Category: Travel

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Week 23 (France 18 – Carcassone and Audenge)

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Where were we?

We began the week in Carcassonne, then headed west to the Atlantic coast and the Bay of Arcachon.

Where should we have been?

Tokyo.  Actual Tokyo.  Still feel a bit (a lot actually) cheated. 

And Kyoto, where we should have stayed with Ben’s friend Waka and where Harriet was longing to find out more about (and maybe even wear) a kimono.

What did we actually do?

Carcassonne

We had one full day left in Carcassonne. We didn’t exactly have a plan, but some tips from friends and a quick google saw us formulating a very busy last day.

The Canal du Midi runs through Carcassonne and was a short ten minute stroll away from where we were staying.  Harriet had visions of a leisurely meander along a wide, plane-shaded towpath and Ben was fondly remembering a family narrowboat holiday some thirty years ago.

Sadly it was not quite to be. The towpath was very narrow and crowded with cyclists and litter-pickers (heartfelt thanks to them) and so there was rather a lot of leaping into the nettles.  It was also very hot.  The lovely plane trees did a fabulous job of shading the road that runs along the canal but left the towpath itself in full sun.  Quite a few of our walking party had been unenthusiastic when we left, and their spirit of adventure deserted them further in the dusty heat.  We headed home…

But only briefly as we had decided that although we generally try to cook for ourselves, we fancied a Sunday lunch out. Sophie had identified a nice looking restaurant back in the Cité and so we headed up the hill (for the second time that day for Ben who had heroically been for a run before breakfast) for a slap up meal of duck and ice cream (not together).

We had a quick peek in the Basilica too.

Then off to the Lac de la Cavayère – a man made lake about fifteen minutes from Carcassonne and home to Carcassonne Plage. We staked out a spot on the beach and enjoyed the welcome cool of the water. We even got the Strandbeest to work!

We were in full sight of an array of It’s a Knockout-style inflatable obstacles and so after a good hour of splashing and dunking in the shallows we set off round the lake to have a go too. 

It was after 5 and we were the last group allowed in so our paid-for hour ended up being nearly two as we clambered, sprawled, fell and laughed our way up, over and in.  It was extraordinarily hard work and brilliant fun.  We all had achy shoulders and random bruises the next day, but they were worth it!

Lac de la Cavayère was also home to our beasties of the week though sadly only some of them would consent to be photographed. As we walked through the woods surrounding the lake, the noise of the cicadas was all around. Lucy and Ben spotted one high on a tree.  It was surprisingly big and made a ridiculously loud noise for an insect.  

At the lake itself, Harriet disturbed a proud mother and her eight babies.

And on the way back, Magnus spotted a bird he’d never seen before. Harriet turned her head just in time to see a flash of orange and a chessboard of black and white.  Our first ever hoopoe!

We didn’t take this picture.  It’s from Pixabay. But how brilliant is this bird?

Audenge

We headed away from the arid hills of Carcassonne on Monday morning, travelling West and North towards the Atlantic coast.  The landscape became greener as we travelled, with fields of sunflowers making way to rows of vines.

We crossed the Garonne, wide, oily and green like a lazy python and came into a flat land of bare-trunked pines and big skies.  The houses are single-storey and often wood framed, with shallow pitched roofs.  It feels an entirely different country from the Chartreuse.

If the Bay of Arcachon is a dolphin leaping in from the Atlantic, we are almost at its nose, in the small town of Audenge. We picked Audenge on the basis it was half-way between Arcachon and Bordeaux and because the house fit all our criteria. It was a lucky find. The village is sleepy and quiet but with two excellent boulangeries, a greengrocer and a useful supermarket. More excitingly, it has oyster-fishers huts in fisherman’s-jersey stripes, and a massive free salt-water swimming pool. Harriet has enjoyed an early-morning swim or two.

We haven’t spotted many interesting wild flowers this week, but the hedgerows are full of both blackberries (mostly disappointingly not quite ripe, although we have been enjoying those that are) and sloes. Harriet is wracking her brains as to how she can a) fit them in the car and b) keep them going for three weeks before we get home. Gin anyone?

We also found the world’s biggest pine cone.

Dune du Pilat

One of the major attractions of the area is the Dune du Pilat: Europe’s largest sand dune – 107 metres high and containing 60,000,000 cubic metres of sand. It is still growing and is moving inland, swallowing up the ancient oak and pine forest behind it.

On Bastille Day, after a quick dip in the salty pool, and forgetting that the entirety of France was on holiday, we headed out to explore it.

The car parks were heaving and there were more people at its base than we have seen in one place for many months. There were not many masks in sight but they had installed both the ubiquitous hand gel and a one way system to approach the dune.

You pass through the shady gloom of the woods, sand underfoot, not entirely sure what to expect and then the wood ends suddenly and there is, quite literally, a wall of sand one hundred metres high in front of you, people spread across and toiling up it like desert insects.

We joined them. The landward side is the steep side and the walk up was a short and very sharp shock; the epitome of two steps forward one step back. (There are temporary stairs fixed in high season, but we didn’t fancy them). The sand was bakingly hot underfoot, and entirely pristine to our right where no one had walked.

At the top an entirely unexpected vista. Colour blocks of turquoise blue, palest gold and impenetrable green.

The seaward side is a much gentler slope and although we knew that to go down inevitably meant to come up again, the sight of the Atlantic and Cap Ferret across the bay were too tempting. We ran down. For the sheer joy of it.

A hard hour or so on the beach and a rather harder slog back up the dune were rewarded with an excellent ice cream from one of the many shops at the car park side of the dune. We may have to go back.

Wine tasting

Harriet had done her research (of course) and several websites had recommended Château Bardins, in Pessac-Léognan, as having child-friendly tours. The château and vineyards are just south of Bordeaux, so we braved the typically heavy traffic and watched as the pine forests gave way to ranks of well-tended vines.

The château itself is a stunning nineteenth century house, looking very friendly and lived-in. Stella, our host and fifth-generation winemaker, made us feel very relaxed and welcome. Her English was excellent, which meant the children could be more engaged, and she first apologised that her dog – looking on longingly from behind the door, could not join us on the visit, as he had been a naughty boy and got muddy in the river. We then started our visit by feeding a bucket of carrots to some sheep.

The visit continued by visiting a vineyard, where we learnt that grapes can get sunburnt, and how new and old vines differ. After pausing to have a conversation with a chicken, while Stella sold some wine to a wholesaler, we went inside the winery itself.

Up to this point, everything had felt rather timeless, possibly a bit dusty, and organic – indeed the wines are Bio-certified. Inside was much more industrial, with polished metal presses and vats.

The racks of oak barrels brought us back to more organic geniality, then on to the tasting, which included grape juice (hints of apricot, perhaps?) for the children, and a range of increasingly smart wines for us. It would have been rude not to buy a little…

Bordeaux

From our wine tasting we went on, by popular demand, into Bordeaux. None of us had ever been here before and we were hugely impressed by how beautiful and stately it was.

A particular treat was the Miroir d’Eau, reflecting both the magnificent buildings of the Place de la Bourse, and, rather less magnificently, us.

It was also the first day of the sales, so Rue Sainte Catherine, the longest pedestrianised shopping street in Europe, was heaving with unconcerned but mostly mask-wearing bargain-hunters. We managed to escape with only 15 minutes in H&M/ the lego shop.

Aqualand

When we were planning our World Tour of France Magnus had one request: could we visit a water park?

So on Thursday we did. It was dull and overcast but that just meant less suncream.

Aqualand Bassin d’Arcachon is a bit shabby but otherwise entirely fitted the bill, with an array of slides, lazy rivers and wave pools to keep everyone happy for a full day.

Magnus was, in his own words, “a bit sad and angry at the end”, but nonetheless he also says he had a good time and a bit of food and some sleep seems to have fixed it for the moment.

Tour du Bassin

The entirety of the Gironde has been blessed with a fantastic network of Cycle Paths, some on old railway routes, some purpose-built meandering through forests, and others separated from the roads they run beside.

In the main they are well-signposted and well-maintained. There is also a well-practised custom of priorité-à-velo with the majority of cars stopping to let (6 increasingly hot and bedraggled) cyclists over a road, where the cycle path crosses. Unlike cycling in Chartreuse, there are no hills.

On Saturday we took advantage of this network, and bit off as much as we could chew by attempting the Tour du Bassin: a complete circuit of Arcachon Bay, including a ferry across the mouth from Arcachon to Cap Ferret.

Having booked ferry tickets for us and our bikes, we hired said bikes the evening before, leaving the car there, so that we could set off earlier, and avoid some of the heat expected on Saturday.

Our morning route to Arcachon and the ferry varied between entirely rural, suburban and occasional town centres, with highlights being lovely pine woods (they smelled fantastic) south of Gujan Mestras, the mansions of Arcachon high society and long straight stretches of former railway tracks down from Audenge to the brilliantly named Biganos.

The ferry was a little uncomfortable – a hot wait on a pier followed by sitting in a mask and not eating the lunch we had just bought and thoroughly deserved. Very little attempt at social distancing too, which is uncharacteristic in such an enclosed space. There were good views of the Dune de Pilat as we crossed.

After a sandwich lunch upon arrival at Cap Ferret, our second half rolled gently through coastal pine forests, accompanied by cicadas, along smooth sinuous paths which kept us away from both roads and any sight of the miles of beaches just over to our left.

We were grateful when we were in the shade, as the heat was intense, and while Ben was delighted with being on a bike, everyone else was getting more uncomfortable in both legs and bottom. (Business idea No. 35856: invent a bike saddle that actually suits a woman)

Having turned the corner to head inland and home, we stopped at the first place we could find in Arès, for cold drinks (and a pot of Assam tea) then rejoined the old railway to pedal the weary last few kilometres home.

We were hugely impressed by all the children. 71.7km is a long, long cycle, and given the heat, a magnificent achievement. The car thermometer was registering 42°C when we got back, and although this seems a little exaggerated (I (Ben) always think that measuring temperature is not a car’s core skill) it was well over 30° from lunchtime on. We all slept well after a barbecue on our return.

How was it?

Good bits:

Magnus: The Carcassone lake was good because of the fact that there were inflatables. Aqualand was AWESOME because: water park, what’s not to like?! Dune de Pilat was literally a desert or a mountain of sand.

Sophie: My favourite memory of this week was the waterpark because there was so much to do that was all fun!! I also really enjoyed when we did the inflatable thing in the water. At the beginning I wasn’t sure about the pools of sea water but after a little bit I really enjoyed playing in them. When I had an oyster was quite exciting! I had good fun when we had pizza and phones for a night. The beginning of the cycle was fun as well.

Lucy: The Carcassonne lake was awesome, I had such a fun time. I enjoyed swimming in the seaside pools. Bordeaux was lovely – I adored the Mirroire d’eau and I actually enjoyed the sales shopping (especially because I got a new jumpsuit). The cycle was lovely at times. Aqualand was fun – so much that I didn’t know what my favourite bit was!

Ben: Uncharacteristically I have enjoyed some of the sandy and open watery activities this week. I even went into the sea, briefly, below the Dune de Pilat.

Lots of lovely memories this week – I loved cycling through the forests on our big ride, tasty bread, oysters, a lovely meal out with Harriet (thank you brother Tim), a great Airbnb house to stay in, but I think my favourite was the city of Bordeaux.

I didn’t have any expectations and I was blown away by its magnificent river front, and then by its beautiful streets and sheer class. I would love to return and explore it more fully (perhaps we should just move permanently). We worked out we could get there by train from Berwick-upon-Tweed in time for supper.

Aurora: The inflatable lake thing was SO fun, the pools by the sea were really cool, Dune de Pilat, Aqualand was THE BESTTT. Late night and pizza was super fun and the cycle was amazingly sore on my bum but fun.

Harriet: There have been lots of good bits this week. I feel safe (as it’s actually been 8 days) in tempting fate by saying that there have been many fewer arguments. We may actually, after 24 weeks/17 years (delete as applicable) be learning to live together.

For me the unexpected highlight of this week has been the pools here in Audenge. I have snuck off several times for a swim on my own and the combination of sun, salt water and yet no pesky waves or, barely, other people, has been bliss. Even better when I get to bring back blackberries to put in my breakfast.

The Dune du Pilat was magical. I have never been anywhere like it. It has veen a very long time since I have run just for the sheer pleasure of running, but going helter skelter down the sand towards the endless blue of the sea was a memory I will guard.

I hugely enjoyed our cycle, at least until my bottom got sore. Pootling along mostly flat ground is my idea of cycling. I loved the cicadas too, especially the pair that were perfectly matching triplets against quavers.

I thought Bordeaux was wonderful. I’m very excited about the possibility of a grown up weekend there in the future. We have worked out we can get there by train in less than 12 hours.

Bad bits:

Aurora: Not having Duplo A to talk to!

Harriet: Now that we are travelling again I am realising that I am very bad at doing nothing. I need, most of the time, to be doing something (Although I get a bit cross when I feel as though I am being expected to do everything). At home, or in St Pierre, there was, and is, always something that needs to be done. Now that we are travelling again, if we are just in our accommodation, the children, and to a lesser extent Ben, are very happy just disappearing into the Internet. I, on the other hand, get antsy. I could read my book (and I do sometimes) but I start to feel as though I should be doing something constructive, making, or tidying, or, given we are travelling, going out and seeing. I think it is worse because this is not what we planned. I feel we really have to make the absolute most and best of this time in order to justify what we have lost. And some of the time (a lot of the time) a vocal majority of my family don’t agree…

It is an odd thing but four weeks travelling round France, which in any other lifetime would feel like an extraordinary and endless opportunity, doesn’t feel long enough at all.

The return home is also looming and is, if I’m honest, a big dark cloud on the horizon. I’m not entirely sure why I am dreading it so much, but I am. This week people tried to organise a lovely catch-up for shortly after we get back and I went into a flat panic. I can’t cope with the idea of having things that we will be “obliged” to do, even if we are only obliged because we have accepted kind invitations from people we love. I am very frightened that the weight of expectation (mostly in my head) will descend as soon as we return – the need to do everything right and keep everyone happy, and I will end up failing at all of it.

It may be that being aware of the risk will lessen the likelihood but at the moment all thinking about it is doing is ruining my pleasure in the moments we have left. Four weeks has never felt so short.

On a much more trivial note, the traffic around both Bordeaux and Arcachon is awful. We’re not used to that any more.

Sophie: I didn’t like the traffic on the way to Aqualand. My bum being really painful and also my neck.

Lucy: I got a sore bottom towards the end of the bike ride and the traffic jam was rather boring.

Ben: Apart from some traffic delays, any disappointments this week have generally been when I look at what we’re doing from an external and relative perspective.

Now I’m going to whinge about having 4 weeks holiday in France, which feels very inappropriate, but it’s not the adventure it was meant to be. In itself it is lovely, but I can’t help thinking about how I will feel on my return, and there is a lot of regret at not making it to Tokyo, particularly this week.

Brexit has been making me really angry this week too, because of all the conveniences we have been enjoying, which will be gone next year, for not a single benefit. No phone roaming charges, subsidised health care, freedom of movement, and a collective sense of belonging, all disappearing. Most things will be possible, but with greater costs. I am ashamed of the mendacious politicians, and their agents, who have, either by dishonesty or incompetence, brought us here.

Magnus: I didn’t like the cycle because my butt is still sore.

What did we eat?

Oysters! Audenge and the Bassin d’Arcachon are a big oyster-producing area and fresh oysters and other shellfish are sold out of the very picturesque stripey shacks down by the harbour.

