Surrounded by Vineyards

Week 4 in France 8/25-8/31/2025

Welcome to the 32nd post of our Baby Boomers Move to France blog.

Things on the agenda this week:

• House hunting is still on the agenda this week.
• We have done a little exploring, and we share what we have been up to.
• Finalize our car purchase
• Schedule the drop off our rental car in Bordeaux and replace it with another for a week
• Update the French Culture and Lifestyle section with new things we have learned
• New pictures of the Duras Night Market
• Follow up Orange cell phone service

Why a Blog?

If this is your first visit to our blog, we will try to keep the story of our move to France interesting enough to bring you back each week. Long story short, we are a couple of “Baby Boomers” moving from Venice, Florida and starting a new chapter of our life in the French countryside as American retired expats.

As we shared our move plans with friends and family, we were asked questions about who, what, why, when and where, so we figured that there is enough interest to share the experience. So, we started this blog. Our plan is to publish a brief update on our life in France every Sunday. Hopefully we answer some of those questions and keep answering more as we work our way to our new life. We will also include thoughts on the lifestyle and culture of our new home.

After a little over a year of planning and fretting we moved to France on 1 August 2025. We are completing our 4th week and starting number 5.

Exploring

I wanted to take a ride to Bordeaux and get out of the house for bit, so we packed up Rosie and headed to Bordeaux on Wednesday. Holy smokes, Bordeaux is huge. We found where we need to return the rental car and decided we will have to make a plan to visit Bordeaux when we have more time. Probably find an Airbnb or something for 3 or 4 days. It took us about 90 minutes to get there in our rental car. It’s easy peasy.

We were done with Bordeaux for now, so EB said, “Let’s go to Sainte Emilion before we head back to Duras”. Great idea. It is a short drive from Bordeaux, and we could have a glass of wine and some lunch there. OMG the town is beautiful. The town is surrounded by vineyards. I mean surrounded in every direction and the vines are heavy with fruit now. Harvest is any day now, I think. The area has many opportunities to taste the fine products of these vineyards. Sainte Emilion is a little touristy actually, but not crazy. We explored a little and settled in an outdoor cafe and ordered lunch and a bottle of wine. We shared a delicious pizza, and the red wine was excellent. We decided to go to the Maison du Vin and purchase a couple of bottles. We met the owner of one of the wineries, Chateau Clos Des Abbesses, and tasted one of his reds and bought 2 bottles. No need to go overboard as Sainte Emilion is a short drive through the vineyards from Duras. Pictures of Sainte Emilion below.

Car Purchase Update

We are making progress on this front. On Tuesday I followed up with Nathelie at French Connections HCB and she got back to me and told me that they were working with a garage (dealership), and we needed to send pictures of our drivers’ license, and they would need our driving history from our Florida car insurance. I sent pictures of the licenses and EB scrambled to get the insurance company to send us our driving history. The history was promised to be emailed to us by Friday.

On Thursday Nathalie sent word that the garage needed us to call Monsieur Bellet to verify that HCB was working on our behalf. I called and talked to Madam Bellier. It turns out the correct spelling is Bellier. Her husband wasn’t available, so she covered for him. She speaks English well. She verified that they have the car that we want, and she asked me to go on the website and pick the exact car. I had a little trouble finding the reference number but eventually got it figured out. She said that the car would be ready by Thursday of next week and that it would have a temporary plate as I requested the car to be ready so quickly. In the afternoon I got back to Nathalie and let her know that I had called the garage. She got back to me on Friday morning and said the paperwork is in the works and that Juliette would contact me with instructions for the next step. It is such a relief to have this task moving forward. Now, we have to get the car insurance figured out quickly!

We reserved a car with Enterprise to bridge the time in between returning our current car and getting our new car. We reserved it for a week, and we got one day free as we had some points. Now we need to arrange to be able to drop the new rental off at Limoge airport. Fingers crossed.

French Lifestyle and Culture

POPULATION: USA EXPATS IN FRANCE

Does the number of US immigrants to France negatively impact the French health care system?

Since many US retired people (people not earning an income from working in France) don’t directly pay into the system, I was wondering what impact US retirees have on the French health care system. Yes, I believe we do have a positive effect on the economy as we inject money into the economy. Taxes on purchases help fund the government, so I don’t feel totally guilty about having essentially free health care from one of the world’s premier health care systems.

It might be interesting to study the Population of France and US immigration into France though. In 2025 the population of France is 66,663,605. About 14% of those are immigrants (9.3 million).

Immigrants from the USA make up about 153,000 people. That is a very small percentage of the overall population (about .2% of the total population and about 1.6% of the total immigrants). That said, France boasts the 3rd largest population of US citizens abroad after Canada and the United Kingdom. Most US expats live in Paris. By the way the US population in 2025 is about 347,000,000 depending on who you ask, and the US population grows about .46% per year.

Throughout its history France has gone through periods of low population growth and even negative population growth, meaning deaths outpaced births. World War I and II were especially hard on the country. Because of these periods of negative growth, the country has embraced immigration. Now that birthrates are increasing the country is making efforts to slow down immigration some. Income requirements for example might keep some people from being allowed to immigrate. Restrictions on work permits may also have an impact as well as language requirements.

There are some issues with illegal immigration. The country has counted about 400,000 illegal foreigners in the country. In 2023 about 22,700 people were deported from the country (voluntarily or by force). This number has continued to grow over the past few years.

There are avenues for what they call “regularization” for workers in certain business sectors with labor shortages. In these cases, workers are issued residence permits. In 2023 almost 35,000 undocumented immigrants were regularized.

