Amsterdam, Day 5. We bike to Centraal again, this time to catch the train to Lelystad. Some snafus with ticket purchases cause us to barely make the train on time. On the plus side, we’re actually going in the right direction – had our first purchase attempt at the ticket machine actually gone through, it would have sent us in the wrong direction.
In Lelystad we catch a taxi to the Nieuw Land Poldermuseum, a science museum for kids dedicated to explaining how the Dutch reclaimed land from the sea by pumping it out. The entire site of Lelystad, where the museum’s located, is only about 40 years old; the land it sits on used to lie under 16 feet of water. The museum’s really nice, but nearly empty. A nice woman takes us into a little theater and starts an English-dubbed movie for us that explains the building of the polders. As the movie describes how the dikes helped control flooding during storms, we’re all startled when hidden fans begin blowing wind on us, followed by a spray of water to match the crashing waves on screen. The museum’s centerpiece is the Water Theater, where kids can make a dam, put toy boats through locks, turn an Archimedean water screw, and play with other sorts of water engineering toys. This area also boasts a surprise storm: at one point the blinds close themselves, thunder is heard, little strobe lights go off, and small generated waves break against the toy dams. In the last room of the museum, Anya plays with pieces of a big diorama so she can take a picture of herself in it, while Angela carefully considers the pros and cons of water-related political issues so she can cast a vote in a ballot simulation.
We lunch at the Batavia Stad shopping mall next door. The girls linger in a sandy playground, but it’s getting kind of hot, so we move on. We wind up the visit by exploring the Batavia, a full-scale replica of a wooden trading ship owned by the Dutch East India Company.
We ride a city bus back to the station, train back to Centraal, the bike all the way back to Leidseplein to return the bikes. Anya keeps asking if we can go back to the big park we visited earlier (the Vondelpark), so we walk there. Once inside the park, the girls spot a tree with big branches that looks good for climbing. We spend a while playing around it, and take a family picture on the lowest branch, maybe 4 feet off the ground. The fun ends suddenly when a woman who’s climbing on the same tree falls about 10 feet to the ground. She’s broken her arm. Someone phones for help, and we stay with the woman until help arrives.
We walk back to the apartment, stopping along the way for dinner at a Japanese restaurant. It’s a nice evening, so we sit outside. Before reaching the apartment, we come to a gelateria and get some gelato for dessert.
Amsterdam to Paris. We have some great croissants at a coffee house just around the corner, and kick ourselves for not having discovered it sooner. We really want to make sure we get to Centraal Station on time for a train, and succeed so well that the platform guys laugh when they tell us we’re an hour early. The comfortable high-speed train to Paris takes about 3 hours; the time goes by surprisingly quickly. Bree and Liya use their blankets to make tents over their seats, which we’re worried will alarm the car attendant, but luckily they find this it amusing. “Camping!” they say. The attendant asks if we’d like a taxi arranged in Paris, which turns out to be a great idea; we get to our hotel in no time. We’re staying at the Hotel d’Aubusson, right in the middle of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Bree has fallen asleep in the taxi, so we lay her down. Jan watches the girls while Angela moseys down the street to buy tea at Mariage-Freres, our favorite tea company. (They make The Rouge Bourbon, a red tea with vanilla, which is the girls’ favorite tea.)
A little after 4:00, we’re met by our Seattle friends Will and Sabine. They’re on vacation at the home of Sabine’s family, about an hour from Paris, but have come into Paris for a day trip. Our hotel is just around the corner from an apartment they used to live in, so they should us around the neighborhood a bit. We stop at a sidewalk cafe for a drink. Anya and Liya are introduced to “diabolo”, sort of like Italian sodas, and Anya discovers that she likes the flavor of grenadine. We walk a short ways to the Luxembourg Gardens and hunt for its children’s playground. It turns out you have to pay a somewhat steep entrance fee for the playground, but after a day of travel, it’s worth it to give the girls some time to run around as much as they want. There’s a cool sort of zip line that Anya rides over and over, while Bree plays in the sand area. The weather’s sunny but muggy, and Jan and Anya get hot playing tag on a giant rope pyramid.
