The headline on CNN Travel read, “This US couple bought a house in France for $36,000”, so of course we had to read that story. Author Tamara Hardingham-Gill recounted how California residents, Robin and Jim, were visiting friends in Cajarc (about 2.5 hours north of Carcassonne) when they began fantasizing about living in France. By chance, a cousin of the town’s mayor was selling her 800-year-old house for $36,000, an affordable figure for which Jim said they could either buy a new car or a house in France. After spending $12,000 on renovations they now have a comfortable home where they spend their summers enjoying a simpler life and less consumerism than they find in California. I wondered if bargains like this were still available.

What happens when you put Cary Grant and Sophia Loren on a dilapidated and leaking houseboat moored on the Potomac River somewhere in the countryside outside Washington, DC? If it’s 1958 then you get an Oscar nominated romantic comedy called “Houseboat” with a happy ending. If it’s 2023 and you move the location to France, replacing the Hollywood actors with real boat owners, do you still get romance with a cheerful conclusion? I wrote about our brief consideration of life on the water in Narrow Dog to Carcassonne which explains why we’re on dry land but we still get questions about canal boats. An online article in The Local (France) prompted me to investigate what it means when “a man’s/woman’s home is his/her castle” floating in a river.

Blog reader John sent us (thank you!) an article entitled “7 Reasons to Buy a Property in Carcassonne”. It was sponsored by a real estate company so there were lots of enticing photos with descriptions including words such as “mansion, garden, village, views, marble fireplaces, and wooden floors.” Everything you want to see and read when you are fantasizing about your French dream life. Since we’re already living that dream, it was easy enough to look past all of the beautiful marketing to see the concrete reasons that someone might want to buy here or elsewhere in France, for that matter. We’ve included some of our own observations with each of these ideas from author Karen Tait.