April 2022: Now, with our search area increased to cover a larger area of Nantes proper, we started to pull up houses and apartments that ticked some of the boxes we had. Must-haves got relegated to “nice-to haves” and new boxes got added to the list. It was a very stressful time. Frantic emails and texts and conference calls to our house-hunting agency, hours of online searching, a decision to increase our monthly rental budget, all to find a seemingly impossible place to live. We had no idea it would be so competitive and that there’d be so few properties.
Nantes appealed to us for the reasons mentioned in my last post, “Don’t pronounce the S in Nantes,” but we were getting discouraged. We could be flexible, knowing that this would be short-term (we can live anywhere for a couple of years, right?), so we even looked at apartments in Nantes Centreville. And I mean, the center. I got sweaty just looking at these places, running nightmare scenarios in my head of taking the dogs down a small elevator at 10:30 at night for their nighttime pee, and running into hoards of partying tourists and locals. Think Powell Street in San Francisco but with drunk people and sans fentanyl zombies. Thankfully, the apartments we saw, though unique and interesting, had funky kitchens, or portable toilets hidden in cabinets in the living room that quickly turned us off. I really did not want to live in an apartment. In a city, with no outdoor space for the dogs.
Then, Shelly and I both spotted a house advertised online in Vertou, which is about 20 minutes outside of Nantes, 20 minutes to the airport, and 20 minutes to the train station. The price was right (compared to California prices), it had a fantastic garden for the pups, but where and what was Vertou? We had our house hunters make an appointment for us as it was just too tricky for us with pretty much zero French language skills.
On the day of our appointment, we pulled up to the house in our rented “has seen better days” Citroen C4, and gulped. Wow.
On the way home, we checked out Super U, the local supermarket, and Chlorophylle, an organic market. Okay, we could live here.
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