing of my own imagination - why should it be so? Indeed the opposite seems to be the case, with a real diversity of people (albeit only a few so far) visiting and booking for the next few months. I am really looking forward to meeting them all.

This weekend's guests already live in France but are now looking for a change of place and pace. They have two young girls who are fast growing up and they think that the Charente will be a bit rural for them as they turn into teenagers - Carcassonne is hardly London or Paris, but the town and the region does have a lot to offer so I will be very interested to see if they make the move down here.

I have breakfast to do in the morning and new guests arriving tomorrow afternoon - so I better get myself off to bed. I'm very enjoying this whole new experience though.