Raison d'être

In the go-go parlance of the web, raison d'être perhaps best translates to that odious phrase, "mission statement." The French is so much nicer, but the essence of the question remains: why is this blog here?

There is no shortage of English language prose and tourist information about the south of France. Some of it is good, some is tolerably amusing, and some is just plain bad. Does anyone need more? No.

And yes. Frankly, not very much of the available literature is good. (More on this in a future post.) There are scores of blogs just by anglophones living in the south of France, and nearly all are the sort of detailed diaries of interest to family and friends but, while often amusing to the rest of us, are ultimately as compelling as rifling through someone else's closet. ("Hey, look at THAT. Huh. Well, what do you say we go get a beer?") As for actual tourist information, searching the web is rather like dumpster diving -- if you root around long enough in the great catch-all that is the Internet you just may come up with the very thing you're looking for. Or at least something else interesting. Or you may not.

This last point is a problem because we run a gite. For those unfamiliar with the term, that's a rural, self-catering holiday lodging available for let. (In American English, "a country vacation place where you do your own cooking and there's no maid.") If you didn't get here from there, you can read all about it at our website, lescarries.com. Our gite is one of thousands available in all of France. So, one of our primary goals here is to provide our prospective guests with some means of differentiating our gite from all the other choices available, to do it in a way that's a bit more flexible and informal than a relatively static website, and to encourage feedback.

Another goal is to provide our guests with a better flavor of our specific area, which is the region between Toulouse and Carcassone known as the Lauragais, to differentiate it from other popular destinations in France, and to describe some of the cultural and recreational opportunities available, not just in the summer months but year 'round.

We hope you find it enjoyable, and most of all useful. If you have any questions, or suggestions about information you'd like to see, email us or leave a comment.