France Days 5 & 6

Our days in sunny Provence came to a close in the lovely way that they began. We spent our last full day exploring some of the smaller towns near where we were staying. That is, after our daily stop at the boulangerie for a brioche or eclair and before our daily swim in the pool. Y’know, Provence priorities.

We first headed to Orange to check out the Roman theater. It’s still a working theater and they were setting up for a show while we toured the panorama. It was pretty cool to explore a theater that has been showing performances for nearly 2,000 years.

One of our strongest memories of this day will be the Mistral winds, which came up in force that day. It was a little freaky to be so high in the air with gusts of winds blowing at you. But we all survived and made our way to lunch in a cute little plaza.

We drove up to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse to check out a little town that a friend told us about. The town was up tucked into the side of a cliff in the Luberon region. It was as gorgeous as advertised (if a bit touristy) and we walked up the path to see the headwaters of the river come out of the rocks.

Good hikers, on every continent.

The water was really that tourquoise. It was unreal.

Our sixth day was sadly our last day in Provence, for now. I think we all plan to come back at some point since we were so taken with the region. But we made our way to the train station for another travel day. The train took us to Paris for the last leg of our McFourson’s European Adventure.

 

France Days 3 & 4

Oh Provence. You are beautiful. Tu es belle. Nous t’aimons. 

We started off on Wednesday at Pont du Gard, which is about half an hour from where we’re staying. By this point J was getting used to driving, we were all getting used to being language-impaired and we could really use an outdoor adventure. Pont du Gard provided it.

Pont du Gard is a pretty well preserved Roman acqueduct. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has an impressive museum for us culture vulture types (J and I), and also has a lovely swimming spot on the river for us active types (the kids). It may have been the perfect place for our family to spend the day.

We came back to our Gite for a mid-afternoon swim and then headed to Chateneuf-du-Pape for dinner on top of a hill with a view of the Rhone valley.

After dinner we hiked up to the top of the hill and watched birds fly out of the castle ruins at sunset. Was this the perfect Provençal day? We think so.

UNESCO World Heritage sites are everywhere you turn down here, so on our next day we headed to another one in Les Baux-de-Provence.

Les Baux is a castle ruin that you can explore. Ther’es a guided audio tour, signs and some demonstration areas, but it’s pretty rustic. It’s also gorgeous and was really fun to explore and imagine knights and royalty from the Middle Ages living there.

We headed out when the heat got to us. Of course we stopped for ice cream on the way down and finished the day in the pool. As one does when they are in Provence.

 

 

 

France Days 1 & 2

Early on Monday morning we all hopped in a black cab to the train station to board a ‘bullet train’ from London to Avignon. It was a long train ride, through the Chunnel and across most of France, but we arrived in sunny, warm Avignon in mid-afternoon. We got settled into a rental car, J re-acquainted himself with driving a stick shift, we all starting learning French road signs, and we headed North to our Gite. A Gite is like a farm stay, or a VRBO in the country rather than the city.

Our Gite isn’t so much on a working farm, but it is next to a lovely home and is surrounded by wine vineyards.

Best of all, it has a pool that we can use! We were in it within about half an hour once we arrived.

On our second day in France, we headed to the nearby town of Avignon. On our way we stopped at the local boulangerie/patisserie

for some eclairs, brioche and other tasties. Sam decided that we should make a daily visit to a boulangerie every day that we’re in France. We all agreed.

Avignon is a beautiful old city that is surrounded by a wall. Inside is the Palais de Popes, or the palace that the popes lived in during the 1300s when they decided to move there from Rome. J and I geeked out on the architecture and history. The kids played a game on the tablet guided tour through the Palace. So everyone was happy.

We finished on the original ‘bridge to nowhere’ Avignon Bridge, a stone bridge that only extends halfway across the river.

Southern France is hot, so we’ve pledged to finish up our sight-seeing by mid to late afternoon so that we can finish the day with a few hours by the pool. If you’re counting, we’ve decided to eat pastries every day and go swimming every day. Yep, France is treating the McFoursons just fine.

 

London Days 5 & 6

On our last few days in London, we cultured it up. On Saturday we got a late start (still recovering from our long day in Warwick) but we finally drug ourselves out of our flat and braved the British Museum to check out antiquities. J and I were really excited and spent most of the Tube ride explaining what the Rosetta Stone is to the kids and why it was so important.

Sam was impressed…

While I might not recommend going to the British Museum on a Saturday afternoon with two squirrelly children, we did have a good time. The Museum has some pretty good kids activity guides where you pick a topic and it gives you a route through the museum to go on and things to look for in each room. J and Clare took Ancient Greece and Sammy and I went looking for Creatures. It was actually pretty cool and and we saw snake sculptures in the Central American room, totems in the North American room and dragon carvings in the Chinese room.

But, if you’re counting, that was our billionth museum in London and the kids were done with them. So we ended up a playground while J went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street.

