Welcome to Auberge du Lis!

We are two young Australians in the process of uprooting ourselves from busy city lives and desk jobs to a quieter, simpler life in beautiful south-west France.

As we begin this new adventure, we are living in suburban Melbourne, in a small flat with a tiny garden space. From there, over the next couple of years we will be shifting to a 200-year-old farmhouse on half an acre, replete with fruit trees and surrounded by farmland. From concrete suburban confines to clean air, rolling hills, and an expanse of possibility.

This blog will be a document of our travels and travails as we make the transition, simplifying our old lives and building our skills and knowledge in preparation for the new.

Living sustainably.

Our methods and ideas are inspired by sustainability and self-sufficiency, living as minimally as possible with the resources at our disposal. Permaculture principles inform all that we do outdoors, and much indoors, too. Living in the city, it is easy to lose touch with the outside world. While we are lucky to live somewhere relatively safe and free, we crave a connection to the central parts of our life – growing and cooking our own food, understanding our immediate ecosystem, building strong local communities.

These ideas are simply a mindset, not fixed techniques – there is always more to learn and ways to improve, and that makes it an ongoing challenge with endless rewards. They are just the ideas that inform how we interact with the world.

Of course, as the adventure unfolds we will learn many new ways of living, pick up new skills, and find inspiration in unlikely places. Needless to say, with such a big change there will be challenges and mistakes aplenty (there have already been a few!), and there will be much experience to gain from those too.

We hope that in some way our story might inspire others to be creative, to try out new ideas, and to challenge themselves to find new ways to live sustainably. Everybody’s situation is unique, but there will always be someone who can learn from your story, so we hope people will share their own adventures with us.

Where to from here?

We will begin by telling our story and what brought us to this point in our lives, and our challenges so far, then a description of the area we chose, the Gers, and some of its many highlights. A series of posts will then document the groundwork we have already laid for our transition and the progress to date. As we count down towards the eventual move, we will continue to showcase our home cooking and gardening in our city flat, always looking to improve our knowledge and methods.

We hope that reading about our journey will inspire people to follow their own challenging paths, and try out some new projects wherever they are. Most of all, we are looking forward to sharing other people’s adventures and learning as much as we can from them.

You can read a little of our story, and what inspired us to take the plunge here.

Again, welcome to Auberge du Lis and we hope you will share the journey with us.

Mike and Lisa

We are also posting over at Wordpress