Despite reservations from some of us, we headed off for a slap-up lunch. The children were told they didn’t have to eat anything they didn’t want to, and so Magnus may have had an entirely bread-based meal.

Lucy, however, managed a prawn and some aïoli and Aurora and Sophie hugely impressed us by eating an oyster each.

Ben and Harriet had no problem at all in polishing off the leftovers.

We continued our tour of Europe in baked goods by testing Bordeaux’s delicacy, the canelé, a sort of syrup-soaked sponge. It is rather less nice than it sounds.

In the local delicatessen Harriet also spotted some intriguing blackened cakes. They are, she was told, tourteaux, a cheese-based sweet treat. It was too good an opportunity to turn down.

At the till, she wondered if they were local: “Oh yes, from Poitiers!”. Poitiers is, in fact, about 200 miles away. It is also where we are going next so we’re calling the cake early research – it was delicious: very fluffy and light inside and not bitter at all on top, despite appearances.

More mundanely we had to get creative with our easy supper after our afternoon at the lake. We have yet to find an AirBnB with egg cups.

It was a memorable journey from Carcassonne as Ben ate the very last of the sweets we had gathered in Cologne, all those months and hopes ago.

It is perhaps not surprising that the last sweet was liquorice

What’s next?

We leave Audenge on Monday and head North, probably up the left (west) Bank of the Garonne, partly to avoid the motorway traffic, partly to get a kick out of passing all sorts of expensive wine appellations and partly for the fun of the ferry across the mouth of the river.

We have then got two nights in Poitiers, where we may eat more Torteau and we will certainly (by popular request) go to Futuroscope.

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Week 22 (France 17)

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Where were we?

Here. For the last time.

Though we will be back.

And also here.

Carcassone, where we arrived yesterday

Where should we have been?

In that parallel Covid-free universe, this is the week that Tweed got to Tokyo.

We had a great few days in Shanghai before leaving China on Wednesday on the ferry (slow boat from China?) to Osaka. It has a mahjong room and a karaoke suite…

We got the train from Osaka – our first bullet train – to Tokyo and arrived here yesterday. Ben has enjoyed speaking Japanese, which he has been practising daily on our route here. We have a long list of things we want to do here. Including, by popular demand, Disneyland Tokyo. Some of us are terribly excited.

What did we really do?

St Pierre de Chartreuse

Ben found Harriet’s bank card. It was in Lucy’s pocket. Lucy had apparently looked everywhere.

It’s not here…

On Monday our landlords unexpectedly announced they were coming for an inspection visit and arriving on Thursday. As five of us are their direct descendants this was actually pretty good news, but we did want them to feel we had been looking after the place so a cleaning and tidying frenzy ensued.

The conservatory as no one has ever seen it before.

Shuggie and Ele, Ben’s parents and our enormously kind and generous landlords, duly arrived on Thursday evening after an epic drive from Rotterdam. It was utterly lovely to see them.

We had about 16 hours with them but we managed to cram in a swim, a garden inspection, a meal (and some wine) and a lot of chat and cuddles. Lucky us.

Earlier in the week we had another strawberry-fuelled walk. This time we headed up to the Source du Guiers. The Guiers Mort is the river which features large in many of our pictures, although possibly not quite as many as that mountain. It rises in a deep cave in the cliffs behind the village before tumbling down a waterfall and is a pleasant two or so hour walk up.

The route passes through the usual birch woods and up forest tracks, where the strawberries were thick on the ground, before opening into an enclosed meadow. Harriet and Ben did this walk on 21 July 2004, the day they got engaged, and, although it sounds like they made it up, really did find a four-leafed clover in that meadow. It hangs in a frame on the kitchen wall. A few years ago we did the walk again, as a family, and again Aurora found another clover.

Hopes were high, and we were determined, and ten minutes of searching produced not one but three good luck charms.

The cynical ex-biology-teacher among us points out that having four leaves is clearly a mutation that is simply passed to many of the clovers growing in that field but we (including the cynics) are refusing to let that ruin the magic.

Makes us all smile

We also met a lot of our tadpoles’ country cousins, happily swimming in a large puddle. It was reassuring that they too showed no sign of having legs.

The three girls spent a lot of time with their American friend Riis this week, including a movie night, a trip to the mini golf down the hill in La Diat and an ice cream party.

Aurora and Riis got on particularly well and are now trying to work out a long-distance relationship…

Harriet had her second girly drink in two weeks, again with Debbie and Carol and this time with the addition of Debbie’s daughter Chloe. It turns out that having a giggle, and a glass of rosé in the sun, is very good for you.

Magnus meanwhile discovered an ancient bottle of bubble mixture and drove everyone mad leaving a snail trail of soapy water on all the clean surfaces. Harriet then found an online guide to making bubbles within bubbles and she and Magnus had lots of fun (and some frustration) with that. In an appropriate location.

Magnus was also invited to spend an afternoon with his friend Sam. This was a great opportunity for four of the rest of us to go “climbing in the trees” and for Ben to head into Grenoble to claim back the cost of his doctor’s visit, tests and drugs, and to run some other errands.

The climbing in the trees (Is there an English word for this? – in French it’s accrobranche) was great as always, but Ben had a rather more frustrating time in Grenoble. He didn’t have exactly the right forms in exactly the right order to reclaim the money (although this can be done by post) and the china shop, where he wanted to replace some broken plates (astonishingly dating to before our arrival) wasn’t open when it said it would be, and when it did open didn’t have the plates we needed.

So he consoled himself by buying a fondue set. Retail therapy of the most cheesy kind…

At Sam’s, Magnus made a new friend: Oli, whose dad lives in the village. Oli has a trampoline and a scalextric set. Magnus was very happy there for several hours on Thursday while the rest of us cleaned and packed.

Carcassonne

On Friday morning, 117 days after arriving in St Pierre de Chartreuse, we packed up the car, left the fondue machine in the care of Shuggie and Ele, said our goodbyes to our wonderful friends and headed off South and West to Carcassonne.

This wasn’t the most fun journey we’ve had. The traffic was very heavy and it was extremely hot: 37° when we stopped outside Nîmes for a wee and an ice cream. Nonetheless we arrived safely in our home for the next three days, a very nice flat in a rather less nice corner of Carcassonne.

But this is just around the corner

It is a bit of a shock being back in a hot city and none of us slept brilliantly – the bikers of Carcassonne seemingly holding a rally at 2 a.m. didn’t help – but we were up bright and early to take advantage of the welcome overcast skies and cooler temperatures.

We have left the garden and wildflowers of the Chartreuse behind, but the agapanthus in Place Gambetta in Carcassonne were a pretty good replacement

We walked into La Cité, the medieval walled town of Carcassonne and found it just as beautiful as we remembered (but less steep, says Harriet) We were delighted that all four children asked to go and visit the castle and its ramparts.

We were hugely touched by the response to yesterday’s Instagram/Facebook post. People were enormously kind about what we have written and posted in the last 117 days and in particular about how we, especially the children, have coped with this unexpected situation.

We celebrated how proud we are of them all with a lolly/ crêpe/ very large ice cream in the shadow of the ramparts of Carcassonne.

How was it?

Good bits:

Ben: For our Friday Instagram post, I described the process of losing the dream of our transcontinental journey as conforming to the seven stages of grief. I’ve been through anger, denial, bargaining, sadness, etc. The last of these is Acceptance and Hope, and (for the moment at least) this has been my mood during our farewell to the Chartreuse.

I’m delighted my parents came to see us in our / their home, and pleased with how pleased they were with what we had done to (and in) the house.

I am very grateful to the people who discovered antibiotics. I am feeling much better than last weekend.

On a lesser note, it is good to see our “where we are” dot on the blog move, even if it’s not going to get as far as it was meant to.

Sophie: I really enjoyed Riis coming over lots, the ice-cream party was good and I had loads of fun watching a movie on Riis’s terrace and playing with his cat. I had lots of fun at Indian forest although I got lots of wedgies. I adored being able to see Ele and Shuggie.

Lucy: I enjoyed the Source du Guiers walk especially when I found a four leaf clover because I feel we need some luck in this unlucky year. I enjoyed spending time with Riis especially the film and obviously Shuggie and Ele coming was awesome. I love climbing in the trees so Indian Forest was good. Carcassonne is lovely but I don’t have much to note about it.

Magnus: Oli’s house was good because we got to play on his Scaleletrix. I had a blue Mercedes AMG.

Ele and Shuggie coming was good because, well, Ele and Shuggie are really nice. I mostly hugged Ele.

Source du Guiers is one of my favourite walks, because it has these metal crates that you jump across to get across the waterfall.

Harriet: The Source du Guiers walk is always a favourite and didn’t disappoint. I loved the climbing and in particular being aware of how much more physically able I am than I was five months ago.

It was lovely to see Ben’s parents and (honestly) a massive relief that they seemed delighted with the condition of the house. It is good too, although tinged with all sorts of regrets, big and small, to be back on the road again.

The children hate me saying it but I am so proud of how they have grown and changed over the last wee while and the people they are and are becoming.

Aurora: Hanging out with Riis made me smile loads. Indian Forest was fun but I got loads of wedgies. Seeing Ele and Shuggie. The movie with Riis was fun. I loved doing the ice cream party for Riis, skipping bits of cleaning to have lunch with Riis and making Tiktoks with Riis.

And cleaning windows with Riis…

Bad bits:

Aurora: Not having Duplo A and saying bye to Riis.

Harriet: I am sad, for lots of reasons, to be leaving the Chartreuse. There is the big picture of the fact that this really does mean we have failed to do what we set out to do. We will not get to Tokyo in 2020. There is the medium picture of the fact that we have, over the past few months, really begun to put down roots with people and place in the Chartreuse and I will miss them all. And then there is the small stuff – I didn’t see the tadpoles grown up. I never made any wild strawberry jam. There are walks unwalked and rivers unforded.

I am, and I know it’s a controversial opinion, underwhelmed by Carcassonne. The Cité is of course spectacular, but as medieval walled cities go, I think I preferred Aigues Mortes, and the more modern town feels a bit run down and depressed (though the umbrellas are lovely).

It looks great from here though

Magnus: Riis coming round. Cleaning.

Sophie: I am already missing my friends from Saint Pierre (Riis and Milly).

Strawberries can’t help with that.

Lucy: We didn’t do a red Indian Forest run which I wanted to do, there was a lot of waiting around for Daddy after our climbing and it was VERY hot yesterday.

Ben: My trip to Grenoble was a frustrating one, which made me a bit grumpy, and I didn’t enjoy the drive to Carcassonne – too hot and too many cars, and (I’m sure) nothing to do with the nice wine the evening before.

But at least the car was (briefly) nice and clean.

What did we eat?

A lot of leftovers. And the contents of the freezer.

And some very large lollies.

What about the tadpoles?

One of the many lovely things about Ben’s parents arriving is that they can take charge of the tadpoles. This had previously been a cause of concern. We will be following their progress from afar and will keep you updated.

This week they have continued to swim happily, though appearing only when the sun is off their respective pools.

It is nonetheless a sadness that we didn’t see them grow up. We knew exactly where we were going to release them and Harriet in particular was very much looking forward to having, temporarily, an actual box of frogs…

What’s next?

We are here in Carcassonne, fulfilling all Ben’s nine-year-old Dungeons and Dragons dreams, until Monday when we head to the West Coast, between Arcachon and Bordeaux for a bit of beach and wine. It’s not sake and sushi, but it could be a lot worse.

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Week 21 (France 16)

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Where were we?

Still here.  For our last full week.

Where should we have been?

Still in China.  We would have been wending our way North and East towards Shanghai.  Our boat from Shanghai to Osaka was planned for next Wednesday.

What did we actually do?

Ben’s birthday

It was Ben’s birthday on Thursday, the last of our three family Tweed to Tokyo birthdays, none of which has been quite as we expected.

Quite aside from the fact that we are not in Shanghai, Thursday was forecast to be rainy so we had abandoned the idea of a big walk, much to the children’s “disappointment”.

In the event it was gloriously sunny, but in order to keep the birthday peace Ben decided to go on a bike ride instead. It wasn’t too much of a hardship.

We had invited Debbie and Philippe for dinner and we had a fantastically convivial evening with them over three courses, a bit of wine, cake and even some Chartreuse.

Not all of this was drunk.

It possibly wasn’t the most exotic and well-planned birthday Ben had ever had but he says he enjoyed it.

And everything else

Last Sunday Ben and Aurora took advantage of the fact that borders are now open and drove back to Switzerland to see if they could find the long lost Duplo A, last seen at a motorway service station between Geneva and Bern.

Aurora had made a Duplo playlist, and agreed with Ben that this was at best a very long shot of recovery. There is a recurring joke in Asterix in Switzerland about Switzerland being very clean and tidy, so the chances of finding a teddy, from 15 weeks ago, still lying on the ground in a car park were vanishingly slim.

From “Asterix in Switzerland”

After 3 hours on the road, the sight of a man with a leaf blower clearing the car park on a Sunday morning was predictable. There was nothing at lost property either. We came home, knowing we had done all we could for the much-lamented Duplo A.

We started to really think think about packing up and leaving this lovely place. There are various jobs that need to be done to leave it in the best possible state.

We began by turning out the cupboard of old ski kit. A dormouse (of the large, Romans-used-to-eat-them variety) had clearly made a lovely home there over the winter so this wasn’t the nicest of jobs. It is however now done and all the ski kit has been claimed or chucked.

The after photo. Viewers of a sensitive nature might have found the before picture too distressing

Ben got to take his post birthday hangover to the tip as a reward….

The height of fashion and good taste in about 1989. These didn’t make it into the “save it” pile.

We weeded, tidied and swept the garden, cleaned all the kitchen drawers and delved so far down the back of the sofa that we found a pine cone and a very small lego superman watch. We have no idea who either of them belong to.

We also packaged up and posted (at an eye-watering cost) lots of the things we had been so kindly lent, and an even greater number of things that we don’t want to leave here or throw away but which we won’t have room for in the car.  Having arrived here with the bare minimum of winter clothes we have acquired a lot of necessary summer clothes and quite a bit of not-so-necessary stuff.  We will look forward to hopefully seeing it again in 5 weeks.

It turned out that Harriet should have been slightly more sympathetic (not one of her core skills) about the hangover as it wasn’t entirely self-inflicted.  A trip to the doctor for Ben on Saturday morning diagnosed an infection (not Covid for anyone who was wondering) and, this being France, necessitated a trip to Grenoble for blood and other tests.  It all felt a bit like overkill, but he came back with antibiotics and is beginning to get on the mend.

We had another long and fabulous walk up and round the Col de la Saulce.  Ben had cleverly planned this, which was mostly in the shade, for the hottest day we’ve had so far.  Once again we were privileged to be among extraordinary beauty, with woods and meadows and mountains.

Our wild flower stars of this week were the orchids.  We saw five different varieties, three of which were new to us on that one walk.

Orchids: Common spotted (two different colours), Pyramid and Lesser Butterfly

It is true to say that the orchids have done a great job with their branding. There a doubtless huge numbers of equally rare and wonderful flowers here, but we (aka Harriet) don’t get nearly as excited about them.

A leaky pipe about 100 metres away from the house needed fixing on Thursday (Ben’s birthday). This meant that we were without water for about six hours, although we could (and did) fill buckets from the basin of the fountain. This wasn’t hugely convenient when we were trying to prepare a birthday meal, but did mean that the children learned the important life skill of flushing a loo with a bucket.

