Hi dear (potential) guests!
I’m Isaura, your not-so-average 30-something year old Belgian expat, currently living and working in Germany, adventurous spirit with a passion for travel, discovering cultures around the world and the beautiful wonders mother earth has to offer. My motto is: “the things you’ll regret most in the end, are the things you didn’t do”. Something I inherited from my father.
So how did I end up buying a house in the south of France, you ask? It’s a long story, starting in the 1990s with the divorce of my grandparents. After my now deceased grandfather retired, he and his second wife decided to spend the rest of their lives together in more rural, warmer climates. Via a friend they discovered this beautiful house and it was love at first sight. Now, about 25 years later, “Tonton and Milou” found themselves growing older, and therefore less capable to manage the property themselves. On top of that, due to illness, they found that medical care was not as easily accessible as it is in the city they used to live in. So they decided to move back there and sell the house that was a big part of the summers of my youth.
As I was growing up, I always said that one day, if I get the chance, I would own this little piece of heaven on earth. And luckily for me, the stars were in my favor. This however was an indirect consequence of a very dark day in my life. After graduating med school in Leuven (Belgium), I moved to Germany to become a gynecologist. I really started blossoming there, felt like I was in exactly the right spot for the very first time in my life, being good at what I do and with an insatiable hunger for learning all there is to know about the female body and it’s problems and solutions. On a certain day I was doing a 24-hour shift in the delivery room when my mom called me with the most devastating message I ever heard: “your father was found dead in his bed”. My father, 54 and bustling with life the last time I talked to him, suffered a heart attack in his sleep. He left his girlfriend of 14 years and 3 young daughters of which I am the eldest. No exaggeration to say this event marked mine as well as my sisters’ lives. For me, it made me into a more spiritual, emotional being, after being a very rational thinker for the biggest part of my adult life before that. I went on a quest to find meaning and I learned that my intuition is my most powerful gift, which leads me to the places I need to be in life and the events that are supposed to happen for me. And I’ve been very lucky after that, that is, if you want to call it luck.
So when the time came and my grandparents wanted to sell the house, I had exactly the amount of money needed for buying it, I found exactly the right bank to help me finance it, we found exactly the right people to take our father’s house off our hands and so on. Like I said, all the stars aligned and helped me realize my dream of buying this place, as if somebody actually planned it. I’m not gonna say it’s all been peanuts, but I’m definitely saying I’ve been a lucky girl. And so, Val Paradis opened it’s doors in June 2022…
I hope this piece of my personal history helps you guys enjoy your stay even a little bit more, and treat it with the respect it deserves. I wish you a very warm welcome in my little piece of paradise and thank you for choosing to stay with me in Paradise Valley!
