Oscar running in the distance to the large concrete structure

The road quickly leaves civilisation behind, and either side of the track are towering grass covered dunes, and ‘les mielles’, much-demanded sandy farmland where the horse-mad Normans put their horses for the winter. A bit further and you’re in the grass covered car park, and a quick hike through the dunes brings you to one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever visited. There was a bit of a hop down from one of the dunes when we visited onto the actual beach, so if you struggle with hops down, you might decide this isn’t the beach for you, or to find an alternative route down.

Vast expanses of sand on St Germain sur Ay beach and me, with baby on back

We took the kids down there and Oscar, our 3 year old, hit the beach running, and just took off. That’s one of the beauty of these beaches, your kids can rome for hundreds of meters and you can still see them with ease. And when the tide’s out, there’s little risk of them reaching the sea without you noticing.

We’re told that one of the beaches around there is a nudist beach, although nobody was braving it when we were down there. A point worth noting whether that’s your thing or not, but rest assured there’s enough space to cater for all bathing tastes down there.

I’ve included a map below showing how to get to St Germain sur Ay plage from the town center (use the controls to zoom in a bit), but it really is pretty simple. The beach is about a 10 minute drive from our Normandy gites, and guests bringing dogs or children will love the ease of access to such spectacular beaches.

View How to find the best beach in St Germain Sur Ay Plage in a larger map

Our holiday homes are the perfect solution as they are just a short drive from the sandy stretches of beach on the west side of the Lower Normandy peninsula. Whilst the eastern beaches are more famous for the Normandy landings, the western beaches offer huge expanses of beautiful golden sand, with miles and miles of gorgeous beach front for family fun in the sun.

If you’re into sea front walks, we can recommend a broad range of stunning walks with amazing scenery and beautiful hilltop views along the coast. Additionally, there are scores of beautiful fishing villages such at Portbail and many more. Drop us a line to get in touch and find your gites in Normandy.

We have our eye on a lovely property which would give us a family home plus 3 gites to rent out. They’re all immaculately developed, and it’s an existing business which is particularly exciting. The gites are just 10 minutes from the sea too, which is a big bonus for us and for guests.

So now the negotiations begin, and we’re holding our breath that the exchange rate won’t suddenly take a plummet and leave us unable to complete the purchase. We’re really looking forward to moving out as a family and experiencing the good life in France, and spending some more time with our friends in the Manche region.

I’m still looking at loads of properties on the net, but we’ve agreed that it’s going to be easier just to rent a gite for the winter and do our hunting whilst we’re over there. Not too sure about arriving in the dead of winter, but at least we’ll be initiated in the deep end!

My 3 year old has clocked that something’s afoot, so we’ve explained the plans and now all we hear is “when are we going to France?”. He’s nearly as excited about the move as I am!

That strikes me as a good idea. So within a week, the London property is on the market, and we’re in discussions with friends in the Normandy region about renting their gite over the winter. So far, everything seems to be falling into place. We could be over there by the beginning of November, and then have up to 3 months to find ourselves a decent gite complex to run,

Rumour has it that there could be an issue with ferries into Cherbourg, so we may need to re-think the general area we’re thinking about if Brittany ferries follow through on their threat to pull out. Can’t believe the regional govt would allow this to happen, but you never know, and it’s an important consideration if we’re going to be targeting a UK audience with our new business.

1. How many people sell their properties directly (peer to peer) rather than via an agency

2. That ‘notaires’, the lawyers who take your money for concluding the deal (both parties) also sell properties

3. Quite how crap the estate agents websites are in France. I mean, come on… give me more than one photo!

The latter is the astonishing one.. so many times sites simply refer to ‘dependances’… outbuildings.. without actually showing you what they are in pictures. That said, we’ve now found a couple of massive farmhouses with outbuildings which look ripe for gites, so we’re getting our friends who are sur place to go and take an initial look for us before booking our trip to Normandy. Very, very exciting.

So why is it still not showing up in the first 100 results for ‘Normandy Gites‘? There’s a few potential reasons… firstly, Normandy Gites is likely to be a really competitive search term, so you’d expect that there would be at least 100 decently SEO’d sites ahead of me (for now!). Secondly, I bought a domain name which had been used before, and there’s a small possibility the previous owner did something naughty in Google’s eyes which could have a residual impact.  Finally, it could just be a time issue… sometimes Google sticks something in it’s index, then waits to see whether the site is there for the long run, or just a flash in the pan before giving it the ranking it deserves. We’ll soon see!

We’re page 1 position #6 on Bing, which is pretty good. And we’re page #2 on Yahoo US, which is ok too.

On the gite hunt front, we’ve got a list of 10 properties to consider, which is amazing given that i’ve looked at over 3000 online. I’m getting the impression that the french property market isn’t quite as online savvy as in the UK… there’s no Righmove or Find A Property over there… lots of it is done by Notaires, and even more is done on word of mouth.

The gite descriptions are really poor on the websites, the photos are terrible (when there are any) and there’s a real mixed bag across Normandy. We’re thinking of heading out in September to see what we can find.

it’s taken a few more days but Bing has been back and re-ranked for a selection of search terms. I’m pleasantly surprised that we’re on page 1 for Normandy Gites already, and it’s encouraging to see page 2 for two other Normandy Gite related search terms. Google still hasn’t updated the index, but i’m not overly concerned as I can see that the site has been spidered without errors when i log into webmaster tools. Watch this space.

And we’re off… precisely 5 days after launching the website, Bing has picked us up and ranked us #15 for the term “Normandy Gite“. Not bad for a start. I know Google has been and paid us a visit as I’ve registered the website with Google Webmaster Tools and that shows that we’ve been crawled, but we’re not yet showing in the Index.

Normandy Gite is one of the main keywords I’m keen to rank highly against for my UK target audience, but Bing isn’t that big a search engine for UK, so I’m keen to see how my Google rankings turn out for this search term.

I reckon about 3 weeks before I break into the top 100 on Google… watch this space!