Note the fountain itself isn’t running…

Harriet’s lovely pale blue shoes didn’t survive their first proper walk entirely intact. 

This made her unreasonably sad.

We did well on our foraging, collecting a large number of (admittedly very small) wild strawberries. We made good use of them in Ben’s birthday cake.

Harriet’s bank card has disappeared. This is irritating rather than anything more serious as we are certain it must be in the house somewhere (she gave it to Lucy to go to the boulangerie and it has clearly been abandoned somewhere Lucy-ish). It’s been temporarily frozen, so all we have to do now is find it…

The lavender is out in the garden and playing host to an array of butterflies, bees and beetles.

We have a new category: fungus of the week. The first winner is amazing, and, when you think about it, quite obviously named, yellow coral fungus.

Magnus and Harriet tackled a kit that he had been given for his birthday and made a Strandbeest.  So far we’ve only manage to make it work with the aid of a hairdryer, but we have high hopes for the Atlantic beaches.

Our best real beastie this week was a very large, very green, cricket.  Sadly he was missing a leg so we suspect he may not have been feeling his best.  It did mean he was pleasantly still for the photo though.

Harriet went out for a spontaneous (uncharacteristic), twenty minute, girly drink with friends Debbie and Carol mid-afternoon and mid-week. It was brilliant fun and she talked way too much.

Lovely friends (former colleagues of Ben’s) came up to visit on Saturday afternoon. They arrived while Ben was in Grenoble getting poked with needles but Harriet had a delightful time sitting in the sun and drinking elderflower cordial with them and their children. 

And later that day we had a party.  We realise that that seems an impossibility for anyone in the UK, but it is totally permissible here and although we did provide hand gel, we don’t think Covid was on anyone’s mind. 

The kids turned it into a pool party and the adults chatted as the sun set over the mountains.  Plentiful rosé was drunk (we will be bringing some back) and nibbles nibbled.  We have been very lucky to meet such lovely people during our time here and it was a delight to be able to spend time with them all.

How was it?

Good bits:

Sophie: I liked the tasty barbecue, and while we’re on the subject of food the naan breads and Daddy’s birthday cake. My favourite part was the party.

The teddies in the window at the tip made me smile.

Lucy: Daddy’s birthday obviously. It was very fun and I enjoyed the dinner. The party – I had some good chats and had lots of fun in the pool. The walk was nice. The strawberries were nicer. Sophie and Aurora were really kind on the day I didn’t have my phone. And I enjoyed today as well.

Magnus: The naans were really tasty and yummy. My Strandbeest was cool. I liked the walk to Perquelin with Sophie and Aurora.

Harriet: Apart from Ben being ill it has been a lovely week.  We really feel as though we have put roots down here and it is lovely feeling part of the village.  Our party was great fun and our little dinner for Ben’s birthday perhaps even better.  I feel (and those who know me will realise this is not always the case) very relaxed.  I am enjoying spending time with our children,  which also isn’t always so.  Perhaps the fact that I am writing this in the hammock and none of them is in earshot may have something to do with that…

Having an excuse to do lots of baking is always a good thing as well. It makes me very happy when people like the food I make.

I was very proud of myself for putting the Strandbeest together too.

Aurora: Going to Switzerland with Daddy was fun but we didn’t find Duplo. I enjoyed making flapjacks, brownies, popcorn and biscuits and helping Mummy make nibbles for the party. The PARTY!!! Athough I spent the whole time trying to get everyone go swimming and no one would come in. I liked going to Riis’s house and getting my new hat because I kept stealing Riis’s. Swimming was really fun and Daddy’s birthday was amazing. Fabulous, beautiful, marvellous, wonderful food. I am the best eater.

Ben: I had a lovely birthday, and am still loving being here and feeling very at home. We have made lovely friends here (whether now or my old colleagues from 20 years ago). It has been satisfying finally to do some of the tasks that I meant to do fairly early on in our stay.

I was quite proud of myself being a big brave boy during my blood test. I am never the best with needles, and I was feeling ropey too. But for goodness sake, I’m 48, and I perhaps I should grow up, and not be such a scaredy cat. Maybe all those injections against rabies and encephalitis weren’t a complete waste of time and money after all.

Bad bits:

Ben: I am rubbish at being ill, and would have liked to have been better company at our leaving party. I’m glad that as I write this (one day later) the antibiotics are having a positive effect, though the side effects of tendonitis (no running or big walks advised) and sun sensitivity, as we set off for the sunniest beachiest bit of our trip, are a bit foreboding.

Aurora: Not having Duplo. People being annoying (I can’t say who but you can probably guess).

Lucy: It all got a bit frantic before the party and there were some scratchy bits on our long walk.

Magnus: I got a massive headache at the party and went to bed in the middle of it.

Harriet: The ten minutes after Ben came back from the doctor and announced he needed to go to Grenoble when we had thirty-odd people arriving three hours later were perhaps not my finest and most supportively wifely moment.

I was disproportionately cross about getting my new shoes muddy, even though I knew it was inevitable.

Sophie: The long walk wasn’t bad if you know what I mean, but you know, it was a long walk.

What did we eat?

Snails. Ben’s birthday treat.

We also had an Eton mess birthday cake, with our foraged strawberries and redcurrants from our friends’ garden (ours aren’t ripe yet). Despite a lot of internet research Harriet yet again failed to identify a variety of French cream that will whip, so it was perhaps less stable than some cakes, but it was tasty nonetheless.

Our party required a lot of nibbles, which, with several sous-chefs (some more enthusiastic than others) and a maître pâtissier in the making (Aurora), were fun to make and even better to eat.

How are the tadpoles?

Not sure. The ones in the bird bath are being more elusive than ever. It has been hot and cloudless for much of the week and we don’t think they like that at all. We have barely seen them all week, and only when it is cloudy. The outside sink colony continue to do well but we still have no sign of legs from any of them.

The water really is that green.

On the upside the outside sink is also now home to a large number of other larval things. If these tadpoles do ever turn into frogs they won’t go hungry.

Probably baby crocodiles. Or unicorns.

What’s next?

This week will mostly be spent tidying, cleaning and packing up. We leave here next Friday.  We have planned and booked our route home and we now know where we will be every night until 6th August when we have a ferry crossing back to the UK. 

The children then go back to school on 11th.  What could possibly go wrong…?

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Five tips for travelling in a post-Covid world

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For those who don’t know us, we set off with four kids from Scotland in February with high hopes and meticulous plans. We were going overland to Tokyo to arrive in time for the Olympics.

Coldstream, Scotland 10 February.

Five weeks in, borders started to close and we made a dash for France, where we have been ever since.

Lockdown in France began to ease in mid-May and from 2 June we were allowed to test the travelling waters again. A week later we packed up and spent ten days staying in hotels and AirBnBs in the South of France. Next week we will pack up for good and slowly make our way across France to head back to the UK (where the Scottish school term will re-start, early, four days after we get back).

Camargue, France. Six days after hotels reopened. We were allowed to travel up to 300km.

As borders start to open up and people start to wonder about travelling again, we thought it might help to share what we learned on that brief trip and what we will be remembering as we travel onwards:

1. Check the rules for your destination and stay up to date with them

Each country has its own Covid rules. These rules change quickly and sometimes without warning. Make sure you know what they are and get the information from official government sites rather than the media.

We thought long and hard about going to Spain next week. Harriet was keen to sneak in an extra country but Ben was worried. He had read in Le Monde (highly respected newspaper in France) that there were quarantine rules between France and Spain. We checked the French Foreign Ministry website. It wasn’t true.

This ferry only goes across a river, but the ones to and from most UK ports are open now too. Check if you can travel.

For us, too, things are further complicated by the fact that we are British, living in France, and wanting to go to Spain. We therefore need to be sure what the rules are for Brits as well as the rules between France and Spain. They aren’t always the same. Different countries are treating different nationalities differently (Greece has just restricted entry for travellers from Britain – does that mean us? We don’t know…). It may also be relevant where else (if anywhere!) you have been in the last few weeks.

Check, check and check again!

In the event we aren’t going to Spain – partly because it will be too hot and partly because the rules for UK travellers coming in by land still aren’t, to our mind at least, clear – but it’s a good example of the need to check your sources and to make sure the information you’re relying on is true.

12 June. On the move again. Avignon, France

Once you are in a new country check the local rules again – Do you need masks? How many people are allowed in one place at once? What are the rules on social distancing? You will feel much happier on your travels if you know you’re not going to get pulled up for doing the wrong thing!

2. Check out the Covid policy before booking accommodation

In our normal life we manage a holiday cottage. It reopens next week and we have been bombarded with sometimes contradictory advice about how to make it safe for guests.

This has, though, given an insight into what to look for when booking accommodation. The key thing, to our mind, is to book somewhere that acknowledges Covid on its website. You can be sure then that they have at least thought about the issues. If you can, call up and ask. Facilities may be different: swimming pools may be closed, breakfast may no longer be served or there may be particular rules on the use of public spaces. Again it pays to research all this before booking.

As far as AirBnB is concerned it seems to us (and we have no proof that this is Covid- related but it may be) that more and more hosts are not providing sheets and towels. Check this! They are “essentials” in the list of amenities and it is not always made clear in the listing if they are not provided. We didn’t realise…

This AirBnB was spotlessly clean and had a private pool. We were delighted to find it available. It had sheets too

3. Check what’s open and book if you can

Many tourist sites, at least here in France, are now open, but do check before visiting. You may need to book in advance as numbers may be limited. You may well also need to bring a mask or make other preparations. At the extraordinary and highly recommended Grotte Chauvet 2 in the Ardèche we had to download their app to enable a non-guided, guided tour.

36,000 year old Rhino, and an empty cinema (with masks) at Grotte Chauvet 2.

Equally some places may have different restrictions in place. During July and August for example only residents of Barcelona can get tickets for Gaudì’s Sagrada Familia.

The upside of this is that many normally very busy places are much more empty – all the Barcelonans will doubtless be delighted to have their cathedral to themselves. And for us tourists, this means that you really can get that photograph where it looks as though you are the only person there…

In a normal year, 10,000 people a day visit the Pont du Gard. When we were there it really was just us. And yes, that is Magnus shouting at his sister.

4. Carry a mask, use hand sanitiser and keep your distance

If you have a mask with you at all times you can use it if required. We have found that some places (restaurants, shops etc) require masks and others don’t. Many say they do, and then actually don’t when you are inside. You won’t necessarily know until you are there. Many restaurants in France require a mask if you are inside the building moving around. So you’re fine sitting on the outside terrace but if you don’t have a mask and you need to go inside for a wee you’re in trouble.

Masks are obligatory on public transport in France. In Spain you can be fined up to €1000 for not carrying one with you at all times.

If you enter a building and they provide hand sanitiser at the entrance, use it. You don’t know what you’ve touched since you last washed your hands and it’s only polite to the other people there.

Find out what the social distancing rules are (of course you’ve done that already because you read tip 1) and stick to them. In fact be generous with them. Just because you feel safe around other people doesn’t mean those people feel safe around you. We met several people working in shops or restaurants who didn’t seem to be comfortable being there, but who had little or no choice. It is only respectful to try to put them at as much at ease as you can.

Palais de Papes, Avignon, again almost eerily empty. Social distancing wasn’t difficult.

5. Remember opinions differ

There seem to be as many different opinions on Covid as there are people we’ve met. Some people will tell you it’s all been blown out of all proportion and some will say you are not being careful enough. One person we met in the South of France said she had given up swimming in the sea because it wasn’t safe with Covid. We never did work that one out.

Staying well away from the sea… just in case.

If you want, and feel safe, to travel, and the advice in your country and the country you want to go to is that it is safe to do so, don’t let anyone else’s opinion stop you. Listen to them, take account of their concerns, make sure your behaviour doesn’t make them unsafe (or even feel unsafe) and then go and enjoy yourselves.

Bon voyage!

We should have been in China now. We’d have seen and done amazing things. But we wouldn’t have seen this or so much else.

Harriet

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Week 20 (France 15)

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Where were we?

Back in the safety and familiarity of St Pierre de Chartreuse.

It doesn’t get old…

Where should we have been

This should have been the end of our third week in China. By now we would have visited Xian, Chengdu (where we would have seen pandas) and Lijiang. We would probably now have been in Guilin.  We would also hopefully have been very familiar with the vagaries of Chinese trains. And very good at eating everything.  

Some of these hills are not like the other ones. Image from Pixabay.

What did we actually do?

After our early morning start to see the sunrise a month or so ago, we thought we would go bigger and better for Midsummer.  The Solstice was actually on Saturday but in Harriet’s head Midsummer’s Day is 21st June and in practice there was less than 4 seconds difference in day length between Saturday and Monday.   Sunday was, however, forecast to be cloudy, so we nominated Monday for an early start.  The intention was to see the sunrise from the top of Charmant Som (1,867m) at 5.29 am.

Alarms went off at 3.30 am and everyone headed into the car (wrapped up warm and armed with a thermos of hot chocolate and a box of biscuits) for the half-hour drive.  The skies were perfect: cloudless and studded with stars.

As with many of our well-laid plans though, it didn’t go quite as intended. As we travelled up the road, the clouds came down to meet us. By the time we were getting out of the car we were in thick fog. We know the path well, so following it wasn’t hard, one step in front of the other. Up into the cloud, we went, the pools of light from our headtorches bouncing in front of us. We could hear the jangling of the cow bells but not locate them.

There was an unspoken hope that either the cloud would clear or we would come out above it, but it was not to be. The summit was wet and cold and the view non-existent. The hot chocolate was all the more welcome for it. Sunrise was also, we discovered, not until 5.49.

Having reached the top at about 5.10, we decided not to hang around for a sunrise we were unlikely to see, and as we descended, the skies lightening around us, the sun suddenly broke through.

It wasn’t the sunrise, as such, but it was pretty close and it was very beautiful.

On Thursday we had a better attempt at Charmant Som, climbing it in blinding sunshine before having the traditional slap-up meal at the Auberge du Charmant Som. In previous years we have felt that the walk earned us the meal. It must be a sign of how much fitter we are that we weren’t entirely convinced we deserved it this time.

Later that day, Louise, a local 13-year-old came round to do some language chat with Lucy. It turns out that she is the daughter of the owner of the Auberge where we had been that afternoon. They seemed to get on OK. Mostly in English though.

Harriet did her annual cartwheel. It was fun: she might have to do more.

This week’s runners up for beasties of the week were rather bigger than usual (and further away in one case)…

No wolves though. Ben had wondered if there might be.

The actual beasties of the week were also pretty tame. Sheep are still pastured on the high alps here and they are still moved on foot from place to place along the paths and roads. Some had been moved into Debbie and Philippe’s field (not a high alpine meadow, but still) earlier in the week. On Sunday evening we got a call – they’re on the move.

They are accompanied by big dogs, that look beautiful but which, we are told, would attack anyone who came close (we didn’t try) and, rather less obviously logically, a donkey (with a bell) and a number of long-horned goats.  The ewes are still lambing, on the hill and unattended, so there were a dozen or so day-old lambs among the flock.  These had to be tracked down and lifted into a van as they aren’t strong enough yet for the walk. They, and their mothers, weren’t delighted to be separated. Harriet and Lucy, on the other hand, were very happy to take the opportunity for a cuddle.

We had another accidental walk on Sunday courtesy of the useless new walks book.  What was supposed to be a beautiful hour’s stroll to a pass turned out to be a rather dull thirty minutes. So we kept going and were treated to spectacular meadows, flowers, woods and views. 

