just another morning here

I was wondering, too, before this morning! We have an appointment with the in-laws this afternoon to discuss travel etc., so I thought I’d better find out where we were heading as well!

We are going A BLIMMING LONG WAY! Travelling on the eurotunnel, so the first leg of the journey is home – Folkestone, which takes about 4 hours. Our crossing is at 7am so we’re going to have to leave in the early hours. Any sensible person would stop over in Folkestone, but no – due to the fact that Steve’s taking his drums which can’t really be left in the car overnight, this is out of the question.

Our first week is to be spent in St. Paul le Jeune, which is in the Ardeche. Mappy thinks it will take us 10 hours to get there – I reckon it will take us 10 hours, but that will be with stops! At some point this week I have to find a Mairie to go to, in order to sign some boring bits of paper (thus saving myself the £100 notary fee if I did it in England). On our last day, we’re going right down to the coast, to Cassis, in order to meet up with my uncle who lives near St. Tropez – that’s another 6 hour round trip!

The second week we’re in Millieres, in the Champagne region. Apparently it’s 6 hours travelling to get here, but it’s halfway home (which was the idea!), and we’ll probably take things a lot easier this week. One place we’re planning to visit (on a friends’ recommendation) is Nigloland. Last time we were in France we were near Poitiers so we visited Futuroscope - Anna is desperate to go back because she loved it so much, but it really is too far to go – hopefully Nigloland will be a good enough substitute.

Then home, via eurotunnel again. We’re kind of looking forward to it all – in a funny sort of way, because we didn’t have the garage running when we booked to go away, so it is with some trepidation that Steve is leaving his baby behind for a fortnight. We are celebrating Steve’s mum’s 50th birthday with her in the middle of the holiday which will be fun. We’re going to make the most of it, as it will be the last time for a while that we go away with Steve’s mum and dad because his dad is shortly to become our employee – how strange is that?!

I’m trying to put together a comic/magazine/workbook style thing for the children around the theme of France. It’s proving harder than I thought – just look at Enchanted Learning and see how much they have on France/French language activities … most of it’s beyone me, let alone the kids! Anyway, we’ll get there in the end, and it will get added in with our holiday diary to make a project all together. I suppose if I was feeling really ambitious we could make a tape of us practising some french language, but that would mean more effort than a quick bit of internet surfing!

Bunnies in the garden

Meanwhile, the children are playing beautiful ‘made up games’ upstairs (which generally results in the total trashing of Anna’s room, but there we go). Abbie has just appeared in a bunny costume wanting to pull a carrot from the garden that she can eat, so I said it would be fine. She looked too cute to say no to.

It was supposed to be a day off all round but we ended up dashing round like mad things for most of the day. The girls went on the Emmanuel School trip to Crealy today and had a fantastic time by all accounts. I took Joe to his Tadpoles swimming session on his own which was remarkably easy with one child instead of three! Steve has been in and out of work all day, I’ve run him around to pick up cars etc … we took an hour out to go to TK Maxx for a couple of new t-shirts for him before he goes off to France on Friday. He is madly trying to get work sorted so he can leave it for the weekend, while I am trying to get the house and children sorted for a week away.

Steve is off to Troyes in France for the Festival de Musique. This is a national Festival and each town does different things. We have friends who moved to Troyes a few years ago, so every year we (the church) send a band over to take part and it’s been really good fun.

The children and I are going to the Muddle Puddle Summer Camp! We’ve been looking forward to it for ages, and now it’s nearly here. We met a few people when we visited the Winter camp in Okehampton, but it will be nice to put a few more faces to names (and email addresses!) and spend time enjoying ourselves with friends. We have a couple of trips planned, to this Dinosaur Park on Tuesday, and to Suffolk Wildlife Park on Thursday. There will be lots more going on as well, too much to write about, probably! Expect a long post when we get home.

This evening I’ve been looking at the AA Routefinder and planning all my journeys (well, to a point, anyway). Over the week I’m probably going to be putting around 700 miles onto the clock of my lovely new car (I am still so glad that it turned up in time!), so please pray that all our travelling goes smoothly.