Our amazing adventure and experience living in France came to an end on June 29th. This will be an experience I will never forgot. Things I will miss about France is their amazing farmer's markets, cheese, wine, and a market around that is corner from your home. One disappointment is that I never really did learn the language much. I could get by reading french, but speaking it I was horrible. I was ready to return to an english speaking country. It is really exhausting on a daily basis to struggle with the language.
Our first adventure began with packing our bags and getting on the plane. There is a cheap airline in Europe called Easy Jet. It lures you in with their cheap flights, but after you purchase tickets you realize that to adhere to their baggage weight restrictions is nearly impossible. As you can imagine we have a ridiculous amount of luggage. After spending a equally ridiculous amount on sending two boxes of stuff to Seattle, Wes googled the phrase "Why I hate easy Jet" and came up numerous amounts of entries how to beat the weight restrictions. One of the restrictions is no more than 20 kilos and only one carry one- not a purse and a carry one- just one you can carry on. Many entries stated that there is not limit to what you can wear. So despite it being 75 degrees we loaded on our heavy winter coats and filled the pockets. What was amazing was we were 2 kilos over and they did not charge us. We made it!
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| All our luggage in the Lyon airport. |
Our first night we spent the night in a town about an hour outside of London called Fernsham. It was beautiful and for a Best Western is was nothing like we have seen in the US.
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| It was right on a lake with swans |
The next morning we drove about 45 minutes to an area where there was a metro into London. We parked and took the metro in. We made a snack stop on the way. It was really strange not having to struggle in french and I had to stop myself from saying "bonjour" to every shop owner. The kids enjoyed some ice cream.
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| Being silly on the metro |
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| We spent several hours at the Natural History museum. It was not nearly enough time. You need several days. The kids loved it. |
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| We decided to do mostly a walking tour, but it was pretty warm that day, we took a short bus ride which the kids enjoyed. |
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| I have to admit I don't remember what this was. |
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| There was a beautiful park with really nice gardens, Ava decided to capture the memory by drawing it. |
With the limited time we had- we have changed our touring a bit- when we first arrived in Europe we entered every church and monument. Now we are down to wallk bys and taking pictures. You just can't see it all with kids.
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| The Queen's 60th year anniversary was celebrated this year. |
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| Westminster Abbey |
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| Parliament Building |
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| The kids were beat after the day. We are on our way back to the metro station where we parked the car |
That evening we drove down south a couple of hours to the village of Sopley. We rented a cottage for the rest of the week since it is a lot easier to stay one place with the kids and not move hotels every night. Plus this place had an indoor pool which ranks high according to the kids. It did not disappoint. We had a great time and would have loved to stay longer.
As you may have noticed- no pictures of playgrounds in the UK or Ireland. The pool and beach was a great replacement.
Besides the pool the kids were also excited because we had promised a trip to a local amusement park. It was called Adventure Wonderland and kids were pretty happy. It is a very small theme park based on Alice's wonderland. I am not sure how they haven't been sued the pants off by Disneyland since they had very similar rides.
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| Does this ride seem familiar? |
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| This maze was hell. For a short time I wasn't sure we wouldn't make it out without outside help. The kids started to cry. |
On Tuesday we drove up to Southampton and met up with my relative Shirley Duke. We enjoyed a wonderful lunch at her home and spent the afternoon catching up. She even gave us a tour the area. We had a great time.
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| During our tour we saw the adorable home with a thatched roof |
We had a pretty busy week and continued our drive down to Exeter the following day. Wes met up with a fellow researcher and I took the kids to a movie. They were very excited since it was in english.
Our little village that we were staying at was near the coast- so we decided to explore the coast near the english channel a bit as well as a neighboring and larger town called Christchurch. Both were very charming. We really had good luck with great and unusually warm weather. The beach was a bit windy- as you can see from the picture of Ava.
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| These little "shacks" were all along the beach. We were not sure if they were public or owned by the beach houses above the cliffs. They even have fold down decks. None of them were being used that day. |
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| Looking out into the English Channel. France is somewhere out there. |
The town of Christchurch
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| It was the 4th of July the day we explored this town and this church was having a 4th of July concert with music for Americans. It was a nice evening and little strange not to be going to fireworks. |
We had a great time in England, but it was time to continue our adventure and move onto Ireland. We drove about 4.5 hours up to Wales (many of the signs up there are in Welsh- and apparently we were in the town that William and Kate live in) to catch a super ferry to Ireland.
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| I saw either a small whale or porpoise out the window, unable to capture it. Picture of the Irish Sea. |
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| Ava being silly. We had so much luggage we had to hire to cabs to take to the hotel in Dublin. |
We spent the night in Dublin and the next morning made our way to County Donegal where we had rented a cottage to the remainder of our trip. Wes and I have enjoyed all the places we have visited, but truly loved Ireland. It is a wonderful place and th e people are amazing. They are so friendly and warm. You felt like you had known them forever.
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| During the drive you make your way up through Northern Ireland and we stopped in this little town for lunch. Again they were so friendly. Wes wanted to trying some fishing, so stopped in a fishing shop. The locals were amazing, shared stories with us and were truly interested in what we were doing. |
As we drove closer to our destination, the landscape changed quite a bit and was like what I imagined or thought Ireland would look like. There are a lot of peat bogs.
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| The trees have disappeared. All the signs are also in Irish. Good percentage of the population in this area still speak Irish. |
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| Our little cottage "Donegal Thatched Cottages" |
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| Inside the cottage |
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| View outside the back door |
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| It got really foggy one afternoon. Unfortunately, Wes had no luck fishing |
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| On our drive back to Dublin, Ava stopped to ride a pony |
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Location where they harvested the peat
So there you have it. Four months of great adventure and experience. Wes and I still ask ourselves if it was worth the loss of money not working and extra expense, but I think it was. I hope the kids remember this and look back as a positive experience despite the challenges it brought not speaking the language. After all they were able to sample the finest McDonalds and check out all the playgrounds of Europe. Until our next adventure- farewell!
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