Happy 2nd Birthday NOAH!!

My first bike

nee naw nee naw nee naw!

On Tuesday in between small trips to nearby towns, including Brantome and Peregeux (the capital of this region) we managed to find a toy shop and bought Noah a little bike (no pedals, you can just run along and then lift up your feet!), a police car that turns into a fire truck by flipping over when it reaches a wall, and a shapes/colours/numbers puzzle (we snuck in a Rapunzel puzzle for Amelia too, all she talks about is Rapunzel).  We selected his presents then as I distracted the kids in another section of the store Maciek sneakily made the purchases, and even had them gift wrapped, which was a bonus as it meant I didn’t have to look around for sticky tape and wrapping paper!

Princess Funky Buns

He loves his new toys, and in the morning we went to the village bakery and bought some scrummy creamy cakes for the planned celebration, and tied some balloons to the tree outside.  The lady who owns the property (Alison) and her two sons joined us for a mini party of caramel popcorn, pretzels, Dora chocolate biscuits (hooray!) and jelly crocodiles, and of course the cakes and coffee! (chocolate filled profiteroles, eclairs and strawberry flans!)  We used a little sponge and custard cake in the shape of a pig for the two candles and all sang Happy Birthday to You!  He had a bit of trouble blowing the candles out as he’s only ever done it once before and of course we haven’t been practicing!

We saw these bikes a lot in Germany and Austria.  It teaches the kids to control the bike, balance and steer before worrying about pedaling.  As a result there were so many kids no older than 3 riding proper bikes with pedals, no problem.  Not a stabilizer in sight!

Just for laughs:  Amelia has three invisible friends – Rosetta, Maydee, and I Love You.  She also tells me that when she’s older and has her own kids she’s going to call them Rapunzel, Shine, Glitter and Santa (Santa is the boy).  LOL!!!!

Also, thanks to everyone for the birthday messages on facebook, skype and emails.  It helped make Noah’s day extra special! xx

Boating in Brantome

In a French Country Garden….

emailing in the courtyard

Our cottage - Le Balcon

Stupidly we drove from our place in the mountains seven hours straight, no stops at all, to here in the south west of France in the region of the Dordogne. 

The Grubs

We were waiting for the kids to fall asleep and then planned to stop when they’d woken up.  But they didn’t sleep for 5 HOURS!!  So then we just thought we may as well keep going.  We could have stopped earlier, but we’d packed enough food and drink for the day and nobody needed a wee so we didn’t see a point!  The roads were good, no traffic, but with hindsight, it was dumb, as Maciek’s eyes were almost popping out of his head and he had a terrible headache once we arrived. 

We are staying at a place called Le Grezes, near the village of Tocane St Apres.  As Maciek said this place is lovely.  It’s a farmhouse and barn, a few hundred years old (now we’re in my neck of the woods – mountains shmountains!).  The cottage we are staying in used to be part of the stables attached to the barn and the whole place is full of French country charm and character.  The ceilings are slanted (and so are the floors – I placed my little round bottle of perfume on my very lady like dressing table only to watch it slide towards me!) and striped with original wood beams, and there’s a huge one in our bedroom over the door that leads to the balcony (even I have to duck!).   There is a grapevine winding around the balcony complete with unripe green grapes, and the pool is a few steps away.  There’s loads of space for the kids to run around amongst various fruit trees (to my horror Noah loves collecting the rotten apples that are strewn along the ground) and an area where we’ve being playing Boules in the evenings.  The lady that owns it is from the UK and has been here with her two sons for three years.  She’s lovely, and unlike other accommodation we’ve had, she has provided us with a kettle, a microwave AND a toaster!  Not to mention lots of other little luxuries like a wardrobe and bedside tables (matching set of course!) and a welcome pack of a baguette, jam, red wine and she also went to the trouble of putting some milk, bottled water, and orange juice in the fridge as well as tea and coffee in the kitchen, which was all EXTREMELY welcome after a 7 hour drive!

Milly's new bikini's

To date it is the best accommodation we’ve had (the last place had been decorated some 40 years ago and never been changed, and it was filthy – we had to buy the kids some crocs to wear inside as their feet were constantly black!)  We seem to be unable to find a balance though.  Whereas the last place was walking distance to a gorgeous village and many attractions, the actual accommodation was horrible, and I found myself counting down the ‘sleeps’ till we could leave!  And although this accommodation is awesome, it’s in the middle of nowhere so requires driving, even to the bakery in the morning.  Hopefully somewhere along the line we’ll get it right!  The nice thing is about this place is the peace and quiet.  Sitting outside in the evening, once the kids have stopped shouting and fighting in bed, it’s silent.  Except for that annoying donkey and the occasional mooooo……

The Chateux seen from the driveway

Royale with Cheese

Hi there, we have arrived in the south west of France and apart from our lovely accommodation, which Melanie will write about, there hasn’t been too much to write home about as yet. So I will write about our experience at the French McDonalds today.

