Rosie and I have reached an age where we should be doing as much travelling as we can while we are still fit and healthy. To achieve this, we thought we would add a couple of weeks of LSL onto a normal school holiday and go somewhere for a month. This was Liam’s schooling wouldn’t be too interrupted and we stay in just one area and really enjoy the lifestyle of this place.
This year we decided to go to France with a stop over in Hong Kong. We left on June 24th on Cathay Pacific, with Liam loaded up with a couple of weeks of school work to do in the quiet times – really only meant maths since not many teachers are that interested in providing work.
We had a really nice few days in Hong Kong, visiting the markets and the beach. We visited The Peak Tram, after catching a ferry and walked around this area enjoying the views, even though it was very cloudy and damp. We also went to dinner at the floating Jumbo restaurant which we really enjoyed.
Continuing on our Disneyland tours, we went to Disneyland Hong Kong to tick another one off our list. This park was much smaller than the two in the USA and was still being developed. We caught the train there, which is always fun. The place was very crowded so we couldn’t do too many rides, but it was still fun.
We then flew to Paris, landing in the morning and picking up our hire car from the airport. While reading the Teachers Union newspaper, Bruce had seen a house for rent in a small French town, so he booked it for a week. We drove from the airport to Figeac, in the south of France. Figeac is a very small walled city, with narrow streets and very old buildings. We could get within a one hundred metres of our apartment with the car and then had to walk the rest of the way. The apartment was perfect and the town was gorgeous.
Rosie walked down to the town square (100m) and did her best to look like a French momma. She strolled around buying bread and cheeses for lunch, while Bruce looked for wine. The local school band set up on our corner so we got to listen to them from our apartment.
Each morning Bruce walked down to the local cafe to check his emails and do any other computer work that he needed to do. Liam came sometimes since it was his only way to access the internet. After a morning coffee, we would drop into the bakery to get a baguette or croissant to take back to Rosie.
The architecture in Figeac was very interesting, as well as the drives through the country side. We got to see aqueducts and other small towns but the most enjoyable part of our stay was just experiencing life in the village.
Trying to feed both Liam and Rosie was a bit of a struggle, Liam didn’t eat anything in France except pizza and Rosie wouldn’t eat red meat or duck, so that restricted her options a bit. She did order a Leonardo Salad when we first got there and was very disappointed to find out that this was a platter full of meat. We really need to learn a bit of French.
After Figeac, we drove over to Switzerland to stay in a town called Porrentruy, where a leg of the Tour de France was going to finish. We booked into a nice B&B where we had a very large apartment and pleasant walks down to the town and river. We had organised to meet up with Patrick, Kate, Mischa and Aninya, who were living in Zurich for a year. We both caught the train to a town between our two cities. Patrick had booked a nice little restaurant overlooking the river, with a view to the road on the other side, where the riders were going to pass by.
Liam picked up a few give aways as we walked to the train so that he was right into the spirit when we got there. We then walked down the hill from the train station looking for a sign that Patrick was around. We found a big Australian flag and the family sitting around it. Easy.
After a very nice lunch with a couple of bottles of wine, we watched the riders race by, then walked back to the train station to get back to the finish line in Porrentruy. Bruce ferried everyone to the finish line in our car, took a couple of trips but this was ok.
By the time the second group got to the finish line, Patrick had staked out a good spot on the fence line of the finishing straight where we could enjoy the atmosphere and wait for the riders. First came the caravan, which is all the support vehicles and merchandise vehicles. You could also buy ice creams, if you were quick. Bruce was quick enough to get the ice creams, but not his change. The caravan had to keep moving so as to not hold up the bike riders.
After the race, we took Patrick, Kate and family back to train station so they could catch the train back home. We stayed another night before heading off back to France to visit the Somme.
A stopover just outside Paris was needed, and also provided us with the opportunity to visit Disneyland Paris (this makes four Disneylands now, only one to go). We stayed as this interesting hotel, which was pretty run down, but the manager did drive an Audi TT, just like Dave T.
