A very varied holiday!

It has once again been quite some time since my last post, but for the very good reason that we have been away on holiday.

We headed off on Wednesday morning and after a ferry ride and overnight stop in a very basic hotel, we arrived in deepest, darkest Burgundy.  We stayed in a lovely little place owned by a scouser and his French (of Russian extraction) head-mistress wife.

A, M, K and the lovely Max.

While there we went canoeing/kayaking (I'm not entirely sure which way round, but we used the paddles from one in the other!) and for a walk part of a the way around a lake.  We spent a very wet day in Dijon, following the owl's trail around the town and visiting the natural history museum and visiting an exhibition about predators.

An owl's trail marker that we followed.

Dijon's good luck charm owl.

Our last full day we went to a Parc d'Aventures to go on the high ropes course, M spotted the leaflet in the cottage and after that it was pretty inevitable!  K & M zoomed around the courses most of the time, with A and I following somewhat more sedately behind.  On one particularly tricky part A fell off (the safety equipment did its job) and after managing to return to the platform at the start of the obstacle, where I was, I had a go, however because A had stretched the ropes (the instructor's opinion!) I too fell off and had a cracking bruise on my hip as a result.  I had managed to get a lot further than A though and managed to get myself back upright and get across.

We saw lots of wildlife while we were in Burgundy from lots of different birds of prey to beautiful red squirrels including the cutest baby one.  We also spotted a deer on the verge like you might see rabbits one evening and while trying to retrieve a ball from a hedge, M spotted a snake, which we're pretty sure was a grass snake.

We have long had a rule in our family that if you want an ice cream when abroad you have to order it yourself in the language of the country you are in, consequently, we can all do so in French, Italian and German.  Transactions, mostly around food, are also strongly encouraged and this continued here, initially for puddings and drinks and by the end of the holiday both K & M were comfortable ordering their own food generally, although admittedly quite often one or other of them went for the 'moi aussi' option.  Another thing that I added in was answering in French (after a bit of teaching) whenever they asked what time it was.

After leaving Burgundy we, not entirely deliberately, went to two UNESCO World Heritage sites in one day.  The first was the Cistercian Abbey of Fontenay, which was somewhere to visit en route to the farm b&b where we were spending the next night.  It was well worth the visit.

The water wheel at Fontenay.

The next was entirely unplanned, having arrived at the farm I asked our host if she could recommend somewhere to eat.  Since it was Monday (when many restaurants are closed), she suggested we would need to go to Provins, which as a tourist town would have places open.

About three and a half years ago we had a holiday to Paris and Eurodisney and promised M that we would return to Disney once she was 1m40 (the height that you can go on all of the rollercoasters).  By the start of this year it was clear that she was going to reach that dizzy height, so we started planning.  When I was young, my dad used to travel a lot with work including to the USA a couple of times a year and although he never to my recollection mentioned it at the time, on one occasion he had a free day and went to one of the Disney parks there.  When we talked about our return trip, he brought this up and how at the time he had thought that it was somewhere you should go with children and suggested that he and mum could come with us.  Not everything went entirely to plan; Big Grandad missed a step and fell over very soon after entering the park, before we even met up, and bruised his ribs quite badly (he's now telling people that Mickey Mouse pushed him over!), Granny's ankles swelled up after the first day and the weather wasn't entirely dry to put it mildly.  Despite all that though, we had a lovely few days.  Granny found the teacups a bit much and Big Grandad decided after joining us on one rollercoaster (Space Mountain) that one was more than enough.  The rest of us went on all of the rollercoasters many times, K & M even more than A and me.

M, K & Granny on the teacups!

Big Thunder Mountain photo.

We finished our holiday with a visit to A's uncle and aunt's farm in Kent.  The girls love going there with the dogs being a particular draw, and it's always good to see them.  It also meant that we came home with blackberries, apples and a huge amount of sloes.  I've already got 5 litres of sloe gin on the go and made one lot of sloe jelly and need to do another load very soon!