The children weren’t hugely impressed by the additional three hours but were nonetheless very good about the abortive ice cream (the café was useless) on the way home.

Bored with waiting for our tadpoles to do anything interesting, we embarked on a rather speedier biology experiment and are growing cress.

Day 2. The tadpoles are on week 15.

This week’s wildflowers to excite Harriet were Great Yellow Gentians, the last of the Troll (Globe) flowers, Fragrant Orchids (disappointingly un-fragrant), and fabulous Martagon Lilies like something out of the 1001 nights.

We had a fruit of the week too: the wild alpine strawberries that are glowing like sweets in the hedgerows. They’re better than sweets though.

Harriet finally discovered why her feet have been getting so wet on our walks when Sophie pointed out the multiple holes in her six-year-old walking shoes. A trip to Brun Sports in the village sourced her a pair of lovely new ones in an entirely impractical shade of turquoise. Mme Brun also provided an explanation as to why Harriet has been slipling over a lot. The soles had worn entirely smooth…

Whoever designed them clearly never goes walking in the rain.

We had a lovely meal, with ping pong, table football and the Minions movie, with Debbie and Philippe.

Top garden highlight this week were these ridiculously over-pimped (yet self-seeded) poppies.

Ben had a (sort of early birthday) treat on Tuesday, while Harriet and the children had a constructive day at home. Not just a real done-in-a-hairdressers haircut (though that did happen before breakfast), but a big-day-out-on-a-bike. Hiring a gravel bike from the local sports shop (no true road bikes available) he set out to explore some familiar and unfamiliar roads, including some of the areas we had walked on Sunday. 63km, 4 Cols, 1700 vertical metres and the bizarre Voie Sarde (a 17th century path, which enlarged a narrow gorge and greatly reduced the pain of crossing the hills between Dauphiné and Savoie) provided the scenery and adventure for a lovely (if extremely hot) first cycle of 2020. Empty roads, a lovely lunch and a cool off in the pool on a proud return made it all the better.

Clockwise from top left:looking out over Les Échelles, the Voie Sarde, Café stop, the 4 Cols.

A warning light came on in the car as we were coming home on Thursday. Just oil needed, but irritating. We pulled in to the only garage in the area (they don’t sell fuel) intending just to see if they would sell us a bottle of oil. They get top marks for service – they came and checked it, did the statutory humming and hawing, decided it couldn’t hurt to put some in, did so, and charged us….nothing.

We gave them some money anyway.

Inspired by the cave paintings we saw in the Ardèche (ish) we went hunter-gathering for our lunch on Wednesday.  We took Magnus’ friend Sam with us too. About half an hour away you can catch (and despatch) your own trout before having it served to you, cleaned and grilled and with excellent chips.   When you stop and think about it, it’s a rather odd thing to do – the trout are clearly farmed and then put in the ponds – but it was an idyllic setting, in the shade by the river, and five of us had never caught a fish before.  Two of us still haven’t but the lunch was excellent.

On Friday – with the forecast for very hot weather – we went to one of our old stamping grounds: the Cirque de St Même. This is a natural wide and circular valley surrounded by towering cliffs. The Guiers Vif (the twin of “our” river, the Guiers Mort) flows out of a cave in the cliff, down a series of waterfalls and through the valley bottom. It was not, in the end, quite the endless sunshine we were promised: we left early afternoon with thunder echoing off the cliffs and came straight back into very heavy rain, but we still managed a good bit of guddling.

More guddling today when we decided to revisit the “fishes” walk along the old route de St Bruno towards the monastery. We had done this for the first time three weeks ago in very heavy rain with the river pounding its way through the gorge. Today was totally different. In glorious sunshine we paddled in water so clear it seemed impossible. It was bitingly cold but that didn’t stop all six of us getting our toes (and ankles, and knees…) wet.

And Ben and Harriet finally made it into the pool, to great joy and much shrieking from the rest of the family.

How was it?

Good bits:

Lucy: I loved the sheep, especially holding the baby lambs. I liked getting up in the morning and seeing the sunrise. It was really beautiful, I think even prettier than when we saw the sunrise the first time. Just as we were getting in the car to see the sunrise the stars were amazing too. There were so many of them and they were so pretty. I really liked the wild strawberries on our walk. There’s something so energising about that little morsel of sweetness when you put it in your mouth. I enjoyed Cirque de St Même. I always do. I thought the walk today and the guddling today was absolutely amazing. I loved it. I liked swimming as a family together.

Magnus: I liked the sheep, climbing Charmant Som in the sunrise and table football at Debbie and Philippe’s.

Sophie: I loved the sheep because when all the baby sheep were in the car the Mummy sheep would go “maaaaa” and all the baby sheep would go “maaaaa” together like a choir. I liked climbing Charmant Som both times and the sunrise was really pretty. I loved getting Kevin (the teddy Debbie and Philippe gave us). He is a marmot. I also liked playing ping pong and the meal at Debbie and Philippe’s. They are so nice. The fishing was good fun.

Ben: It has been a good week for walks, and I’ve enjoyed each of them in different ways. I am a big fan of walking in beech woods, and the Chartreuse is full of them, even though it often looks to be all fir.

I was relieved that the sun came out on our dawn walk. It had the makings of a TweedtoTokyo classic – looks like a brilliant plan, executed in detail, ruined by factors outside our control.

Getting a haircut has been a bit overdue, and a neater head of hair has been more of a pleasure than it should be.

My bike ride was glorious, and I had been eyeing that route for years, though some saddle adjustment is needed next time – I thought there was something under the carpet when I did morning 5BX sit ups the next day, but it was just a bruised bottom…

Aurora: Fishing, guddling, seeing the sheep, Debbie and Philippe are really nice – I love being with them, getting Kevin, omelettes, making a cake, cleaning the pool, ping pong.

Harriet: My favourite moment of this week was either cuddling the lamb – we had sheep when I was a child and it was amazing how familiar it felt – or sitting on a rock in the middle of the Guiers Mort this afternoon. The water was so extraordinarily clear and fresh and seemed both eternally unchanging, almost solid, and yet endlessly different and alive. Pictures don’t do it justice.

I loved our meals out too. We had a fabulous time with Debbie and Philippe, who seem to have featured large in this weeks post. They have become fabulous friends and we are very lucky to have met them and to have been made so welcome, not just by them, but by so many others in the village. I enjoyed the fishing too – although I wasn’t allowed actually to hold a rod. I am quite proud of how unsqueamish I was about the necessary nasty bits of fishing. (Apologies to any vegetarians). And Charmant Som is always a winner.

Our sunrise expedition was a great example of snatching a victory from an experience that got very, very, close to being an utter disaster.

Bad bits:

Aurora: Not having Duplo A and moving rooms.

Sophie: I think I might have lost my Tiktok no bickering streak this morning. And my slight tan has turned into a bit of sunburn.

Ben: I was determined to be positive this morning, and smile, and sail through any complaints about needing to clean the house, but breakfast was a particular needle-fest and it took our walk and paddle up the gorge to settle things down.

I’m not looking forward to leaving here on a permanent basis. Having spent weeks and months (and some particularly bleak days) wanting to be in other places, there feels like so much more to do here before we go. I feel very at home here. I will miss it hugely.

Magnus: All the flies at Charmant Som

Lucy: It was a bit annoying having my period at Cirque de St Même.

Harriet: I’m not sure Magnus is having a great time at the moment. He seems very angry and frustrated and is very resistant to much of what we suggest, be that new foods or walks or even games. I suspect he, and we, will come out of it, but I am finding that hard and not always reacting very well.

As ever, the bickering has been getting to me too, for all that only one of the children has mentioned it this week.

I am disappointed not to be going to Spain. Ben was reluctant and I do understand why, but I just wanted to be in another country. That’s not a reason to take an unnecessary risk, and, as with the Gorge de l’Ardèche (where I was the reluctant one) we are taking the sensible path.

Separately, I feel (dull introspective thought here) that I spend too much time as an observer. I take most of the photos (although I realise I’m in three of the pictures we’ve posted this week) but that means that much of the time, I am not the one doing or living the experiences. It is interesting that my favourite experiences of the last few weeks have all been ones where, for various reasons, I have not been able to hide on the sidelines. Being me, I am beating myself up about this.

Look! In front of the camera...

How are the tadpoles?

Unbelievably still here, and still tadpoles.  We fear that the hot weather and resulting evaporation has made the water in some of the sections of the birdbath much less hospitable. This is a nice way of saying we think that quite a lot of them are dead. But they may, again, just be hiding. The ones in the increasingly murky, but cooler and shadier, sink, seem to be doing better.

What did we eat?

We enjoyed two lovely meals out (with apologies if that feels like gloating to anyone in the UK).

First, our self-caught fish and chips. 

Magnus would have preferred them battered

And then the always reliable deliciousness that is the Assiette Montagnard and Tarte aux Myrtilles at the Auberge du Charmant Som.

Back at home we were quite chuffed with our home made burger buns.

It’s the salad that makes it too tall.

Lucy and Aurora went baking-tastic and made a fabulous Victoria sponge (which we failed to photograph) and some very large (and very tasty) biscuits.

What’s next?

Tomorrow sees the start of our last full week here, and there will be lots to do to make this happen. We have started booking our stays after Chartreuse, and we will be leaving this wonderful place on 10th July. Our route (North and West in France) is planned, with our departure slightly later than we had originally thought, as we decided not to include a trip to North Spain within our plans. The risks (having problems with getting back into France, Covid uncertainty, not speaking the language – and hence not being able to fix the car or be sure what the ever changing rules are) seemed to outweigh the positives (actually going to another country, being able to find accommodation in Barcelona, churros). We need to book more next week.

Ben has already started washing duvets and bedspreads, with other cleaning (windows, cupboards) planned. It is not all sunshine and mountain views…

It mostly is, though.

There will also be two celebrations. It is Ben’s birthday on Thursday (how bizarre to have had all our TweedtoTokyo birthdays here instead of St Petersburg in April, Mongolia in May and China in July as we expected; when we arrived here we had hoped to be gone by Lucy’s birthday) and we are going to have evening leaving drinks next Saturday with many of the lovely people here who have helped us with so much, and made us feel so welcome.

Sunshine and showers. There’s a metaphor in there.
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Week 19 (France 14)

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Where were we?

There and back again: we started the week in Avignon and ended it back in the safety and familiarity of the Chartreuse.  It wasn’t an epic trip across China, but we did see things that were even older than the terracotta warriors.

Where should we have been?

China.  The original plan was that we would spend a month there, arriving in Beijing in early June and leaving by boat from Shanghai in early July. When we left the UK in February, we hadn’t finalised many more detailed plans than that – at six months distance we didn’t think it was necessary and with news of a strange flu-type disease in Wuhan province, we thought booking anything at that stage was silly.  So all we can say is that we should have been in China, somewhere.  It’s a big place.

Where were we really? What did we do?

Avignon

After our tourist-heavy day in Avignon last Saturday (which culminated in Aurora finally being allowed to buy the shoes she’d wanted since before Christmas and hadn’t been allowed to have as they’d be no use on the trip), we headed away from this beautiful town on Sunday morning.

Unfortunately the handy park and ride bus doesn’t run on a Sunday so Ben and Sophie walked back across the Rhone to get the car, while Lucy and Harriet took a stroll up and behind the Palais des Papes to admire the bridge from above.   It was much better (and cheaper) that way.  And there was an entirely incongruous duck pond.  Magnus and Aurora decided to stay in the flat and enjoy the wifi, which had been much missed in the Camargue.

Suze-la-Rousse

From Avignon we headed North for a little less than an hour to Suze-la-Rousse.  You won’t have heard of it (though it does have a very nice chateau) as its major attraction (for us at least) is that Harriet’s Uncle and Aunt live there. They had very kindly invited us for lunch – their first guests since deconfinement.

This was therefore a first glimpse for us of what it must be like for many of you reading this – we saw family but only from a safe two metre distance.  It was lovely to see them and they treated us royally (including digging out books for Harriet and a huge amount of lego for Magnus, which we have borne off in triumph).  They also gave us some great hints and tips for the Ardèche, where we headed next.

Ardèche

Vallon Pont d’Arc

We were staying just outside Vallon Pont d’Arc, in another lovely lucky AirBnB find, with our own pool and the best equipped kitchen we have seen so far.  This was actually the second AirBnB we had booked in Vallon having discovered (after paying and too late to get a full refund) that the first place provided neither sheets nor towels.  You live and learn.

Haven’t seen one of these since Scotland
Grotte Chauvet 2

We arrived on Sunday night and the plan was to canoe down the Ardèche Gorge on Monday morning, however when we rang to confirm our canoe booking we were told that it wouldn’t be possible as the storm we had experienced in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer had had a rather dramatic effect on the water level.  The river was well above safe limits and there would be no canoeing on Monday, although it might be possible on Tuesday. 

Left with a day to spent in the Ardèche, we had time for the obligatory supermarket shop (Lidl let us down by having no fresh milk at all – if we can’t cope with UHT, we should perhaps be counting our lucky stars we haven’t had to try yak) and a splash around in the pool in the morning.

We then headed with our sandwiches for a picnic lunch in the shade of the famous Pont d’Arc, a natural rock bridge over the Ardèche.  Again, it was a treat to find it, if not abandoned, certainly much quieter than it would normally have been on a hot day in June.

After lunch, though, we headed off, at Harriet’s Aunt’s recommendation, to the Grotte Chauvet 2.  This proved to be, for Harriet at least, the unexpected highlight of the entirety of the trip so far.

The Grotte Chauvet was discovered in 1995 and is one of the oldest known painted caves in the world.  The paintings have been dated back 36,000 years and the cave was blocked off by a landslide some 21,000 years ago.   It is extraordinary to think that humans knew about it and used it (though they didn’t live there) for 15,000 years – and that was still 12,000 years before the Great Pyramids was built.

The cave itself is, for obvious reasons, very off-limits to the public (Magnus was hugely impressed by pictures of the bullet proof door), but, some 5 km away, a complete 3D replica has been created, down to the bear footprints on the floor and the stalactites hanging from the roof. 

It was, and is, utterly extraordinary.  We were, once again, lucky to be here now: the site only reopened last week and so we were among very few visitors.   Rather than being led around by a guide, they have created an app, so we used our own phones.  There was only us and one other family in the cave system and we felt almost entirely alone.  The paintings are indescribable, not because of what they portray: rhinos, bears, mammoths, deer, aurochs, horses and even an owl, but because of the power and vitality of these incredible images, which have endured across an almost incomprehensible span of time, yet were made by people who were, really, just like us.

The rest of the site is lovely too, with a small museum (interactive, and unusually, with everything working – though masks and gel were everywhere) and a paleolithic encampment, with a hugely knowledgeable (and English) curator, who explained to us (some more enthralled than others) who these people were, what they would have been like and eaten (Clue: not potatoes) and how they would have made lived.

It was a brilliant afternoon, topped off by another swim.

Canoeing the Ardèche Gorge (well, a bit of it, at least)

We had rung the canoe company (of which there are an almost untold number) in Vallon Pont d’Arc on Monday night and been told that the river was still not yet low enough to confirm whether it would be safe to attempt the descent on Tuesday morning.   As instructed therefore we rang at 8 a.m. on Tuesday and were told that it was all systems go, if we could be there by 9.  This was a bit of a panic as, having booked only two nights’ accommodation, we had to pack up and move out of our lovely modern house and across the road into the owner’s mum’s more 14th century gite (no food processor here).