Will and Sabine finally have to leave to head back to her parent’s home. We walk around and find a nice-looking Italian restaurant called Marco Polo. Our entrees are just okay, but the girls fare better with gnocchi. The dish comes in unfamiliar sauce called valdostana, so we’re taking a bit of a risk they won’t like it at all, but we luck out and they like it after all. It’s fun to simply be eating a pleasant meal outdoors in Paris.
Paris, Day 1: Louvre. Somehow the girls let us sleep in. Usually it’s Sabriya who’s up first, babbling away at the first light of dawn. We have breakfast around the corner at Cafe Paul, recommended to us by Will and Sabine. The girls are happy with their hot chocolate, and the pastries are, as hoped, fantastic.
The first thing on our short list of attractions we want to see in Paris is the Louvre, which Jan deliberately avoided on his only trip to Paris twenty-odd years ago – saving it for his next trip. We seek out the Caroussel entrance in the shopping mall below the museum, as that entrance is said to usually be the least crowded. We stop by the Mona Lisa first. There’s a scrum of tourists in front of it, all madly raising cameras above their heads and pointing them in the general direction of the painting. Anya and Liya forge straight through the crowd to the front, Angela following in their wake. Jan hoists Sabriya to his shoulders so she can get a look.
We walk through the Egyptian galleries, and the girls all pull out their sketchbooks. Liya copies down hieroglyphs, Anya draws, Sabriya sits in front of something and scribbles something entirely different. We have lunch in a cafe below the museum, and although it’s nearly identical to a meal the girls wolfed down a few days ago, they hardly touch it. After lunch we head to the Classical Greek gallery, stopping to look at the Venus de Milo. Anya had a unit on Greek mythology this past year, and astutely picks out that all the statues of Athena depict her wearing a strange brooch: the Medusa’s head. With that, the girls are done with the museum, and we walk out through the big glass pyramid into rain. We take turns carrying Bree, and she falls asleep on the way. Back at the hotel, we even manage to get in a nap ourselves.
Paris, Day 1 continued: Eiffel Tower. Our usual travel rule with the girls is just do one tourist attraction a day, but the girls seem up for an evening visit to the Eiffel Tower, so we head out around 5:30. The nearby RER station is closed for construction, so we have to navigate the replacement bus instead to get to the nearest functioning station, then take the train to Champs de Mars. Coming out of the station, we can’t see the tower, but when come to a little alley, there it is, looming close by between buildings. We stop at a touristy restaurant for dinner before braving the lines. There’s a line for tickets, another for the elevator to the 2nd stage, then another longer line for the top. It’s getting on in the evening, but we’d nevertheless like to make it all the way up. We finally get to top and walk to the upper outside deck, in time to catch a burst of the setting sun below the clouds. A nice cabbie gives us a ride back to the hotel, pointing out landmarks along the way.
Paris, Day 2. We have breakfast in hotel, then set out for Cité des Sciences, a kids’ science museum in the suburbs. We’re making the trip on the recommendation of a couple we know and several guidebooks. As it turns out, it’s okay, but probably not worth the opportunity cost of other sites we could have seen in Paris. The highlight is a room where the girls design little cardboard boxes on a screen and then have them cut out with an industrial laser-cutter for them to fold and assemble.
Back in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, we stop at Amorino for gelato, which turns out to be amazing, perhaps best we’ve ever had. The fruit and chocolate flavors are intense, and they carefully shape the cones of gelato to look like flowers. We eat them outside on the sidewalk. Bree eats hers rather slowly in the sun, and ends up covered in chocolate.
Angela shops with Anya and Liya, selecting some nicely-colored wraps. Jan goes to Mariage-Frères for black tea. For dinner we walk the short distance to Le Relais de l’Entrecôte, a steak restaurant recommended by Jan’s friend, Robbie, but it’s too early for dinner. As we walk back, it starts to rain, then thunder. The skies overhead look ominous, and we can just feel it’s about to pour. We make it to the door of a restaurant called Le Procope, a reasonably nice restaurant that attracts tourists by virtue of being the oldest restaurant in Paris — it was founded in 1686. We sit down, and through an open window watch the skies just open, letting down a torrential downpour.
Anya and Liya make up the following lyrics for a commercial. They sing this a lot.
“And I cry and I cry when it’s time to go.
