Apartment Neptune: 1 Bedroom, Sleeps 3

Shortly after we got back from Kuwait we took our children on a holiday in France. We stayed partly in camping sites and partly in Logis, and drove everywhere in our white van (well, we do live in Essex, after all!). There were so many highlights of the trip but one of them was undoubtedly our visit to Carcassonne, a place I had read about and seen photographs of, and was desperate to go there and see it for myself. We were all, including the children, bowled over by the place, and years later when retirement was not so far off, we decided to invest in a property there. We came for an initial trip to look round the place again and also drive into the surrounding area. We soon decided that the best place to look for a property was in the delightful main square of the Bastide. Initially I had decided to look for somewhere in the Cite itself but soon realised that this would be a little like living in Disneyland! But the Place Carnot is only a short - and very attractive - walk from the Cite, and has all the advantages of being in the town centre. Living there even for a short time as a visitor, makes you feel as if you are part of the local community.

Once we had decided this was where we wanted to be, we perused all the estate agents and left our details, and then came down for several more visits before finding the ideal place. Mind you, as with English estate agents, several of the property details we were given were not even in Carcassonne, let alone in the Place Carnot! But in the end we found exactly what we were looking for. So ideal did we find it that when the opportunity arose a couple of years later to buy the two apartments above it, that this is exactly what we did.

We were undoubtedly very lucky to find exactly what we were looking for. And we do love to share our little bit of Carcassonne with our clients. We have furnished and equipped all the apartments as though they are solely for our own use, including a handful of family photographs. Many clients remark that they feel as though they have borrowed a friend's apartment rather than a rental apartment and this is just the impression we want to give. There are so many extra touches, such as alarm clocks beside the beds, sewing boxes, typical French shopping bags so that you can wonder around the market below feeling like a genuine local! However many times we visit we still love the moment each morning when we open the shutters and look out over the square below, particularly on market day - you couldn't be anywhere else but France.