We made it, ish, only to discover that in fact everything was very laid back, in a classically surfer-ish (canoeists seem to be rather the same) way.  We hung around, while other groups came and went, for what felt like ages.  Having become used to people being desperate for our business, it was rather odd to be somewhere where there were clearly plenty of clients.  When we were finally at the front of the queue, we were rather crestfallen to be told that it really wasn’t advised for us, five of whom had never done the descent before, to attempt the full, 24 km version.  The water level was within legal limits, but only by 5 cm.  Ben was quite keen to go ahead regardless, but Harriet, with vivid memories of her father and a friend capsizing on the Tarn thirty years ago, was less keen.

Eventually we compromised on doing the shorter 8 km top section that day, with a view to doing the longer one the next if it went well.

It might perhaps suffice to say that we didn’t go back the next day.  

The longer version is that the river was, as promised, very high and fast: there was no need to paddle at all on any of the non-rapid sections.  This didn’t stop us trying to paddle and getting a little cross and shouty with each other as a result.   There were also more people on the river than we have perhaps seen in one place since the beginning of March, so it wasn’t the relaxing, calm, merrily down the stream experience some of us had imagined.   It would probably nonetheless have been more positive had the inevitable not happened to Harriet, Lucy and Aurora going over Charlemagne, the last and biggest rapid before the Pont d’Arc.

Clearly we were all fine, and we all did what we were told, and floated feet first out of the rapids.  We also did exactly what we were told not to do and managed to rescue all the paddles (Aurora), five out of six flip flops (Lucy) and the boat (Harriet), before swimming hard under the famous arch (failing entirely to appreciate it in the process) and making for a beach, where we landed rather out of breath and (in Harriet’s case) very concerned to find out if her phone (and all the photographs) had survived the experience.

They had, but a small sense of humour failure nonetheless ensued.  This was assuagued by some lunch and a swim back under the arch.  We set off again, restored to ourselves, and thoroughly enjoyed being washed, effortlessly, down the last kilometre or so to our rendezvous.  Nonetheless, five out of six of us decided that we weren’t keen to go back.  Not for a couple of years anyway.

Instead we headed back to our little house and into Vallon Pont d’Arc for a little shopping (to replace the missing flip flop) and a well-earned pizza.

St Pierre de Chartreuse

We returned to St Pierre on Wednesday and have had a relatively quiet time since then.

The journey back was uneventful, although we enjoyed spotting the pink feathers of the tamarisk trees, endless lavender (Harriet did her press-ups), wheeling vultures, the thick scrubland of the Garrigues and even a flash of blue from a jay. As we headed back into Rhone Alpes proper, the lavender was replaced by orchards and wheat fields before we climbed the hills back into the Chartreuse, which was ominously grey and cloudy.

Nothing hugely exciting seems to have happened without us. The garden has survived our absence, but the peonies have been destroyed by the heavy rain that apparently persisted all week. The flowers of the week are therefore these roses.  Everything else is mostly deadhead.

The beasties of the week were a very large llama which had got out of its field on our walk yesterday and decided that it was king of the path.  We walked round its back end rather nervously (would it be better to be kicked or spat at?). We also enjoyed a very small flying thing that does, if you squint, sort of look as though it has “love hearts” on its wings.

Ben was delighted that his new cycling bib shorts have arrived (courtesy of a voucher that was a leaving present from work) and has booked a hire bike for Tuesday. He’s having a hair cut first just to make sure he’s super aerodynamic and to shave (no pun intended) off a crucial 75 grams or so.

We resumed our daily walks, at first just along the familiar routes we trod during lockdown, but today further afield, relying on a new book of walks we had treated ourselves to yesterday. It was not an unmitigated success. We suspect that the writer hadn’t actually been on the walk he was describing because rather a large number of the paths didn’t exist and the words didn’t match up with the map. Nonetheless we had a lovely stroll through head-high meadows and along another beautiful stream. We rewarded ourselves with an entirely unnecessary and very large ice cream afterwards.

We have put a large warning sticker on the book.

Also new this week were Sophie and Aurora’s Primary School Leavers Hoodies and P7 Kelso Cougars Rugby tops. The rugby tops in particular are a big deal – they won’t be able to play for Kelso again until they are adults as there is no girls team and mixed rugby has to come to an end once they leave primary school. They were hugely touched to have these posted to them.

Primary school leavers hoodie and Kelso Cougars P7 top

Chartroussin wild flowers of the week were new to us (i.e. Harriet): the pinkest of pink musk mallow and the pincushion-like of the masterworts. Top of the wild plants of the week though were the alpine strawberries which are beginning to ripen along all the paths. They’re much better than Haribo for keeping a walk going…

What were the highlights?

Aurora: Getting my leavers’ hoodie, getting my Kelso Cougars new top, my Vans, kayaking, having pizza, the pool being clear, salmon wrapped in Parma ham (best thing ever), coming home to the rest of the teddies again and pizza all together.

Ben: The massive silver lining in the small cloud that was not being able to go kayaking down the Gorge on Monday was the Grotte Chauvet museum/reconstruction. Having the cave to ourselves (normally there are 28 in a group) was an unrepeatable treat.

I was struck by the realism in the artwork, but also their longevity despite their fragility. The oldest pictures were 36,000 years old, the most recent 21,000, just before the rock slide which blocked the entrance to the cave. That meant the oldest pictures had 15,000 years of human contact all of which they survived – it would have taken a day or two out of any of those 15,000 years to destroy or deface them, yet they are still there, still exquisite.

I loved our day canoeing, and would be delighted to go back and do more, even if it’s not this year. I think that days when I exercise are generally better days. The press up challenge Harriet and I have been doing to raise awareness of the RSABI has been fun, and I’m looking forward to cycling next week.

Magnus: I liked the canoes because it the water moved us really fast and it was nice. I like my new lego. My favourite bit is the Star Wars lego.

The pool in Vallon was awesome. It was so clear and nice and it wasn’t too cold or hot.

It’s good to be back here because there is actually a duvet in the cover.

Sophie: I really enjoyed the cave paintings and thought they were inspiring.I really enjoyed the pool being clear too and the pool in Vallon. Some of my favourite bits were listening to Percy Jackson with Lucy and Aurora, and Lucy telling us about Greek myths.

I also enjoyed getting my Edenside leavers jumper and rugby tour t-shirt.

Harriet: I was, however much of an unbelievable cliché it may seem, moved to tears by the paleolithic art. I don’t know whether it was the sheer minimalist beauty of the paintings, or their age, or the atmosphere of being almost alone, but I could have stayed looking at them for ever, and having to leave them made me weep.

I loved clambering around on the rocks bordering the Ardèche. The extraordinary colours of the water, the stone and the trees were a joy.

I enjoyed our walk today, through the alpine meadows, for all that the uselessness of the book was rather irritating.

Lucy: The cave paintings were amazing and really thought-provoking. I enjoyed being on the Ardèche beach especially the non-Newtonian fluid sand. Coming home was nice but I do want to go away too. I have also enjoyed listening to Percy Jackson with Sophie and Aurora.

I also really liked how clear the pool was in Vallon.

Any bad bits?

Magnus: I didn’t like the rapids because we got absolutely soaked through and it was so scary. I didn’t like the pizza in Vallon because I was grumpy and bored.

Aurora: Not having Duplo A to talk to and share the experience, Everyone being annoying.

Sophie: Bad bits were us fighting in general.

Lucy: Falling in the Ardèche and cleaning.

Harriet: I was really disappointed in myself that I did not enjoy the canoeing. It wasn’t the capsizing (although that didn’t help); I wasn’t enjoying it before that. It was too stressful and shouty with the children yelling at each other and the many other canoes. I really wanted it to be brilliant – this is something Ben has wanted to do with the children for years – and it wasn’t and that was, at least in part, my fault. People had all told me how fabulous it was and then it wasn’t. My sense of humour failure on the beach was at least in part because I felt I was letting everyone down by not enjoying it.

More generally we have definitely got out of the way of travelling: we lost more things (a watch, a pair of goggles, some shorts) in eight days than we did in five weeks at the beginning of the trip. Emotions run higher too while we are travelling and I had forgotten that. We have been bickery (particularly about who slept where and with whom – Ben and I don’t get involved in those ones) and scratchy at times in a way that I felt we had learned not to be over the course of lockdown. Change will do that, I know, but however explicable it wasn’t fun.

There are a lot more mosquitoes in the Ardèche than in the Camargue.  Just saying.

Ben: There are days when small things – usually children bickering, getting something wrong, or a minor setback – can really take a toll in my happiness in a disproportionate way. Friday was one of those days when many a mickle made a muckle, though thankfully today (Saturday) is another day, on a more even keel.

Being back here has led to mixed emotions. I love the Chartreuse and lots that it offers, but waking up, groundhog day-style, back in the same bed again, not on an exotic Chinese adventure, provoked a somewhat world-weary sigh.

On a more prosaic note, I didn’t like the mosquitos in the Ardèche.

What did we eat?

Being back in AirBnB accommodation meant we could cook for ourselves again. This was mostly pasta but Ben made an excellent parma ham wrapped salmon that (much to Harriet’s surprise) everyone declared delicious.

Weve been baking again since coming “home”. One of our lovely readers (Angela) sent us a recipe for millionaires chocolate flapjacks which we happily sacrificed the last of the home made golden syrup for. It was well worth it.

What about the tadpoles? Did they miss us?

Not noticeably.  They are still there but they still don’t have any legs.  We are beginning to wonder if they’re doing it on purpose.

What’s next?

Much of the talk has been thinking about what we will do with our remaining time for TweedtoTokyo. This week we finally admitted that Tweed will not get to Tokyo this year, and cancelled our flight home and our Japanese accommodation. This had been looking likely for a while now, but now it is done we need to look at what the last seven weeks or so will look like.

We think the planning will take us about two weeks, and there are various things we need to do (planning, booking, packing, maintenance) and would like to do (Ben’s birthday in early July, some walks, some socialising, a little cycling) before we go. In the first weeks of pre-lockdown adventure, we achieved a lot in 5 weeks, so even if we wrap up the Chartreuse stay in 2 weeks, that gives us a lot of room to play with.

Which route has potential for fewest wobbles?

There are questions we have to resolve in the planning: should we take advantage of the opening of most Schengen borders and plot a route through Italy, Switzerland, Germany (or further afield)? Will we finally get to Slovenia for Bled cake? Should we head for somewhere beginning with T so we can rename ourselves TweedtoTrieste or TweedtoToledo?

The current front runner is probably to stay mainly in France and take a long route home, which might feel a little unadventurous, but still offers a lot of scope. The reasons against the exotic other (though we would have laughed at the idea of Germany being exotic five months ago) are both practical – in France we speak the language, we know how things work both generally and new regulations-wise, and there are many ways we can have fun – and a bit of once-bitten-twice-shy risk management – the potential of getting stuck somewhere and not being able to cross a border, potentially not even back to France, and this wonderful bolt-hole in case there is a second lockdown.

We think, and this is still very vague, we will head South and West, before turning North probably along the Atlantic coast. If the Zeebrugge/Hull or Amsterdam/Newcastle ferries are running, that will be our route back to the UK. Currently we think that only Calais/Dover is available, which with current quarantine regulations would require a Dominic Cummings-style 450 mile dash with no stops for fuel or a wee, before 14 days of supernoodles, clothes-washing and Netflix in isolation at home.

Suggestions – on all fronts – welcome.

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A book from…the bookshelf.

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At home I have a beautiful, Aspinal of London, leather-bound notebook with my initials on it in gold.  I was given it for Christmas years ago.  I had asked for a new set of mixing bowls, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway this book, which is way more beautiful than any mixing bowls could ever have been, sat, unopened, for years.  It was too beautiful for just any old scribbles.  It needed, probably, poetry. Or failing that, profound thoughts, or a first draft of a prize winning novel.  And though, not so secretly, I love to write, I could never convince myself that anything I wrote would ever be worthy of the book. 

Eventually I gave up, accepted my limitations and started jotting down in it my thoughts on other people’s writing.  Each time I finish a book, or, more realistically, when the tower of previously read books next to the bed becomes so tall and unstable it seems a mortal threat to any passing toddlers, I scrawl a sentence or two about it. It is entirely for myself, and at least in part as I tend to forget books almost as soon as I have read them. This way I can’t.

Of course the book is in Kelso, but in its absence, and in the absence of any travel-based reading, here’s what I’ve read over the last month.   They have nothing in common except that they are in paper form and here.

Warning. May contain spoilers.  Although not big ones, I promise.

This is very confusing. This may mean it is very clever but I’m not sure.  It is like one of those 3D puzzles that you have to solve without touching: you need to hold multiple seemingly contradictory possibilities in your mind and look at them from all angles in order to fit them together. I’d read it before and been more confused than impressed.  This time I think the balance shifted the other way.

Lucy just thought it was confusing.

I also have a pet hate of the Russian letter Я (‘ya’, which means ‘I’; should you ever have wondered) being used as a backwards R. But that’s just me.

I have been, literally, a beggar when it comes to books (this has worked – Magnus has acquired the entire Narnia series which we are enjoying reading together – addition aside: what order do you recommend? We have gone 2,3,4, 5 and I think will then do 6,1,7 but other views and arguments to support them are welcome). 

Anyway, as I am a beggar, I cannot, in consequence, be a chooser.  I have therefore been reading Lucy’s teen fiction.

This one was pretty good.  Although I did find myself wondering if I really wanted my just 13-year-old reading about child abuse, rohypnol and date rape.  Too late now.  Of course if I ban books as being inappropriate maybe Aurora will start reading them….

Another of those annoying books where the person who wrote the blurb clearly hadn’t actually read the book.  Why do publishers do this? I therefore spent the first five or so chapters annoyed because it wasn’t what I expected.

It was good though, once I’d got over that.  How do we treat newcomers in our midst. What if we couldn’t stop them coming? And what are they fleeing from? 

It’s not science fiction though, and they can go back.  Blurb-writer take note.

What were the chances of many of Kathy Reichs’ readers having spent several formative teenage weekends in the West Wycombe caves?  Probably small, but I am that reader and so the denouement of this was rather anti-climactic. Shame really.  Too many acronyms (IMO) but it was probably better than I found it to be.

Reading this felt like a dream.  Looking back on it feels like a dream that you can’t quite remember.  It was a good dream, but one that even as you are in it feels ethereal and other. Misty and hazy.  Where anything can, and does, happen.

For the avoidance of doubt, that’s a complimentary review.

This book made me feel clever. That’s always a bonus. It also made me read faster and faster to find out what happened. It did also make me wonder at times if he’d just copied and pasted his research notes, which is less of a compliment.

But I have recommended it to my brother, so it must be good (or he’ll get cross with me). And I will read it again (so I can enjoy the writing, and the cleverness) now that I know how it ends.

This is a classic of modern teenage fiction. And I’m sorry but I thought it was rubbish. The protagonist was possibly the most selfish and self-absorbed character I’ve ever read, and I don’t think that was deliberate. One of the more stupid and reckless too. Admittedly my sympathies generally may now lie more with the parents than the teens, but this teen didn’t deserve any sympathy at all. There are other, much better teen novels out there. Read them instead.

This one, for instance. Again, maybe 40 years of reading (and life) experience makes me harder to surprise with a twist than the intended audience, but even though I’d worked out what was coming it was still satisfying.

More critically, I do feel that if you are going to try to write in four different voices you do need to make those voices distinct. These weren’t.

Inspector Dalgleish gets SARS. Convenienly on an island which is immediately quarantined. The world doesn’t come to a complete stop.