This was only the second time we have had Maccas in Europe, we try to stay away from it because it’s crap. We were driving into another old town and there it was, the golden M.   It had a big playground and it was close to lunch time so we decided that rather than spend an hour looking around an old town for something to eat we’d just have it.

What is This???

The girl at the counter didn’t speak any English so with my best French I proceeded to order:

2 large big mac meals with fries, one with coke, one with water

2 happy meals with nuggets, with fries, I didn’t know how to order a juice so I asked for water

When the order came I had everything for us and 2 happy meal boxes with 2 small cokes, I tried to question the coke but just got a blank stare so I thought ‘that’s not a bad effort we’ll settle for the coke, the kids can drink mels water’.  When we open the happy meal boxes there were two hamburgers, no nuggets. Our kids don’t know hamburgers, they know nuggets. They don’t eat what they don’t know so they had to settle for just fries for lunch and a strange banana and strawberry milk thing that looks like yoghurt. They were happy with their toy though, which was some weird contraption which apparently belongs on the top of a pencil.  I on the other hand didn’t want to waste their burgers so I ate them which in turn resulted in us spending our time in the old town looking for a public toilet and fast.

Every time I eat McDonalds I say ‘never again’.  And again I said it today. The cool thing though about McDonald in France is, like John Travolta said in Pulp Fiction, you can get beer.  But it’s not some expensive extra.  You can get it as part of your Big Mac meal, instead of coke for example, how cool is that?

Maciek

Annecy and Chamonix

Lac Annecy

By the Canal in Annecy

Lunch in the Park

On Tuesday we took a daytrip to Annecy, about half hour drive away.  Set on Lake Annecy, again surrounded by mountains and villages, the town of Annecy for us tops everything we’ve seen so far!  With winding cobbled streets and alley ways and characterful buildings dating back hundreds of years, it is ‘the Venice of the Houte-Savoie’ with canals streaming through it.  The water is crystal clear though, unlike the real Venice (and no pigeons!).  It is just stunning!  On the lake you can hire pedal boats, motor boats with deck chairs and a mini water slide atop, or just camp under an umbrella and enjoy a swim.  You can ride a gondola through the canals, or buy a ticket and relax on the ferry for an hour, taking a circuit of the lake, which is what we did.  For lunch we bought a baguette and some fresh strawberries from the market and found a mini enchanted forest with a stream and had a picnic (we’ve given up on eating out after we tried on Monday in La Clusaz and had death stares from an old french couple because of Noah’s reluctance to sit still and eat his pizza, and Amelia spitting hers out because she didn’t like the cheese!) It’s indescribably beautiful.  And I don’t think even the photos can capture it.  It’s a place you just have to see!

Another canal

Old prision

Mt Blanc, Chamonix

Thursday we decided to visit Chamonix for the day, one of the top ski holiday destinations.  It was a steep climb and a steep descent to get over a mountain to reach the valley to take us there.  We know of Amelia’s car sickness, and are prepared for it with Kwells and sick bags.  Not so with Noah, who vomited twice!  So once we arrived in Chamonix our first mission was to buy Noah some new clothes, as he reeked!  But he’d fallen asleep, and not wanting to wake him as it would just throw the whole plan for the day off, we pounded yet more pavements looking for Le Office De Tourisme and something for lunch, and a shop to buy clothes to change him into once he’d woken up.  It took the best part of the afternoon.  We found nothing but The United Colours of Benneton which luckily had a sale on.  So little Noah is now running about in designer clothing, all because he threw up!  And the funny thing was, in the shop, Amelia asked if she could get new clothes if she got sick?  So we bought her a tinkerbell t-shirt just so she didn’t miss out!  Unfortunately our day in Chamonix was overshadowed by vomit!  But also the magnificent mountains all around, and Mount Blanc which peaks at the height of about 4850m (which Maciek tells me is quite impressive!)  It’s actually very intimidating standing in the village with that towering over you.  The gondola’s and trains going up were very expensive (nearly E100 for the family) and we weren’t sure about the kids and the altitude (you can get a gondola up to 3770m!), so we gave it a miss.  Maciek definitely wants to come back when the kids are older to sample the heights.  And I’d like to come back to sample some fondue without the stench of sick! 

