Making the decision to move here

I have been asked by a few people lately how I came to live in France. I thought this was the place to talk about it.
Firstly we had always wanted to live in another country. We looked at America, New Zealand and Spain over the years but none seemed right. Then we bought a Corvette ( car) and started going to the 24 hour Le Mans race.
The next step was selling our beautiful house and down sizing. We used the equity to buy this house. I had been searching the Internet for some time so it did not take much effort to draw up a list. I found 11 properties that fitted what we wanted. We wanted rural and we had a budget to stick to. I made up a list for each property to log things like mains electric and water. I also insisted on a working bathroom. We set up the viewings for an Easter weekend and viewed them all. The first one was near here and was in a town. We are can do people but the first place was awful. We came away thinking it was not going to happen if that was all we could afford. Then we pulled up here!
We arrived before the agent and stood at the entrance amongst the weeds and cried. We knew this was it. The agent turned up and opened up. The house was a mess and smelt musty. The agent told us someone else was viewing after us but as it had been on the market for 9 months with no viewings we did not believe him. We drove away and parked where we could see anyone turning into our access road. We saw another car go in! I had to push P but we went to the agents office at nearly closing and put in an offer. It was accepted. The agent took the sale photograph out of the window and gave it to us. We signed a paper that gave us 7 days to think about it. We viewed the rest of the houses on our list but nothing came close.  We went back toms the agent and told him we wanted the place and wanted to complete on the Friday of the Le Mans weekend.
We picked up the keys from the Notaire on the day we wanted!
We stayed a week and several friends who were at the race came to see us. Most could not believe what we had done...no vision!
The house was a mess. No upstairs and a basic bathroom off the main room. Our bedroom door led off the main room too. The house was infested with mice and had a resident toad. And we loved it!
To be continued....