Until I see my… doorknob!
And I kiss it,
And I hug it,
And I really, really love it.
And I cry and I cry when it’s time to go.
Until I see my… bookshelf!
And I kiss it,
And I hug it,
And I really, really love it.
And I cry and I cry when it’s time to go.”
(etc.)
Paris, Day 3. We walk to Notre Dame, intending to walk to the top of the cathedral’s towers, but the line’s far too long, something like 2 1/2 hours. Jan remembers visiting a smaller cathedral called Sainte-Chapelle that’s nearby on the Île de la Cité, so we walk there. The line there doesn’t look too bad, so we get in – only to find that it moves incredibly slowly, and once we’re inside, there’s a courtyard with yet another slow line. The girls do an admirable job holding themselves together. The long wait is redeemed when we walk up the spiral stone stairs to the upper chapel and see its breathtakingly beautiful stained glass windows.
Paris, Day 3 continued. Lunch across the street, then walk west towards the Tuilleries. We walk along the quay by the Seine, and come across one of the “Paris Plages” (“Paris Beaches”): a strip of sand by the river, with beach chairs and palm trees, set up each summery by the city. The girls happily play in the sand for a long while. We walk on to the gardens, and all the way to the corner to the Musée de l’Orangerie. We spend a while looking at Monet’s huge “Nymphéas” water lily paintings, then walk quickly through the rest of the museum. We have a long walk back to the 6e. Jan carries Bree on his shoulders, and keeps Anya and Liya moving with questions about which gelato combination they’re going to order when we get back to Amorino. Amorino’s gelator is just as great the second time.
For dinner, we finally make it to Le Relais de l’Entrecôte during business hours. There’s already a long line, but luckily we can still squeeze into a booth for four. The featured steak is good, not amazing, but the desserts are superb.
Paris to Ancelle. Today we’re heading to the French Alps in the southeast corner of the country for a bit of “adventure tourism” coordinated through an outfit called Undiscovered Alps that caters mostly to British tourists. We’ve got four packed days of interesting activities lined up, but first we have to get there.
The trip starts with a cab ride to the Gare de Lyon, where we discover that our TGV reservations through Rail Europe only covered the adults, and we still need to buy tickets for the girls. We have just enough time to get the tickets, get on the train, and then… wait. There’s some announcement about a problem. There’s more waiting, and more announcements, and finally they say the engine has a problem and we need to switch trains. We get underway about an hour late. We’re surprised to discover that SCNF has put a family with young kids into the “voiture silence” (the “silent car”), which makes for a slightly tense journey as we try to keep Bree’s volume level down to normal chatter.
In Grenoble we disembark and find the Europcar branch we’re renting a car from. They’re closed for lunch. We wait a while, and a woman finally opens up the shop. There’s a surprising amount of paperwork, then finally we’re given the GPS and car seat we’d requested. The woman gives some confusing directions to the car. She gestures in the direction of a huge, depressing, underground parking garage. We find a floor that has rental cars on it, but they’re for the wrong car outfit. We’re lugging quite a bit of luggage around as we search, so we’re all getting tired. Liya announces she needs to use the bathroom, so we all lug the bags upstairs again. Jan goes back to the Europcar booth for clarification, and this time is directed upstairs to the train station. No luck. Outside, there’s no sign of the rental cars. Jan finally asks a train station information booth guy for help in French (Jan’s couple of months of Rosetta Stone French have paid off well!) The guy gives some long directions pointing down the train platform. Jan walks down the very long platform, and at the end finds the end of a very long parking lot along the tracks. At the very far end of it, he finally finds the car. After going back to find Angela and the girls, we all roll the bags the long way to the car. Despite being the largest rental car available, it’s a smallish Alfa Romeo Giulietta with a manual transmission. It’s a bit of a challenge to jam all the bags into the small trunk, and even then Bree and Angela end up with bags at their feet.
Miraculously, the GPS works, or at least seems to, and points us in what we hope is the direction of a small village in the mountains called Ancelle. Jan hasn’t driven a stick shift in years, and is glad a friend with a manual transmission car had let Jan practice a bit back before we left Seattle; it’s hard enough to follow the GPS’s guidance through the narrow crowded streets, never mind the unfamiliar brain-taxing task of shifting.
