Tourism and handicap

There's legislation in France that requires businesses that the public can enter (us) to be accessible to handicapped people;  it specifies a minimum set of things that you are required to provide.  If you are in the tourism sector you can go farther and qualify for a special label, "Tourism and Handicap" if you like.

We get mostly family groups in the gîte, for significant birthdays, wedding anniversaries and so on, and often there's gran and grandad, their kids and the grandkids, sometimes great-grandkids.   Gran and grandad are often getting on a bit and suffering from the general problems that come with age.  So we decided to go the extra mile, and with the help of some excellent advice from the local tourist board, we made the changes and got the appropriate label.   They inspect you once every few years, and they're coming tomorrow.

This was a spur for a little bit of work today.   One of the things they check for is anything that might trip or catch out a visually impaired person, and we recently installed some new parasols.  The bases are weighted down by decorative concrete slabs, but the bases stick out a bit from the slabs, so I had to shorten them.   

Cue some noisy work with an angle grinder.  There were three bases to deal with, so the job was done in half an hour or so.   I was surprised and pleased at how much better the whole thing looked afterwards.