I tried to find a statistic showing the number of US retirees in France. Couldn’t find it. While there are lots of working age US expat in France, I would venture to say that a large percentage of US expats in France are retirees. I specify US expats because America is not just the USA. North America includes Canada. Then there is Central America and South America. I didn’t research all of the Americas’ immigration into France. The USA is complicated enough.

Bottom line is that I didn’t find any statistics on the impact of US expats on the health care system in France. I have seen some complaints that immigration puts an unfair burden on working French people. We expect that eventually the French government will impose some fee on retired immigrants to help support the health care benefits. We shall see.

TEMPERATURE

The weather is cooling down this week. We had rain Wednesday night, and Thursday morning was downright chilly. It got me to thinking about how most of the world refers to temperature. Here in Europe, they say it is hot at 35 degrees. It took me a couple of seconds to remember that the unit of measure for temperature in Europe is degrees Celsius. The US is one of a very few countries in the world that uses the Fahrenheit system.

Anyway, converting Celsius to Fahrenheit using the conversion formula of:

F = (9/5) x C + 32

you get that 35 degrees Celsius converts to 92 degrees Fahrenheit. Plenty hot!

You might remember Celsius as centigrade. Centigrade is actually the old-fashioned name for the unit of measure now referred to as Celsius. In this system water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Whereas in the Fahrenheit system water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

Both systems were invented separately in the 18th-century by European scientists. Anders Celsius in Sweden invented his namesake and Daniel Fahrenheit in Amsterdam invented his namesake. There is a whole bunch more history and science to it but that is not my thing here. Just an interesting side trip, and an example of a difference between the US and France.

NIGHT MARKET

We love the Night Market. I think there is one more night market this season. Despite the threat of rain, we walked down to the Duras town square for the Night Market. Rosie came with us and met another little dog that she didn’t care for. She is a crazy Chihuahua. It did rain for about 5 minutes then stopped. We had a little rain over night, but we didn’t hear it.

As usual we bought a bottle of wine and found a seat near where the band would play. There was a trio of young guys playing jazz. They had a saxophone, a base guitar, and a drummer. They were the warmup group for the next trio, a led guitar, a singer and a drummer. Sorry they didn’t advertise their name, but they were pretty good. The singer sang a lot of great oldies in English, and she salted in a couple of French language songs too. I tried to load a video here, but for some reason it is invalid. Here are a couple of photos of the Night Market. The first one was taken about 8:00PM and the second one closer to 9:00. The words above the umbrellas in the 2nd photo say something like “Healthy Bio”. While these pictures show a lot of “older” people there were a lot of families with young kids. The kids were all pretty well behaved and we didn’t see any kids sucked into smart phones.

Sunday

Sunday was a busy day. We got up early (7:00) and had a quick cup of coffee and then drove to Bordeaux airport to turn in our rental car. (No problems with the toll booth this time.) This went smoothly until I realized that I forgot the 2nd car key. Not a big deal. The guy just said for us to call and get the address of where to mail it.

When we went to pick up our new rental car I had forgotten to take my passport. Luckily the guy at the counter accepted the picture of my passport that I have in my phone. He checked my driver’s license and the next thing you know we were driving off in a Citroen. It is a pretty nice car.

With rain threatening we headed straight home. Well sort of straight. EB was in charge of the GPS and she selected the route that avoided any tolls. We are trying to save money. Thus, we were on some pretty back country roads. They were narrow but all were paved. Winding through vineyards and farms and little villages. Actually, a very pretty drive.

Just a note about our overseas banking. We have been using our Wise card without any problems. If you have been following the blog for a while, you know that I was concerned about the cost of converting Dollars to Euros. If we use Bank of America, they charge a very hefty fee and the exchange rate sucks. Wise on the other hand, has an exchange rate called market rate that is way better than the regular bank. You will remember that I signed up for Wise while we were still in the states. One downside to Wise is that they do not have a “Joint Account”, so EB and I have to have totally separate accounts. She hasn’t signed up yet. We do have a French bank account with BNP Parabis where we do have a joint account, and we both have cards. French Connections HCB helped to get us an account at BNP while we were in Florida. There were some hiccups, but all is ironed out now.

Speaking of the exchange rate, the dollar is still way down against the euro, so a dollar does not buy as much today as it did back on January 1st of this year. It is down over 11%. I hope it turns around before we are ready to buy a house.

Also, on Sunday EB followed up with our “Orange Travel” cell service to extend our service for another month. We are all set for another month. hopefully we can figure out a way to establish an address in order to save some money.

Next Week (la Semaine Prochaine)

We have a couple of things that need follow up:

• Drive to Limoges and pick up our new car.
• Then drive to the Limoges airport and drop off our rental car.
• Follow up with our Confolens hosts to schedule a meet up and also to view some homes for sale in the area. Elizabeth found one online in the area that looks like a very good candidate.
• Get the ball rolling on our visa validation. This has to be done within 3 months of arriving in France. Believe it or not the first month is over. This validation includes a doctor appointment and more of the paperwork that the French government is famous for.
• Get information on exchanging our driver’s license for our French license. I think this one isn’t so urgent. I hope it isn’t urgent.
• More exploring
• Follow up on an “address” to save money on cell service.

Signing off for the week

As always, we sign off wishing you all a good week and remind you to take care of yourselves and your family.

Keep in touch and leave questions, suggestions and comments below. We really enjoy hearing from you. Your kind and encouraging words remind us that we can do this. We have completed our 4th week in France.

A bientot (see you soon)

Mark and Elizabeth Beiley

Babyboomersmovetofrance.com