We find the right highway, and head up into the mountains. There’s a toll at one point, which is somewhat daunting. We’re given enough time to figure out how much money we need and pull out the correct change, because there’s some problem with the toll gate of the lane we’re in. We have to back up into another lane. In this one, the guy in front of us gets out of his car, walks across the lane to the next one, then pulls out a map and has a leisurely chat with the tollbooth attendant about directions. We finally pull through the booth after something like 10 minutes.
Once off the highway, it’s all twisty narrow mountain roads that climb and descend through hairpin turns. All the way while the GPS says we’re getting closer, which is a promising sign. We finally make it to the town center of Ancelle, only there’s no sign of our hotel. Jan finally tries his phone, which thankfully has an idea of where the hotel is. We pull up to the Hotel Les Autanes, unload our bags, and park in the back. The village is large by area standards, but still small and very rural. When Jan steps out of the car, he hears a goat bleating from the yard across the street.
We have time to take a dip in the hotel’s small and rather cold pool before Jan meets up with our tour coordinator, a nice woman named Sally. She’s English, but married to a Frenchman (whom we’ll meet in a couple of days), and they live about 30 minutes away. Sally walks Jan through the activity plan for the next four days, and hands over a packet of maps, brochures, and instructions.
For dinner, it seems the hotel already has the best restaurant in town, so we just eat downstairs. We have a great Fondue Savoyard. The girls love fondue at home, although we always make a Swiss-style fondue. Here the cheeses are different: Comte, Emmental, Beaufort. We’ll have to try this at home.
Champsaur Valley, Day 1: High Ropes Course. We drive to the nearby town of Laye to a place called Jungle Aventure, where they’ve got a series of 5 or so different high ropes courses set up through the alpine trees. The youngest can be done by children as young as four, so even Bree ends up outfitted with a harness and helmet. After an orientation briefing, Jan takes Anya and Liya to the “Decouverte” course, for people age 8 and up (Liya’s coming up on her 8th birthday, so we round up a bit.) We clip into the safety lines (so we can’t fall), then ascend a series of rope ladders, high wires, and so on. The average height is probably 15 feet off the ground. The girls take to this activity instantly. There are high ropes courses in the States too, but this one has a huge variety of stuff to do: wobbly logs, nets, a “Tarzan Swing” that sends you into a vertical net, tunnels made from barrels that swing side to side, and so on. By far their favorite are the zip wires, which get longer and longer as we go through the course. The course is incredibly long, and it takes us close to 2 hours to go through it all.
Meanwhile, Bree’s still skeptical about the whole thing. Angela takes her to one of the courses for younger kids (maybe 5 feet above the ground), but Bree’s apprehensive. She eventually warms up to going back and forth across a sort of rope bridge with wooden crosspieces.
We walk back down the hill for lunch and find a surprisingly good restaurant that sits alongside a small ski run. Now in late summer, the course is covered with alpine flowers. Bree and the girls discover that, if they run through the meadow, crickets will hum and fly in all directions.
After lunch the older girls want to take Angela through the Decouverte course, so Jan takes Bree to another kid course. This time Bree’s getting the hang of it. She still says “No” to the zip wire, but does most everything else with a little bit of help from Jan. When she’s all through, she says she wants to do it again. So, back Jan and Bree go to the beginning. This time, she wants to do everything. She’s still nervous about the first, short zip wire, but decides to do it. Shortly thereafter, Angela and the other girls come along, finished with their course. Anya and Liya want to race through the younger kid’s course to catch up with us, and Angela goes along too.
At the very end of the kid’s course, there’s a fairly long zip wire, which Bree elects to do. She zooms along the wire, and is very happy at the end. We all decide she gets the “brave award” for the day.
Champsaur Valley, Day 2: Caving. Bree’s too young for this afternoon’s adventures, so we’ve made arrangements for at a creche (daycare) in nearby Saint-Léger-les-Mélèzes. First we need to pack a lunch for her, and a picnic lunch for ourselves as well. We walk around Ancelle a bit and find a bakery, a butcher, and a tobacconist/stationers that has some candy. It’s fun to shop, but we’re not able to find much that Bree would like.