I might do a whole post about London’s playgrounds (because goodness knows I hung out in enough of them), but they were truly the most international places I’ve ever been in my life. Sitting by the sandbox was like a mini-UN meeting, only the people meeting were all under the age of 10 and they all could agree that water mixed with sand was a good time. It was fascinating, but also so very human, to watch parents and children of every nationality, religion and background come together to just play.

On our last day in London we were getting a bit tired of the hustle, bustle, noise and crowds. So we hopped a tourist boat to Greenwich for some green space, more museums, and a bit of (relative) relaxation.

We saw Big Ben! (Sort of)

“We’re on a boat!! In the Thames River!”

“Mom, can you give us your phone so we can make a phone call from an actual phone booth.” (My kids still don’t quite get the concept of phone booths… but why would they?)

So we weren’t done with English museums. We spent a few hours at the Cutty Sark. I wasn’t that excited about this stop, but it was actually pretty cool. You gotta love a museum that has something for everyone in the family.

We finished at the Greenwich Meridian with a view of beautiful London.

Cheers London, you beautiful, dirty, crowded, exciting, wonderful city!  The McFourson’s are out – but we’ll definitely be back.

London and Warwick – Days 3 & 4

We’re getting settled into the English part of the trip – riding the tube, eating fish and chips (Sam), drinking pints (J and I) and looking for traffic on the left when we cross the street (all of us). We’re all getting acclimated to the accents and languages around us all of the time, as well as the personal control that we need to get around in such a busy city. Clare can’t dance down the middle of the tube car and Sam can’t just leap on everything he sees (though they both try). But we’re out and about everyday. Here’s a rundown of our first few days in England.

On Day 2 we headed to the Natural History Museum. I’d heard that they had skeletons of dinosaurs and of a blue whale that I thought would be fun. The museum was cool… in a dusty sort of way. There were lots of taxidermied animals that probably would be cool if we hadn’t seen the real things in zoos or on TV. But there were some interesting parts about it. The dinosaur skeletons didn’t impress, but the animatronic Tyranisaurus Rex was pretty cool.

Hey look! It’s a blue whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling! It did actually show how huge a blue whale actually is.

But the best parts were the earth science section and the butterfly exhibit. We got to the earth science section with the coolest escalator that went into a giant red planet (pictured above). We also really liked the volcano and earthquake section with an earthquake simulation of the Kobe earthquake. And we finished in the tropical world of butterflies.

We finished our day with a bus ride to another playground. Our daily playground visits are essential for two kids who are used to having a lot of freedom and room to roam. I generally sit back and let them run, climb and shout to their heart’s content. I figure it’s fair since most of the day they have to stand still, keep their hands to themselves and use inside voices. My favorite part of this day was when Clare and Sam were playing with another brother and sister on the zip line and the climbing structure. When we left Clare told me “they didn’t speak English, but we figured it out. They were fun to play with.”

On our third day in England, we decided to leave London for a bit. We hopped a train to Warwick to explore the Warwick Castle.

The castle is quite the tourist destination and is owned and run by the same company that runs LegoLand and Madame Taussads. It was a bit more glitz than authenticity, but it was very family-friendly and accessible to the kiddos.

And it had ice cream. So that was good.

We saw a trebuchet fire, show arrows, fawned over princesses and watched falconry. We got home after 10 pm that night after a long day filled with 20,000 steps, memories, laughter, and some glitzed-up history.

McFoursons in Europe!

We did it! We got passports, booked flights, pulled the kids out of school a week early, and flew to London. After years of saying “when do you think the kids will be old enough to take to Europe” we decided that 6.5 and 8.5 is the age to do it. (I’ll keep you posted on if we still think that when we are back home…)

We flew out from PDX on Monday night on a 10 hour overnight flight. I had no idea what to expect and was fearing the worst, but the flight actually went better than I expected. We all slept at least a few hours, watched movies, ate some food, and arrived in London without any tears.

We’re staying in at VRBO in Notting Hill, which is a few blocks away from the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens. We checked out the playground on our first afternoon and the kids declared it magical. It’s a pretty great place, with a pirate ship, sand pit, several hidey holes to play in, and the whole thing is fenced in so the adults can let kids have the run of it without worrying that they’re going to leave.

(Not pictured, a 6 pm bedtime where we all crashed HARD. Also not pictured, a midnight bowl of cereal when the kids woke up hungry and then had a hard time going back to sleep. Jet lag needs no pictures.)

We all woke up on our first full day in London feeling rested. So we decided to brave the Tube (England’s subway). We took the St. James Place and walked through the park (found another playground) and then checked out Buckingham Palace.

We didn’t see the queen, but Clare thinks that she and Queen Elizabeth would be friends if they ever met. “She’s a grandmother, so she probably likes kids. And I like grandmothers!”

We wandered through Trafalgar Square, spent about 45 minutes checking out art in the National Gallery, fought the crowds in Leicester Square and ended up in Covent Garden to watch buskers and eat ice cream.

(Sam is impressed by Van Gogh… not really.)

Cheers to successful first day in London!