This is therefore not the book for 2020. To make matters worse it was (I felt) badly edited, with too many sentences that didn’t quite make sense: including one about a spare toothbrush that had Ben and me both puzzling for half an hour. If it was his spare toothbrush, where was his actual toothbrush? And why were they brushing their teeth in different bathrooms?

Annoyingly this wasn’t the clue that unravelled the entire mystery.

I am not a fan of this sort of book. Or at least of the sort of book I was expecting: fey genteel poverty, all-neatly-tied-up, one step up from Mills & Boon (do they still exist?) twee romance for the middle-aged and middle-class. (Both of which I am, of course) But I enjoyed this. (QED). Even if I thought the fact that main character “bit her tongue and said nothing” showed less that she was acting “in the interests of peace” and more that she was a complete doormat who needed to stand up for herself and say what she actually wanted.

Although if she’d done that they’d have got together in about chapter 4 and there wouldn’t have been a book at all…

The last time I read this I cried. Big ugly noisy sobs. Snot was probably involved. I also laughed. Out loud. This is not something I usually do at books. I’m more of the snort in an unattractive fashion type.

This time, although I laughed, I didn’t cry. But the final act still hit me with almost physical force. If you haven’t read this book and if you care about the NHS, now more than ever, read it. I’ll post you my copy. Unless you’re pregnant. If you’re pregnant, maybe leave it until after the baby is born.

As far as trashy airport novels go, Jennifer Weiner is among the best, even if this one was a bit annoying. Good in Bed was better.

If I could write like anyone in the world, it would be Maggie O’Farrell.  Well, it would be lots of people, and I’d take any of them, but Maggie O’Farrell would definitely be high on the list.

She writes phrases like this:

She kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or dreaming or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice in her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? […] It was as if someone had dimmed the lights, as if she were viewing her existence from behind a glass wall.

And it makes me realise that I have felt this, built my life around this, perhaps for ever, and yet never articulated it. And she has.

I wish I could do that.

This was so good I read it twice. Well, I did read it twice but that may have had more to do with the fact it was the only book I took with me when we went away last week.

It is good though, pleasingly both neatly tied up and yet life-like in its randomness. Too many coincidences, perhaps, but then, as she says, a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.

I like Jackson Brodie too. I will re-read the others when I get home.

Middle England next, which is making me feel even more bleak about the doomed state of British politics.

Harriet

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Week 18 (France 13)

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Where were we?

Places! We went to places! Read on…

On the road again…

Where should we have been?

Early last Sunday we packed up again and headed for the main station in Ulaanbaatar for our last booked train. From here on in (weird mental leap here) we didn’t (in March) have much actually booked; plenty of plans and ideas but nothing concrete.

We arrived in Beijing on Monday afternoon and have spent the week exploring this amazing city.  We left it briefly mid-week for a night. In a tent. On the Great Wall of China.

Where did we actually go? What did we do?

St Pierre de Chartreuse

Sunday was a day of torrential rain, but we needed to get out, so we put on lots of waterproofs and drove 5 miles or so down the gorge towards St Laurent du Pont and explored a path recommended by Fabienne, whom we met last week. This path was the original path used by the monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery before the late 19th century road was built.

The original bridge was the clashing rocks. We were glad to be able to use the 16th century version.

The way was marked by painted blue fishes, and the river was in full spate, which was glorious to behold, as was the beech forest. Ben could not believe he had never been there in the 30 years of coming to the Chartreuse.

Wet river walks aside, the top excitement at home prior to our departure was the arrival of the dishwasher repair man.  Keen readers will remember that the dishwasher broke about three days into confinement and dishwasher repairs were not considered an essential service.  It has taken this long since deconfinement a) for us to ring him and b) for him to come up the hill and see us.  When he arrived Harriet had just taken a batch of biscuits out of the oven.  He had a cup of coffee and several biscuits and… turned the dishwasher on. €48 for the privilege.  Oh well.

The shepherd that relied on this red sky would have been destined for disappointment

If free French lessons and endless pots of delicious jam aren’t enough, our now-not-so-new friend Debbie went further to the top of Harriet’s list by (apparently) being genuinely astonished to discover that she (Harriet) was over 40.  As Harriet is rapidly heading for 43 and a half and hasn’t worn make up in months this was A Good Thing.

Pont du Gard

Anyway, we left the Chartreuse on Monday morning intending to head straight for the Camargue, about four hours South.

The drive was easy and those of us that were looking out of the windows enjoyed watching the landscape change entirely: the beech and fir were replaced by the iconic cypresses, the roofs became flatter and the buildings more golden, Mont Ventoux loomed over the horizon and as if we needed any more Provençal clichés, there was lavender growing in the field next to where we had our picnic.

The plan to head directly South went awry though when Harriet spotted that our route took us within five miles of the iconic Pont du Gard.

Ben had first been here thirty years ago, when there were no railings and you could walk along the top (as parents we were very pleased that is no longer possible), and Harriet and Ben came 15 years later when there was major building work going on.

Now, though, there is a swanky visitors centre, with museum and cinema, and over 1.5 million people visit each year.

Except in 2020 of course. It was both extremely eerie and an extraordinary privilege to have the place almost entirely to ourselves. There were perhaps a hundred or so other people across the entire site. That elusive tourist photo that makes it look like you are the only person there was suddenly easy.

It is also possible to walk down to the river Gardon itself and paddle (or jump, or swim, although as we hadn’t come prepared we stuck to paddling). The water is absolutely clear and the little fish will come and give you a pedicure…

Camargue

The Camargue is formed by the delta of the Rhone, which forks at Arles into two branches. The land is marshy and low-lying and famously home to wildlife found nowhere else in France: flamingos, Camarguais black bulls (no one ever mentions the cows) and white horses and infamously, hordes of particularly vicious mosquitoes.

The Camargue big three

The main town in the Camargue is Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a small seaside resort of the reassuringly unclassy variety. It is named after the four Saints Mary, two of whom you have never heard of (St Mary Salome and St Mary Jacob). According to legend these saints arrived in France by boat after the resurrection along with their maid Sara. Sara had dark skin and is, apparently just because of her skin colour (even writing this feels wrong now) the patron saint of gypsies. (That’s another word that feels wrong. The French use the word Tzigane which is traditionally translated as “gypsy“. We have done the same but if that is wrong we would love to be educated).

St Sara. The patron saint of bling

In any event there is a huge Spanish and Romani tradition in the town, with massive festivals twice a year, though not this year of course. The famous bulls are bred for the ring, but we were relieved to discover that in Course Camarguaises the point is to snatch a rosette from between the bull’s horns (or possibly shoulders) and not to kill it. The best bulls become local superstars.

Sadly of course the bullring is another casualty of Covid-19 but we were all agreed we would love to come back and see it.

We were staying, for the first time on this trip, in a hotel. We had wanted somewhere right by the sea in the hope that might lessen the threat from the mosquitoes. In any event AirBnB accommodation seemed thin on the ground. Whether that was Covid, short notice or just because there are so many of us we don’t know.

Location, location, location

Staying in a hotel was a useful exercise as it reminded us why we don’t stay in hotels. They are too expensive (not to mention having to eat out for every meal) and we like having our own space.

But it was lovely being so close to the sea. We couldn’t see it, but we fell asleep to the sound of the seagulls (ish, they were very noisy and there was a whiny mosquito too)  and woke to the waves on the sand.

If we are honest, we suspect that the beach was the highlight of the Camargue for the children.  A sandy, gently shelving strand with regular breakwaters and not a sunlounger in sight.  We treated Magnus to a bucket and spade and he was as happy as one of the local clams digging endless holes, making castles and burying anyone who sat still long enough.

The girls, on the other hand, turned into water babies. It may have been the Mediterranean but the water temperature was still only about 15 degrees. Nonetheless they were in it like fish, swimming, jumping and generally enjoying their new and much-longed-for bikinis.  As parents the (2 and a half year) age gap between Magnus and Aurora and Sophie has never seemed wider.

Having said that, on the beach, all four of them seemed closer than ever.  The girls were brilliant with Magnus, keeping an eye on him in the water and actively wanting him with them. This isn’t normally the case and it was lovely to see.

On our second day we dragged them away from the beach and onto a boat for a tour along the coast and up the Petit Rhone.  This was billed as a chance to see some of the wildlife up close. Although it was slightly disappointing on that front, sitting watching the world (and the many herons – which possibly would have been more exciting had we not been so used to them at home) go by was a very happy use of ninety minutes. 

We got much more up close and personal with the birdlife at the Parc Ornithologique du Pont de Gau.  Harriet had been longing to see flamingos and this more than fulfilled her wishes.  As a protected wetland area it is home to many more species than just the pink leggy ones and we also spotted more herons, storks, avocets, oyster catchers, black kites, endless swifts and swallows and many more including a coypu, a large aquatic rodent rather like a giant swimming guinea pig.

We also enjoyed some proper frivolous shopping for the first time this year (all our Christmas presents last year were very trip-ly practical (when will we ever get to use our filtering water bottles?)). As well as the bikinis, Aurora and Sophie got new matchy-not-quite-matchy skirts and Ben treated himself to the first collar he’s worn since leaving Britain. Magnus was hugely tolerant of a morning spent waiting outside changing rooms and was rewarded with a slushie and a bucket and spade.

On Thursday we headed away from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer towards Aigues-Mortes. This medieval walled city was once on the coast and was the port of embarcation for Louis IX when he set out on crusade. Now however it is some five miles inland and is surrounded by salt flats.  Baleine sea salt, the one with the whale, is extracted here (and probably other places too).

It isn’t the salt itself though that makes this area spectacular. That credit goes to a little algae called dunaliella salina which lives in the highly concentrated salty water. In Summer it blooms, turning the water in the salt pans a spectacular bruised raspberry pink.

The town of Aigues-Mortes itself rises out of the salt flats like a Disneyfied dream.  It’s lovely inside too, all little boutiquey shops and houses with hollyhocks outside and stephanotis climbing the walls.  It’s also (who knows why) stuffed with sweet shops.  It felt a bit twee and clichéd in some ways but it was lovely for a wander and lunch. There’s really not much wrong with a big salad in a plane tree-shaded square after all… and in case it all felt too predictable it also had an All Blacks Rugby shop. Who knows why?

The Campbell girls had hoped to ride the famous white horses too.  This would have been Harriet’s first time on a horse in thirty years and Aurora and Sophie’s first time ever.  Sadly though the arrival of 40 mile an hour winds meant it had to be cancelled.

Come on in, the water’s lovely.

Arles

We left the Camargue on Friday morning.  Our next “big” plan is to canoe down the Ardèche gorge but Ben was keen we should avoid the weekend for this if possible.  This forces us into a few extra days in Provence.  A bit of spontaneous AirBnB-ing saw us booked into a very glamorous and surprisingly reasonable place in the centre of Avignon.   The high winds drove us inland early in the day, and we headed for Arles, based solely on the fact that it gets a specific mention in our road atlas and Nîmes doesn’t.  This turned out to be a good thing as there was a serious police incident in Central Nîmes yesterday and we are very pleased to have been well away from that.

Arles was lovely for a wander and we enjoyed the Roman Arènes, which is now used for bullfighting of both the Camarguais and Spanish varieties.  We also wandered  through the Roman baths and the Theatre. Once again we had these almost entirely to ourselves.

We accidentally followed in the feet of Van Gogh when we found ourselves lunching feet from where he painted his Café, le soir.  Lucy recognised it, which we were most impressed by. (Though it may help that it is yellow).

Spot the difference

Avignon

We arrived in Avignon yesterday afternoon, after a traumatic (for Aurora and Sophie) bus ride from the park and ride (“But everyone will be looking at us with our rucksacks” (They weren’t, and the bus was virtually empty anyway)). The apartment is stunning and extraordinarily central. We can see the Palais des Papes as we clean our teeth.

This morning we visited both the Palais, and the famous Pont d’Avignon (where we didn’t dance but Harriet did do 25 press-ups, much to the bemusement of the only other people on it at the time).

If you look very closely they are dancing

Once again, both were virtually empty and it was an extraordinary experience to have these normally thronged and world-famous places to ourselves.

What were our impressions? What surprised us?

Sophie: Wearing a mask is horrible. It’s difficult to breathe.

Harriet: The overturning postcard stand surprised us all.  Chasing beautiful postcards down a narrow street in blazing sunshine felt a bit like being in a film.

I absolutely loved the Camargue. I loved the sea, the wind, the huge skies, the endless flatness (and yes, I am from East Anglia). I loved the brightness and clarity of the light and the colours. The paddy fields the most acidic green, the sea in the harbour turquoise, the salt lakes and flamingos pink, pink, pink. I found myself noticing the birds and plants more – the oleander trees, the vines, the endlessly wheeling swifts and swallows.

I was very pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t bitten at all. I am to mosquitoes as marshmallows are to my children, and everyone we had mentioned the Camargue to had said “ohh, mosquitoes“. I slathered on repellent several times a day and it worked. Maybe forewarned really is forearmed.

Aurora: Sandy, loads of shops open and masks everywhere.

Lucy: I felt St M de la M was very Spanish which was odd because we are in France. I liked all the walled cities and roman culture though I wish there were more roman mythology things. I thought the Camargue was very pretty and I like the southern france architecture. The Camargue was very pink! – pink water, pink birds and even pink high-viz!!

Ben: Travelling again has been a massive change, and I’ve been surprised how much of a mental leap it has taken to get into the cadence of it. Spending lots of money (after all these relatively frugal lockdown weeks), no washing machine, eating out, even filling the car with fuel have all been novel and a little jarring at times.

The museums, sites, shops, beaches, and all the public places were a worry – how would people act or react – but they have felt very normal, if almost empty apart from the shops, with fairly cursory attempts at post-Covid regulations.

In terms of places and sites I have enjoyed the cities – Aigues-Mortes, Arles, Avignon – and their histories. The ipad guide thing in the Palais des Papes eventually won me over, but the interminable audio guide to the half bridge that is the vastly over-egged Pont d’Avignon was daft.

It’s not all old. This is the new (incomplete) Frank Gehry building in Arles.

Magnus (in five words): Watery, sandy, busy [in Avignon, apparently] salty (because of the massive salt mountains), pink.

What were the highlights?

Sophie : The best bits were shopping and getting my bikini and skirt. I also enjoyed having meals out.

I also liked how there were lots of sweet shops in Aigues-Mortes. I adored being by the beach.

Aurora: My bikini, the sea, staying in a hotel, seeing flamingos, window shopping.

Watching flamingos

Ben: Sitting in the sun as almost the only passagers on a tourist boat up the Petit Rhône was lovely, as was watching the children be children on the beach.

Saying goodbye to all those mountains and hills has been good for my running – I achieved my fastest 10k ever in the Camargue this week, helped by being at sea level and being entirely flat (total elevation gain of 2m). I’ve realised that I need little goals to keep going with getting fitter, and looking for great backdrops for our RSABI 25 pressups challenge has been fun. So far we have had the Pont du Gard, the beach, a boat, the Palais des Papes and the Pont d’Avignon, much to the bemusement of various onlookers.

Meals out have been a treat, both with the children (now that they will eat more than just bolognaise and pizza) and without (happy anniversary to us), and being able to go to any restaurant and immediately commandeer a table for six has been a never-experienced luxury.

15 years!

Magnus: Flamingos, digging in the warm sand on the beach, and jumping in the waves, though I was quite nervous sometimes, was good fun.

Lucy: I LOVE the beach and being in the sea. I have also enjoyed pottering round and going into shops. I was pleased with my Van Gogh knowledge (I spotted the cafe) and I really liked the salt flats. This seems short but I can’t really describe the good bits because I loved all of it. And flamingos.

