Fussy Pair…?

…no, Foussais-Payré! This is where we now live, hence the title of this site.

Foussais is an ancient village located in the south-east corner of the Vendée (click here for a map). It has about 1200 inhabitants and is classified as a “Petite Cité de Caractère”. It was originally founded in the 11th century and is, apparently, steeped in history. There certainly are some rather nice old buildings, and the church is Roman and seems to be quite important architecturally.

There is a book in our local Tabac all about the history of the village which I keep meaning to buy, but I am always put off by the thgouht of having to translate it. Perhaps I should start by reading children’s books and work up from there…

The village is quite vibrant, with an Auberge, a Tabac, a small supermarket, butchers, bakers (our neighbour, Michel – more of him to come!), Chocolate shop (Rosie’s favourite place), and a big sports centre. There are lots of events held in the local ’salles’ and there are 2 local schools – St. Antoine (where our 2 youngest go) and Gaston Goulard.

We ended up in Foussais rather by chance. While looking for an area to live, we narrowed our search based on the transport links – it was vital that I could easily travel back to the UK in order to work there when necessary, so I didn;t want to be more than an hour from the airport.

The region between Nantes and Niort seemed to fit the bill quite nicely, as half-way between these two cities is a region that is around 1 hour from 3 airports, Nantes Atlantiques, La Rochelle and Poitiers. So we focussed our search on this small area. Having seen several houses on the first 2 days of our initial house-hunting trip we really were despairing about our plight. We felt we would never find anything and it was so depressing.

Then along came Marion, our saviour! She pulled out 3 great-looking houses, the second of which was this one in Foussais. Once we saw it we knew this was the one. And as an added bonus, Marion also lived in the village, so we found out everything we could possibly need to know abo ut the area too. We really fell on our feet and snapped the house up!