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

Somewhere over the Mountain...



Lucern



Tanja, Jolie,Amelia & Donna-the horse



Friday we took a long drive towards the south of Switzerland, near Thun, to visit my life time friend Tanja.  I met Tanja 25 years ago on a Christmas trip with my cousin to Germany.  We’ve kept in touch ever since, and have only seen each other twice since our initial meeting, so this made it the third!  She now lives on a beautiful property high up in the mountains surrounded by fields and forest with her cute little daughter Jolie and two horses to look after, and of course her husband who unfortunately we couldn’t meet as he was away on business.  We ate lunch outside in the lovely sunshine and while Noah slept we helped rake the horse arena!  It was fun being out in the sunshine with lovely views and chatting while we worked.  Poor Tanja has such a huge job looking after all that land and a little one I only wish we could have stayed a few days and helped her out!  I think Maciek’s ideas about helping on a farm are fading after that!  She made us some delicious Canadian coffee (she lived in Canada for some years and has it sent over, I don’t know the name of it but it was so nice!) and a yummy chocolate cake while the kids raided another child’s toys!!  It was really lovely seeing Tanja and meeting her little girl, and hopefully if we stay in Austria for a while it won’t be seven years before we meet again!



Tanja's place - gorgeous ( for sale too)



From Tanja’s we took the ‘scenic’ route (Karen’s choice, not ours) through some pretty hairy and scary mountain roads, (nearly lost the side mirror a couple of times, and at one point while climbing a steep section of road, we got stuck behind a tractor, which was trailing a ride on lawn mower!) to Lucerne, a city we both remember from our Contiki days!  We didn’t arrive till 6.30pm, and had just enough time for a quick dinner and a wander around.  It was nice actually in the evening, as the weather was lovely and there were only a couple of tour groups oohing and aahing and snapping pics!  Needless to say, Lucerne is another one of our favourites.

We’ve had three full days in Switzerland, visiting friends and famous places! (“how do you know so many people in Switzerland?”, said Suzanne!)

Peach and Monika were fantastic hosts.  We really enjoyed sitting up in the evenings and chatting, eating Ben & Jerry’s and drinking tea (of course Peach and Maciek didn’t have tea, they had BIER, because they’re MEN!)  Every evening we had a delicious meal to come home to.  Monika even made hats for the kids!  Thanks guys – we really appreciate all you did and your company.  And thanks Yannik for sharing your precious toys!

And no, as tempting as it was, we didn’t set up a Swiss Bank Account…..

Suzanne & Rapunzel

Suzanne, Victoria & us

Lenzburg Shloss 

Thursday we visited Suzanne, a friend I used to work with in Dublin.  She lives a half hour drive from Peach and Monika but its lucky my memory held out for her street name as the Sat Nav had us pull up outside an electrical store!  Her street was on the corner of this one, and luckily it was signposted, as we have come to find that not many streets are in this part of the world!  By the way the name of our guide on the Sat Nav is Karen, who is Australian.  Karen has a habit of leading us up the garden path, and it doesn’t help that Maciek gets so confused with his lefts and rights, especially when this is a typical instruction – “keep left on A223, then keep right, take the exit ramp and then keep left, then take the 3^rd exit right on roundabout”!

Suzanne made us a lovely lunch with her 3 gorgeous girls (once again Amelia and Noah had a field day with little Victoria’s toys!) and showed us around her surprisingly large and beautiful house set over 4 floors!  (it’s deceptive from outside, tucked away there around the back – I only found it as I knew her garden was being renovated and so I followed a gardener/builder type looking man to her front door!)  After lunch Suzanne proved herself as the new coffee maker of the household (move over Andries!). 

King Maciek & Heir

Mummy's Knight in Shining Armour

Suzanne told us of Lenzberg Castle not far from Peach and Monika’s so on the way home we stopped in for a look.  It dates back to the 11^th century and has a museum and at the top of a winding staircase in the tower is a kids museum, full of medieval dress ups including jewellery and hats and a mini castle the kids can play in, plus puzzles, dolls and other toys, and colouring in and games!  We had so much fun trying stuff on and taking photos.  But as we arrived a bit late in the day we had to cut it short.  But what a fun day! Thanks Suzanne!

Rapunzel in her Tower