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An American Pipemaker in Brittany

April at the Bay of Sorlock

In 2002, Talbert Pipes moved from our comfortable existence in North Carolina, USA, to an entirely new life in Brittany, France in search of adventure. It was an enormously difficult transition in every way. Here, for the benefit of our families and friends from around the world, we present a little travelogue of our life in Brittany - the people we have met, the places we have seen, and occasionally an adventure or two.



News!
  • November 5th, 2006 - Been quite a while since I updated anything in this area!  The Brittany blog has pretty much relegated this to archival status, but I did just post two new pages to the Adventures area - one is my much-delayed "Four Years On" retrospective on our fourth year of life in France, and the other is the story (and photos) of our trip to Utopiales, a big French science-fiction convention.

  • August 3rd, 2005 - I've just added a "Photo of the Moment" link to the "Adventures" page, where I will try to post a new photo daily. I hope I've got it set up well enough to make this quick and easy - we'll see how long it lasts ;)

  • July 30th, 2005 - May was our three year anniversary in France but I've been too busy to write up a report. I finally tackled the project last night after finishing up a set of blowfish pipes, and "Three Years On" is now posted in the "Adventures" section.

  • June 5th, 2005 - I worked out the display problem I was having (some of the ad-blocking code in my UserContent.CSS browser file was misinterpreting some some elements as banner ads) so I hope to add a few updates to the "Adventures" section soon. The first addition is already up - I just posted the story of our recent hedgehog visitors.

  • May 31st, 2005 - Our friend Lesley sold her farmhouse, so I've removed the links for it. As predicted back on the 9th (below), I've been too busy with pipemaking to waste time trying to solve the 'Adventures' display problem in Firefox, so no updates there for a while still! We have celebrated our third anniversary in France - we were arriving this past weekend in 2002. I intend to write a "Three Years On" article for the Adventures page when I have time, though I'm not quite sure what to put in it. Things are going well, we're gradually getting caught up financially, our language skills are progressing, and we have found all the local supplies we need (except for a few non-existent exotic items, like peanut butter...).... so, I'm not sure that the article will be very interesting reading!

  • May 9th, 2005 - Well, I've just sat down to post some new pics in the "Adventures" page, and found that my new Firefox browser doesn't display the "Adventures" button at the top, though it has no problem with all three top buttons on all the other pages. It displays perfectly in IE. After much puzzling and comparing of the HTML for the different pages, I'm no wiser as to the cause of the problem - the coding is nearly identical but only the France page loses its "Adventures" link. So, no updates for a bit until this can be figured out! (Which likely means that I'll go make pipes and forget all about it). Nothing really major to report anyway, just some nice local area photos. We visited Herbignac's "Marché des Potiers" (the annual pottery market) yesterday to take some photos and do our usual yearly write-up, but after getting fussed at by several potters ("No, photographing my work for free publicity is not allowed!"), we decided "To heck with this bother!" and won't be doing any more of our yearly pottery market photo displays. To those who have enjoyed the pottery market pages in years past, I can only say 'Sorry, and blame inane paranoia on the part of the potters'. At least I have a cheerier entry page photo up, though!

  • January 22nd, 2005 - Since she didn't have many pics to start with, I've added a Zip file of a wide variety of house pics to Lesley's "House for Sale" page.

  • January 13th, 2005 - The news of the moment is the link above. Our friend Lesley Allen is selling her stone farmhouse not far from here, and I told her I'd post some pics and the description on our site just in case. I get more "expat" and "want-to-be expat" traffic than I had ever expected, for an area I figured would just provide some idle entertainment to our pipe customers, so maybe she can find a buyer this way, who knows? I am not involved in the sale in any way, though (no commissions, fees, etc) so please direct all inquiries to Lesley at her email link on the house page. And expect very sharp replies if I start getting lots of, "I know you aren't involved in the sale, but could you tell me about the area/house/region/etc on your free time?" emails....

  • January 1st, 2005 - Happy New Year! I'm not sure that 2005 will be any better than 2004 was for spare time to update our Brittany pics and stories, but I'll do what I can. One idle idea that has interested me is the thought of creating some sort of podcast for this area, but common sense tells me that until I've finished such simple but time-consuming challenges such as rebuilding the upstairs and rearranging the workshop, starting up something like this is a lot more fun AS an "idle thought". Also, a friend here pointed us to this link:

    http://docarmor.free.fr/valarmor/valouest/talbert1.htm

    Apparently, we are a Breton peninsula and didn't even know it! It's an interesting story for those who can read or Babelfish the français. Also, for fun, here are a couple of pictures taken at midnight on Christmas, down in the medieval city of Guérande (with a full moon, no less!). And yes, with screeching winds howling through the cobblestone maze of streets in the middle of the night, it was every bit as cold as Emily looks: