Bonjour!!

Dinner in La Gand Bornand

Walking down the Mountain

Driving to France was easy and the view of Lake Geneva and surrounding landscape took our breath away.  Turning from the highway into the town of Evian we understood why they bottled that water! It was a hot day and it was so tempting to park the car and just run into the lake and have a big drink at the same time!  We started the climb towards our campsite, winding and steep, and after a while the Sat Nav (we’ll call it Karen from now on!) told us we would reach our destination in 10 minutes.  Great, we thought, we made it within 3.5 hours, which will give us loads of time to settle in before dinner time.  We were still driving through green mountain pastures with the odd farmhouse along the road when Karen tells us we will reach our destination in 2 minutes.  That’s a bit weird, we thought, there’s no sign of a campsite here.  And sure enough, in a village with three houses and one church and a few cows we were told we had reached our destination.  Parked outside one of the houses we consulted the map.  Karen had brought us to the wrong ‘La Clusaz’.  Apparently there are two!  We searched Karen’s information for the other La Clusaz, and after another hour of driving we finally reached our ‘real’ destination in La Grand Bornand, in the French Alps.

We knew then why people choose to live in France.  The scenery is magic, our campsite 250m from a charming village full of character with a market once a week (they close the roads, and it’s just like the type of French market you would imagine, fresh fruit and veg, hundreds of sausages and cheeses, bowls and bowls of olives and all sorts of other things).  We have a pool (you have to wash your feet first and ‘non shorts allowed’ only ‘undies undies bathers’!) and there’s a playground in the village, a tennis club and a sports acro and trampolining club who set up outside and train there for the summer!

We found that our French was quite rusty after being in German speaking countries for 5 weeks but the good thing is, although we thought we didn’t know much German we automatically came to use it with shop keepers and waiters which proves we have picked up more than we thought!

Monday we caught a gondola up and hiked back down, and just because it was down, doesn’t mean it was easy!  It was about 500m vertical, a winding track full of rocks and mud.  We had the stroller (I swear those wheels are going to fall off very soon!).  It took us 2 hours, but gorgeous views of the hills and mountains and the valley below where our campsite was.  The next day our butts were extremely sore!

We have found it difficult adjusting to the French ways of doing things, as its totally different to the other countries we have been in.  They are certainly laid back!  Nothing opens till 10am.  Then closes again for lunch between 12 and 2pm.  We put the kids into the crèche Wednesday afternoon thinking we would enjoy a long lunch, taste some traditional French cuisine and local specialities, have a couple of wines only to find that nowhere was serving lunch, lunch time service finishes at 2pm!  (We had met an Australian man with a boy in the crèche who came here for his honeymoon 10 years ago and never went home! and so didn’t reach town until after 2pm).  We eventually found a place serving only pizza, so that had to suffice.  And then today, the kids in the crèche again, we wanted a crepe and coffee at 9.30am.  Couldn’t get one.  No-one opens till 10 (if we’d have known we would have waited but we only found this out afterwards).  So we settled for a Pain au Chocalat from the Pattisserie instead. 

And nowhere serves dinner until 7pm.  Which doesn’t work for us.  So it’s been pizza or cold chicken and salad all week!  Oh, C’est La Vie….

Hats by Monika