Disneyland Paris was just like all the other Disneylands, but here they did put a French twist on most attractions. If there were French characters in the Disney movies, then they were the main characters you saw around the park. The fireworks also had a very French feel to them. We really enjoyed this park.
After this we continued North to the Somme. Bruce really likes a bit of history and Liam also likes to know about wars and guns. We were very impressed with the Somme district. You always here how rude the French are, particularly to the English, but all you see in this area is complete respect and appreciation to all the different countries that supported France during the wars.
We spent a few days looking around this area and gaining an appreciation of the way WW1 was fought. We got down into the trenches, and Liam and Bruce managed to get out of them as well. Rosie fell flat on her face getting out and had to wear a jacket the rest of the day to hide the round mud stains on the front of her T-Shirt.
After the Somme, we travelled back to Paris for the last few days of our stay. We had booked two different hotels for our stay, the first was next to the Gare de Nord. We picked this hotel since we could drop off our luggage and then go to the train station carpark and drop off the car. The first part of the plan was good, we dropped Liam and the luggage off, got him up to the room and set him up. Rosie and Bruce then just had to drive around the corner and drop off the car.
When we got to the spot, we couldn’t find a Hertz dealership anywhere, and kept getting directed into a huge underground carpark. After a couple of laps of the area, we decided to go into the carpark and then noticed signs to Hertz five floors down. Down we went and found a parking spot where we left the car. Took the lift up to the ground level and found a Hertz office where we dropped off the key.
A short walk back to the hotel and all was good.
The first hotel gave us good access to the Bato Bus, which is a hop on, hop off ferry that goes up and down the Seine. We caught this to many of the major attractions in Paris and thoroughly enjoyed this leisurely way to travel. We saw all the usual sites in Paris, but Bruce tended to enjoy sitting in the cafes, drinking a wine and people watching.
The weather was perfect and Liam enjoyed most of the sites, since he had recently watched Rugrats in Paris, so he knew what he was going to see.
At night, we caught the last Bato Bus for a lovely cruise along the Seine. It cost us nothing, but we followed a tourist ferry that had spotlights and lit up all the attractions along the Seine as we went along. We go to see the Eiffel Tower beautifully lit up and then the boat turned around and took us back to our hotel. Great value.
We shifted to our second hotel, which was around the corner from the Eiffel Tower, but was also very close to where we wanted to go to see the last day of the Tour de France. We investigated the route for the final days ride and decided that we wouldn’t get close if we tried the Champs Ellise so we picked a better spot. We walked to the Jardin des Tuileries, and found a really good spot up high looking over road.
We took turns at holding our spot up against the rail overlooking the road while two of us walked around the Jardin des Tuileries. As the riders got closer it became much harder to hold our spot, but Rosie can get quite aggressive when needed.
It turned out to be a great place to watch the race, since the riders go around the Jardin several times so you get to see a lot of action. We were next to a drink bottle disposal area, so after each lap, the police threw all the discarded bottles up into the crowd. Liam really tried to catch one, but the policeman who through it to him missed and it bounced back off the wall. Liam was most upset.
The next day we flew directly back home to Perth, via Hong Kong. Sadly our plane was the last to land in Hong Kong before they closed the airport since there was a huge typhoon over Hong Kong. We ended up being stuck in the airport for over a day, since we had landed at our designated place, there was no obligation to give us anything.
After a few hours we got really bored and decided to try to find somewhere else more comfortable. We approached one of the airport lounges, but they wouldn’t let us in. The next one, we just walked past the counter and directly up to the restaurant section, the Maitre De asked us whether we would like breakfast, so in we went and had a pleasant few hours lounging around.
Unfortunately they called up our flight, so we left, only to find out that our flight was still delayed. We tried to get into another lounge but were blocked, so tried the one we got into the first time. Again, we just walked past the check-in counter and went up to the Maitre De, who welcomed us back. This time we ate, had showers and had a good sleep on the lounges. We didn’t leave until they started to do final boarding calls for our flight.
Bruce missed a day of school, but it wasn’t his fault so no problems.