Harriet: Apart from the Camargue itself? I have really enjoyed the Provençale architecture and narrow streets. It was lovely having a meal with just Ben for our anniversary on Thursday. Weirdly I have rather enjoyed the press-up challenge. I enjoyed the utter pointlessness of the three-minute ferry across the Petit Rhone on the way to Aigues-Mortes (you can go the other way round on the road and it’s exactly the same distance). Every single flamingo was a thrill, whether in the bird sanctuary or just viewed from afar. I loved watching the children looking out for each other on the beach.

It has just been lovely being on the move again.

Any bad bits?

Harriet: I was surprised by how disappointed I was that our horse riding was cancelled. It sounded so wonderful – splashing through the marsh with the wildlife all around.  I hadn’t been that keen (hence leaving it to the last minute) but I wish we’d done it earlier.

I’d forgotten how expensive travelling is. Admittedly this trip was even more expensive because we were in a (very basic) hotel, but eating out, activities, shopping (forgotten about that!) all adds up very quickly. After 13 weeks where our only expenditure has been the boulangerie and a weekly trip to Intermarché the bleed of money out of our account has come as a shock. Even though that’s exactly what the money was there for.

Aurora: Not having Duplo A, not horse riding, not having all the teddies we brought and Magnus being annoying.

Lucy: It was raining today and I was wearing flip flops and looking like a baby giraffe on the (very slippy) streets of Avignon and I found it a bit boring waiting for Sophie and Aurora to try on every bikini in the shops.

Magnus: I got tired on the Pont d’Avignon and had sore feet because of blisters from my flip flops. Sharing a room with mummy and daddy was annoying, and there was sand in my bed and it was too bright and there was no duvet in the duvet cover. It was so boring going shopping for bikinis with the girls, but in the end it was finally OK, because they got bikinis, even though there were 26 million in the shops, and I did get a bucket and spade and a slushie.

Wild flower of the week: the mallow, in every gutter.

Ben: The Pont Bénézet (the famous one in Avignon) is massively over-hyped. It is half a vaguely interesting bridge.

Although I love seeing my happy family being happy on the beach and in the sea, I’m not personally a beach person – too sandy, hot, windy, wet, salty, suncreamy. I’ll stop whinging now – it has been a great week.

Within five minutes of arriving.

Sophie: Something that I would change if I could would be Magnus having a single bed not double to himself, so Lucy’s sleeping on the floor, in the house we’re in right now. [Editor’s note: This is Lucy’s choice]

What about Covid?

Part of the point of this little holiday-from-our-holiday was to see how travelling in a Covid-19 world is.  The honest answer is: Variable. All the tourist sites we have visited have been oddly empty.  On the one hand this is lovely – we really can get the perfect camera angle any time we want – but on the other they can feel very sterile and unreal without the buzz of others around.

We were worried too that we might not feel welcome: that we might be viewed with fear or distrust, as outsiders and potential carriers of the disease.  This has not at all been the case.  Perhaps not surprisingly, half-empty restaurants or quiet shops are desperate for our business.  Hand gel is everywhere but the requirement to wear masks (which is obligatory in public transport but up to individual shops) seems to be getting less and less and we certainly see very few on the streets. The only tourist site where mask wearing was strictly enforced was the Palais de Papes.

Covid remains a hot topic of conversation and attitudes to it seem to vary enormously. Most people seem to display a sort of resigned optimism: all they can do is carry on and hope things improve, but we have also had conversations with people who don’t believe it was as bad as they said, people who think we should still all be in lockdown, and one woman who said she’s given up swimming in the sea because of it. We never got to the bottom of that particular piece of logic. 

What did we eat?

Artichokes. But not this one

Although Harriet’s elderflower smelt amazing while infusing, once completed it was rather insipid and disappointing. A new recipe and the all-important citric acid are in the post from Essex.  Now we’ve just got to hope that the elderflowers aren’t all over by the time we get back.

Being in a hotel meant lots of meals out. (Restaurants here were allowed to reopen last week). Having not eaten out since Vienna (treating Granny) and only once or twice on the trip prior to that (for budgetary reasons), this was a bit of a shock.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer isn’t a particularly gastronomic destination but Ben and Harriet had a lovely meal out on their anniversary and prior to that we all enjoyed a variety of foods including octopus, Camarguais beefburgers, tellines (which may or may not be clams but were totally delicious either way) and a lot of pizza and ice cream.

The local treat is Fougasse d’Aigues-Mortes, a sort of sweet focaccia-type bread with orange flower water. It is supposed to be eaten as part of the treize desserts (yes, that is what it sounds like and yes, it is a thing) on Christmas Eve but, as with mini eggs and hot cross buns is now available all year round (bah humbug). We failed to find an open boulangerie in Aigues-Mortes but one in Saintes-Maries did us proud.  After all that effort, it was, in the words of Magnus: “a bit like soap“.

It might have been better if we hadn’t bought the orange hand wash.

Lucy asked, mid-week, why there aren’t any blue foods.  She was proved wrong at a restaurant in Arles.

Does the world really need blue (or indeed pink) cauliflower?

Continuing our tradition of eating as many baked goods as we can, in Avignon we tried pompe d’huile from Bella Ciao,  a self-proclaimed boulangerie d’utopie.  It was pretty good but honestly in utopia we’d hope for something with chocolate in. 

What about the tadpoles?

Who knows? Fortunately for them it’s been raining all week in the Chartreuse so they won’t have got dehydrated.

But keen tadpole-watchers will just have to come back next week to find out how they have coped without us.

This was last Sunday. Will they have grown (legs)?

What’s next?

Tomorrow we leave Avignon and head back north, stopping on the way with Harriet’s uncle and aunt.  We plan to canoe down the Ardèche gorge on Monday and will probably head back to the Chartreuse after that.

More long term though this dip of our travelling toes in the water has made us realise that travel is possible.  At present we can’t leave France (they wouldn’t let us back in) but that may change in the next week or so. The plan is to see what happens when Macron addresses the nation (again) on Sunday and make our decisions after that.

The big picture though is that we will be on the road again soon (hopefully). It won’t be where and how we planned but it will be an adventure.

Where will we go next?
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Week 17 (France 12)

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Where were we?

Toujours ici.

Where should we have been?

We arrived in Ulaanbaatar late on Saturday and settled into our AirBnB flat just behind the city’s Sukhbaatar Square. The next morning, Magnus’ 9th birthday, we were up and out bright and early to meet our guide who took us out of the city, through the Gorkhi Terelj national park to the Chinggis Khaan (how they spell it here) statue. We had prepared ourselves for it being big, but even so we weren’t quite prepared for how big. In the evening, at Magnus’ request (Mummy, please can I not have yak milk on my birthday), we had burgers and chips in Ulaanbaatar’s best burger restaurant.

The next morning we set out, heading north and west out of the city for our most adventurous adventure yet – six nights of off-grid travel, exploration and family stay booked through Eternal Landscapes. Highlights were our extraordinary guide and driver, the families we stayed with, the yaks and camels, the stars and the sheer enormous emptiness of the landscape.

The best bit of all is that we haven’t cancelled this. So we really will be going one day. We’ll let you have the details (and the pictures) then.

Picture from Pixabay. For more Mongolian pictures visit the Eternal Landscapes website….

What did we really do?

Magnus’ birthday

Despite our best efforts we were unable to buy yak milk at Intermarché in St Laurent du Pont, so we had to resort to just a “normal” birthday. Insofar as anything about any of this is in any way normal.

Magnus had gone to bed in his swimming trunks on Saturday night so as to be ready for the pool first thing on Sunday morning, when it would finally be usable. Unfortunately for his sisters, the route to the pool was past the pile of presents, so swimming was, perhaps inevitably, delayed.

There are moments in our parenting life when we are struck by how old are children are becoming or, conversely how young they still are. Magnus’ nine-year-old birthday delight at lego and toy cars was an inescapable reminder that despite the teenage attitude from his sisters, he is, still, just a little boy. He couldn’t have been more delighted with his haul. Especially as it included a copy of the Beano with his cousin as the Beano Boss.

He did manage to drag himself away from his cars to be the first into the pool. Before breakfast. It was predictably glacial so there was definitely more jumping in and getting out than actual swimming.

We had planned to do his favourite walk, up Charmant Som, but a chance encounter in the boulangerie had informed us that the day before the cars were parked for over a kilometre down the road from the parking. So we went for his second favourite instead.

Lego occupied most of the day. It was hard to tell which of the males in the house was happier about this.

And in the evening, we had an actual party: burgers and chips (as requested), cake, singing, and guests. It was lovely and lasted far later into the night than any of his birthdays have in the past.

He thinks being nine is going to be fun. Can’t ask for more than that.

And the rest?

It has been a much quieter and less structured week this week. This is partly due to the weather, which has been fairly consistently wet and which has put paid to any long walks (an hour within a kilometre of the house is doable in the rain, a 15+ kilometre hike up a hill less so). But we also think a malaise has set in. We are all less energetic, less motivated. We haven’t pushed this this week but we do need to make sure it doesn’t become a habit or a pattern.

The rock harvest bore fruit (Sorry couldn’t resist that entirely wrong mixed metaphor) when we were invited, all six of us, for dinner with Jeanne and Raphael, who we had met while knee-deep in mud. Jeanne was born in Vietnam, and although she left at the age of 17 she treated us to the most amazing Vietnamese feast. We had tempura prawns and vegetables, followed by enormous bowls of noodle soup with chicken and crab, followed by sticky glazed pork so tender you could pull it apart with your chopsticks, and rice. Finally, in a nod to her adopted country, crêpes suzette and chestnut and chartreuse ice cream.

Every mouthful was a treat and the children thought so too, wolfing it down in huge quantities. Only Magnus struggled with being up past ten p.m. and ended the evening with his ice cream while snuggled on a succession of laps. We finally rolled back down the road in the dark, clear skies overhead, and into bed at just before midnight.

Over dinner the subject of music came up and Raphael mentioned that he had once tried to play the violin (his words). Harriet’s ears pricked up and she wondered if this meant he had a violin he wasn’t currently using and would be prepared to lend. He disappeared up to the attic and came back with an ancient case. The fiddle inside was short of two strings and a bridge and the bow nut didn’t work at all. But he assured us he could fix it, and fix it he has. He turned up the next day with a fully strung violin. The bow can’t be tightened or loosened and we are sure a luthier would wince at the set up but it works. Lucy and Harriet had a happy hour or two. It will remain to be seen if either of them is brave enough to attempt the Mozart and Bach sonatas he also brought round…

The mood in the house turned rather more political this week following the murder of George Floyd. The girls, with their Instagram and Tiktok feeds informing them by the minute instigated several discussions which we were glad to have, even if far from glad about the circumstances.

One of the pleasures of this trip has been, for some of us at least, taking a deliberate decision to ignore the constant depressing stream of news from politics in general and UK politics in particular. This has become increasingly harder in recent weeks and both Ben and Harriet found this, and matters in the States, affecting moods this week.

The weather hasn’t been all bad and there’s been plenty of pool-side fun. Including quite a lot in the rain. (The photographer stayed inside).

Our heavily pregnant Instagram friend Fabienne and her lovely six year old popped round for a cup of proper English tea on Thursday so we could meet In Real Life. She was as lovely as she seems online (no catfishing in the Chartreuse) and the children got on too, despite Lucy being on far from her best form.

Magnus has spent quite a bit of time with his new friend Sam, including managing despite the weather, to borrow a bike and head back down to the pump track.

Harriet was throughly spoiled to receive not one, but two, parcels. One was expected – but no less welcome for it – books from her mother to feed her voracious reading needs. The second was entirely unexpected. Her employers, Douglas Home & Co, had arranged for a box of chocolate goodies to be sent to each employee to cheer them up during lockdown. As Harriet is currently not on the payroll receiving one was hugely touching.

Disappointment for Harriet though on Magnus’ birthday when she lost a bet with Ben about whether there would still be visible snow on Chamechaude. Despite glorious weather (and the occasional heavy downpour) it was (and still was all this week – when not obscured by cloud) still there. Most irritating.

Yesterday. Grrrr.

Wild flowers of the week were the rampions, with their amazingly symmetrical curly ended petals, and the columbine. It sounds much nicer than bindweed, and in the verges really isn’t doing any harm.

Ben and Lucy headed down the hill to Grenoble on Wednesday. There was some debate about whether we should all go – Aurora and Sophie want to go shopping for “nice clothes” – but we decided that a post-Covid-19 shopping trip with everyone in tow didn’t enormously appeal and we weren’t at all sure what the shops would be like. Instead it was the intrepid duo who headed in with Ben’s broken iPod (cause of damage then unknown). The good news is that it is a damaged battery, which is not anyone’s fault but just one of those things. The bad news is that the entire iPod will have to be replaced. It’s under guarantee but Ben’s 25,000 tracks are not stored online but at home and so cannot be downloaded from here. We are also not at all sure that they can be transferred from the old iPod to the new one. We may have a rather quieter next few months.

This week’s stars of the garden are the pink roses, which have added an intoxicating scent to their already considerable charms, and these extraordinary alliums.

Now Magnus is nine it was time for the post lockdown, much needed, haircut…

And…the most exciting for last…we had an actual drink in an actual café. Cafés and restaurants were permitted to reopen from this Tuesday and the Hotel Bar Victoria, just next to us, reopened last night. We had a celebratory ice cream after our cleaning this morning. It felt wonderful.

How was it?

Good bits:

Magnus: MY BIRTHDAY! The pool is here, going to the pump track with Sam, elderflower.

Sophie: I loved making pizza. I also liked playing in the pool. The Vietnamese meal was really great. The rain was fun too. I found an old ski jumper of my uncle Tim’s (says Daddy), and I love wearing it.

Lucy: Magnus’ birthday obviously, I found it really fun and had some interesting conversations. The pool being up and running. The dinner party was really good especially the food and… HAVING A VIOLIN!! Having ice cream today was nice too.

Aurora: Magnus’s birthday, going shopping with daddy, having my first iced tea in ages, finally getting to go in the swimming pool, getting 100 followers on tik tok, seeing Millie and Sam and the amazing Vietnamese meal.

Ben: Sociably, it has been an excellent week, apart from a frustrating time with Houseparty on Wednesday evening. Magnus’s birthday, Jeanne’s dinner party, Fabienne’s visit, even Magnus’s haircut and an ice cream at the reopened Hotel Victoria across the square – a real pleasure from normal conversations, although it feels abnormal given our collective previous 3 months. It has been exciting to plan some travel for next week too.

Being right about the snowy patch too…

Harriet: Magnus’ birthday was a great success: and possibly the first day we have (ever?) had without any bickering at all. I was enormously touched to be sent a parcel of treats by my work. It is such thoughtful thing to do in general – is this because a majority of the management are female? – but especially given my particular (and particularly odd) circumstances. It has been lovely seing the kids in the pool, even if I haven’t braved it yet! I loved having a drink in an actual cafe and a good chat with Sandrine who owns it. I am hugely looking forward to going somewhere else next week (spoiler alert).

Bad bits:

Lucy: The weather and not much else, I’ve had a load of homework but that’s about it.

Aurora: Not having Duplo and Magnus being hyper and really annoying .

Sophie: I didn’t like the rain sometimes apart from when we were in the pool.

Magnus: not going to Charmant Som, the weather.

Ben: The weather has not helped, but a lack of longer walks, and a general laziness from us all, has made some of this week feel like a waste. The passage of time shows itself in so many ways, but I was struck this week by finishing my initial tranche of Loratidine, one of my hay-fever medicines. I have more, but in my head, these were for the very end of our trip. Just another sign of where we should have been by now. 

I am horrified by the news coming from the UK and the USA. The decisions taken by those that have been voted into power in both countries appals me. Their mendacious and aggressive rhetoric is hideous. 

As for the UK, I am not sure I want to return to a country whose character looks both destructive and shameful, and it is increasingly unrecognisable from the one I thought I knew. That’s not to say there aren’t many wonderful friends and deeds and thoughts and actions there, but the trend and direction taken and acceptance of the situation frightens me. 

In the US, there looks like there is less acceptance of the status quo, both in spite of, and because of, the response of those in power. More power to them. I hope that the ground shifts in a positive way. It needs to. 

Harriet: I have been feeling what I think a psychologist would call ” disassociated” for much of this week. I don’t really care about much and I can’t be bothered, whether that’s with current issues or future plans. Mustering up the energy to engage seems beyond me much of the time. I’m not sure if this is because it is very hard actually to have future plans and without them the present seems directionless and without point.

It feels as though we are marking time here until we go home. Going home itself is not an aim but an inevitable, inexorable marker of failure. A retrograde step. And that’s before we get into my feelings about the present and future disaster that is the UK government. Is the country even one I want to be part of?

That aside, I wanted so much for this trip. I wanted to change, to grow, to become – in ways both tangible and intangible – the person I am going to be for the rest of my life. And now I feel that the going back will be not just physical but metaphorical. I will be back where I started.

I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know what direction I want to be going in, but I know (or maybe I just think I know) it isn’t that. So instead I sit. In stasis. Going nowhere.

More mundanely (or perhaps it’s part of the same thing) with the end of confinement we have lost our structure and we seem to be drifting more. Days pass without much happening. The children (and we) seem to be spending more time on our phones which isn’t good for any of us.

What did we eat?

Birthdays mean baking. So we had cake, millionaire’s shortbread, biscuits and moderately successful flapjacks made with the homemade golden syrup.

The elderflowers are out too so we risked some very strange looks from passers-by to gather them and even stranger looks in the pharmacy when we asked for citric acid.

Our cordial is made, but cooling, so we haven’t tried it yet. Without the citric acid it is more likely to ferment so expect reports on our elderflower champagne to come…

How are the tadpoles?

A side effect of having a nice clean chlorine-filled swimming pool is that we no longer have a ready supply of manky un-chemically-treated water with which to fill up the tadpoles. In direct contravention of all the advice on the Internet they have therefore had to take their chances with tap.

So far they seem to be fine (the rain will have helped), but they remain very elusive. Maybe they’ve all hopped away…

What’s next?

We have been mulling all week over the possibility of going further afield in France. We were hesitant about being unwelcome, or finding that things were shut, and we’d also agreed to babysit some rabbits next week for our friends who are going away.

But a general feeling of frustration, of boredom, of needing something to happen, plus the news that the weather here is going to be awful all next week forced a spontaneous decision while the children were having their French lesson on Friday morning. We are booked into a hotel in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, on the coast of the Camargue, for four nights from Monday. Where we will go after that remains to be seen.

There has been a palpable lifting of spirits. The rabbits will just have to take their chances*.

*another neighbour is looking after them. We did check.

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Week 16 (France 11)

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Where were we?

Same as always.  Or feels like it.

At least it’s still beautiful

Where should we have been

Last Friday we got back on the train in Almaty for our longest journey yet, 73 hours not including a four hour change.  We arrived in Novosibirsk on Sunday morning and had a few rather scratchy hours on the platform before getting on to the actual Trans-Siberian railway for our journey to Irkutsk.  We are getting good at the long distance travel now and a day and a half passed relatively quickly with Uno, Quiddler and Netflix…  We arrived in Irkutsk very late on Monday night and headed straight to our accommodation, which had been chosen entirely on the basis of proximity to the station.  The next mornng we were up and out for the easy one hour bus journey from Irkutsk to Listvyanka, on the shores of Lake Baikal. 

Lake Baikal. Largest and deepest freshwater lake in the World.  Image from pixabay.

We had agonised over the timing of this part of our trip and had ended up having to cut it short to maximise time in Mongolia, so we sadly did not explore more of the shores of Baikal or into Buryatia (the area of Russia to the East of the lake).  Instead on Thursday we headed back to Irkutsk for our early morning departure to Ulaan Bator.  We arrive this evening. We are beyond excited.

What did we really do?

After our long, long, lost in the woods adventure last week, we had another full day out in the majestic Chartreuse on Wednesday, climbing Le Grand Som. At 2026m, it is not quite the highest mountain in the area (that’s Chamechaude at 2082m, which is the pointy mountain which appears all over anything we post), but it is probably the most formidable. We took what we understand to be the most approachable (but longest – it took us over seven hours including stops) of the four possible routes to the top, from Ruchère, about 30 minutes of wobbly driving from the house.

Highlights were Sophie spotting what we think was a marmot above us on some scree (although as it was rather larger than we expected it may have been a confused badger out for a midday stroll in the hills), finishing a Netflix movie over lunch at 1700m, dancing a Tiktok at the summit, making snow angels (yes, really) and Magnus enjoying his new walking shoes. In fact, Magnus enjoyed the walk so much it was declared his 5th favourite walk ever. (His 4th favourite walk is down to the river and back so the competition isn’t what you might call stiff).

Wild flowers of the week were, in no particular order: wild laburnum trees (probably stupid of her but Harriet didn’t realise they grew wild), the very odd, non-photosynthesising (really) birds nest orchid, globeflowers (buttercups on steroids), alpine pasqueflowers, and what looked like wild rhododendrons but are apparently rusty-leaved alpenroses.

On Monday we left three of our four children entirely unsupervised and headed into Grenoble. Magnus, who, you may recall, gets on splendidly with the windy road down the hill, was brought with us; mostly to prevent danger to life and limb if we left all four of them alone. We popped into Decathlon (again) so that we could get the shorts we entirely failed to buy for him last time.

Then on to the independent republic of Carrefour.  A supermarket so large you can see it from space. (It is possible that not all of that is entirely true).  Even as someone who enjoys a foreign supermarket this wasn’t much fun.  It was too big, too confusing and too hot.  It also, oddly, didn’t have lots of things that we can buy in the smaller Intermarché in the nearest town: no oats and no Special K, although it did have 75 different types of mustard and the world’s most expensive fondant icing (at €17 per kg).  It is strange too what “exotic foods” are available.  They had marmite (which we didn’t buy) but not golden syrup.  They, again, didn’t have tahini (which seems odd when you consider France’s history of involvement (to use as anodyne a word as possible) in North Africa) but they did have Thai curry paste. Great joy when we brought that home…

Is there really more of a market for lime marmelade than tahini?

In good news though, Magnus wasn’t sick.

He may, however, have come close to dying of boredom. Incidentally all those plastic bags are the biodegradable sort. The meat wrapping sadly isn’t.

Having finally managed to get Lucy back onto the school roll she has been inundated with school work. We’ve had various technical difficulties with some of it (her school-issued iPad is in a box in Kelso) but she has done what she can with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. It has been lovely seeing the quality of the work she produces.

Months of anticipation were nearly satisfied on Friday when the pool men came. This provoked a brief foreign-country-etiquette panic in Harriet (Do you offer French workmen coffee? Do they drink Nescafé? Answer a) yes and b) that might be a cultural step too far. They got a cafetière). As we type the pool is full of chemicals and still unswimmable in. We wait, tantalised, for tomorrow morning when we can use it. Sophie and Aurora say they are going in before 8 am. Given that the temperature will be about 12 degrees we expect that they will be out before 8 am too.

So near…

With a nearly nine-year-old requesting millionaire’s shortbread and a failure to be impressed by the versions without golden syrup, Harriet had a go at taking on Tate & Lyle’s finest. It was remarkably easy and turned out looking very much like golden syrup. It doesn’t, however taste much like golden syrup, being noticeably lemony (that’ll be the lemon juice). The first batch of millionaire’s made with it is nonetheless in progress.

You know what they say about the proof of the puddimg..

We enjoyed some good shorter walks too although one was enlivened by a bit of minor drama when Aurora lost her footing while clambering about in the river. No harm done but she was rather shocked and distinctly unamused to be wet.

Before the fall…

This week’s garden highlights are the roses. No idea what sort they are.

Pink ones and yellow ones (technical terms)

We had some real world intrusion in the form of the potential loss of over £1000 from the refund of our Russian train tickets. Having cancelled on the basis that we would get a full refund (less £90 fee) now the moment of payment has arrived (late) the company (who will temporarily remain nameless) seems to have multiplied the deduction significantly more than ten-fold. We have emails confirming how much they will pay and are in “discussion” with them about the change, but if we don’t get a positive resolution soon you can expect to see us going Defcon 1 (names included) all over Twitter.

Partly as a result of that dispute and partly because we are aware of the imminent expiry of our Russian visas (cost also in the squillions) we took a difficult decision this week and have made a claim on our travel insurance. This might seem like something we should have done months ago, and we did indeed contact the company in our first week here. However it turns out that we can only claim if our entire trip is “curtailed” (which of course in reality it has been since we arrived here in March). If we claim under this condition it brings the policy to an end and leaves us uninsured. This is not so much of a worry if we remain in France but is, of course, more of a problem if we travel further afield. Our decision to make a claim is therefore an explicit and long-resisted acknowledgement that the curtailment is not temporary, as we had hoped. It is very unlikely that we will get any further on our trip. This year at least.

We suspect it may not be a straightforward claim

In better news, one of Harriet’s wild-pipe-dream-1950s-parenting hopes for this trip was that we would all read to each other. Courtesy of JK Rowling this has actually, and rather to our astonishment, happened this week. She is releasing a new children’s story, The Ickabog, online in daily instalments. It has become part of our routine and we are enjoying the drawing prompts too.

The late lamented Mrs Dovetail. By Magnus

A real sign of normality returning to the village nearly moved Harriet to tears on Friday evening. The printed weather forecast which is normally a daily feature outside the tourist information office is back. It seems like (and is) such a tiny thing but having not been there for nearly three months its return really did feel momentous. Restaurants reopen here next week too.

And the fountain is back on.

Our walk on Thursday was less impressive on paper than Grand Som but in reality no less exciting. We drove down and across the gorge of the Guiers Mort and up into the Forêt Domaniale de la Grande Chartreuse where we headed up a (in some places terrifyingly) vertiginous path. There was, once, a road to the Col de la Charmette and after crossing the ridge and descending through the ancient beechwood we followed this back through the gloom of the long Tunnel des Agneaux to the car. We had brought head torches (Ben and Harriet had walked it once before without) but nonetheless it’s amazing how scary a dark drippy tunnel can be when you can’t see more than 10 metres in front of you.

There was no Trivial Pursuit this week. This may or may not be connected to the fact that we have acquired a Netflix account. Recommendations please?

How was it?

Good bits

Magnus: I liked Grand Som and getting the pool running again. My new shoes were absolutely awesome. I am really excited about my BIRTHDAY!!!!!!

Those shoes must have done the trick

Sophie: The pool man coming was great because it means we can go in the pool tomorrow. I liked the view from the walks. And I love mine and Aurora’s new room.

Lucy: I enjoyed our walk up Grand Som it was very pretty and I had some good chats. Staying at home with Sophie and Aurora was fun. I also liked the Ickabog and doing Minecraft with Sophie, Aurora and Magnus. And having the hammock back up.

Aurora: Helping Mummy with Magnus’s cake, staying in the hammock for ages, watching the pool get cleaned and the TikTok at the top of the mountain.

Well what else would you do when you reach the top?

Harriet: Ben wondered last week if we should lose the “good bit”/”bad bit” distinction and for me this is true this week: my good bit is also a bad bit. I think I have, finally, accepted that it is likely, if not inevitable, that this is as far as we will get. This is a bad thing for obvious reasons, but it is also a good thing as it means, despite what I say below, that the actual bad moments have been fewer and further between. There has been, I think less raging at the situation in which we find ourselves and more acceptance. This is probably better for everyone.

Less philosophically, we have done amazing walks this week. The views never stop getting better, wherever we go. I love the sounds and smells too. It is all so fresh and green and alive. The wildflowers, whether familiar or less so, are a constant source of pleasure.

I have really enjoyed reading to the children and I have loved seeing them work collaboratively on Minecraft.

Ben: In 30 years of coming to the Chartreuse, I have never climbed Le Grand Som, and it was fantastic to do it with my family this week. One of the silver linings of the Covid cloud has been our chance to explore new places, climb new mountains and walk new woods. Our walk above Chartreuse de Curiere on Friday, while slightly vertiginous at times for me, was magical. The beechwood, the birdsong, the feeling of centuries of almost untouched nature – I am loving being in these places.

Bad bits

Aurora: Fighting with everyone, not having Duplo A.

Ben: Screens in general [he taps into a small screen…]. I know I’m spending too much time on a screen, and I’m pretty sure we all are. When there is something which needs to be done, from setting out the lunch table, to a small amount of academic work, or getting shoes and socks on, there is inevitably at least someone on a screen, and a necessary nag to get them off. Sometimes it’s me. And when the screen is a valid “necessity”, for insurance correspondence, or creating or printing academics, or even watching a film, it is too small, too fiddly and not as good as an alternative laptop / TV / etc.

We are also over three weeks past the midpoint of our trip with very little prospect of moving on. This is not a good thing.

Sophie: I don’t like how there were some bits on the walk where you could fall off the cliff. Also I found the tunnel creepy and that’s it.

Harriet: The bad bits are the same old, same old really, a bit like many of our days here, no matter how beautiful or varied our walks. While I have now accepted that this will probably be as far as we get I still have moments when I am terribly sad about that, and moments when I am very bitter and angry. I find thinking about where we should have been hard, but I also don’t want to let go of that. Perhaps I fear that if I let go of it then we really won’t ever go.

Most mornings I wake up to a sinking disappointment that we are still here.

Lucy: The mahoosive workload I have from school and just general scratchiness.

Magnus: Sophie moaning on the walks (all of them).

She does like it sometimes.

What did we eat?

We didn’t eat it as such but Harriet is rather pleased to have made her own golden syrup. Even if parts of it were more difficult than they should have been:

You could even call it partially inverted sugar syrup (Credit: Harriet’s brother, Seb)

On the heels of the children’s surprising approval of turnip daal, we made it again. Though with just the one turnip this time:

We accompanied it with naan bread, always a winner, but we were a little nervous about this naan as the yeast for it had sat in the car while we walked up Grand Som. We weren’t sure what seven hours in a hot car would do to all those little live yeasts. Turns out they were ok.

When the yeast mixture is frothy…

How are the tadpoles?

In a word, elusive. In two words, camera-shy They are definitely still there but we barely see them. The current theory, to add to the one about them staying away from the sun, is that as they are maturing they are much more aware of what is around them. We are now potential predators, so even if they are on the surface as soon as we approach they tend to disappear under the water.

They still have no legs though.

This one decided to pose…

What’s next?

We just don’t know.  If we are not going to go anywhere other than France, we need to have a plan of things to do here before we just drift our way through to August.  Any suggestions welcome.

We do though still remain committed to going anywhere we can if that ever becomes possible.  It just doesn’t seem likely that it will in the near future, if at all this year.

In the short term, tomorrow is Magnus’s ninth birthday, so we have presents and plans for that.

Is this as far away as we will get?