At the creche they don’t speak much English, and Bree’s a bit reluctant to be dropped off, but she once again shows her brave side by going along with this creche plan. The woman checking us in takes a look at the somewhat meager lunch we’ve brought for Bree, and suggests we should get more food just around the corner. Angela pops around and discovers a much better selection of shops that what’s around our hotel.
Our destination now is a little hamlet called Le Collet near Saint-Étienne-en-Dévoluy, about an hour away. We drive up out of the Champsaur Valley along a road that winds back and forth as it climbs a steep mountainside. The road, which leads to a saddle between two mountains called the Col de Noyes, is famous for being a particularly grueling stage of the Tour de France. We pull off the road at one point and have a little picnic lunch. The view is stunning: a lush green and brown patchwork of valley farms surrounded by gigantic slabs of mountains. We continue up and through the Col de Noyer, and on to Le Collet.
We meet up with Martinho, our charismatic guide whose booming personality compensates for his moderate command of English. There are about ten other tourists there, mostly French-speaking folks from Belgium. A young college student who’s studying English is picked out to be our translator. We’re given wetsuits, as the cave has water in some parts. They don’t have any wetsuits small enough for Anya and Liya, but apparently the girls will be ferried across the wet bits in a small inflatable boat. On top of the wetsuits we put on jumpsuits, and there’s a caving helmet to top it all off. It’s quite warm today, so we’re instantly sweltering.
We all climb back into our cars and drive a short ways to nearby gorge. Martinho leads us on a 15 minute walk down into the gorge, across a stream, and up the other side to a natural overhang in the limestone. From there, we lower ourselves down in through a small hole, where we find the first room of the cave. There’s water in part of it, which turns out to be incredibly cold – glacial run-off that’s seeped through the rocks. Anya and Liya manage to avoid the water by scrabbling across a slanted rock face. The room leads to a tunnel that goes deeper into the cave.
Eventually we come to a place where there’s a drop down into a passage filled about 4 feet deep with water. Anya and Liya are lowered into their promised boat, along with another girl. Jan and Angela have to get in the frigid water, which quickly seeps into the wetsuits where it eventually warms up a bit.
The cave goes on and on, mostly down. It’s surprisingly navigable, no real claustrophobic squeezes, and there’s plenty of light from all the helmet lamps. There are a few stalactites, and lots of ripples in the rocky floor formed from minerals deposited over aeons. The passage eventually starts going definitively down a sequences of steps, some small, some so big we need help getting down.
After an hour or so, we reach a point where Martinho indicates we’ve almost reached our point to turn back. He explains that the last bit we can go down is a steep slick slope, maybe thirty feet high, which we can descend by holding a rope, lying on our backs, then using the rope to control our descent. Anyone who doesn’t want to do this can wait for a bit. Angela and Anya don’t want to do it, but Liya surprises us by saying she does, as long as Jan goes first. So Jan goes down, followed by Liya. At the bottom, there’s a floor with a big hole in it. Martinho explains that the hole drops straight down some 50 meters, and to descend it requires a harness and a bit of technical skill (neither of which we have). To get back up, we have to climb up a fairly steep staircase of rock, which is also somewhat wet. Martinho points out that it would be bad to fall while climbing it, as you might tumble down into the shaft. Martinho climbs right behind Liya to make sure she’s okay, but it’s still nerve-wracking for Jan to watch. At the very top, there’s a tight squeeze through some rocks that Liya nimbly pops right through, but which takes Jan a while to negotiate.
Reunited, we head back up out of the cave. It’s surprisingly quick to get back out, now that we know where we’re going and what to do. It took us an hour to get in, but only 30 minutes to get out. When we finally emerge back into sunlight, the surroundings seem surreally bright and colorful.
Now it’s getting on in the day, and we’re in a bit of rush to get back to the creche to pick up Sabriya. We manage to get there half an hour before they close, and we’re all happy to hear Bree’s in good spirits. Apparently she had a pretty fun day herself.
The last adventure of the day: laundry. There’s neither laundry service nor washing machines at the hotel, so we have to do our best to follow the front desk’s instructions to find the nearest coin laundromat. Once we find it, we have to wait, and figure we might as well eat at the restaurant in the same building, since they have sign for “Pizza”. The pizza turns out to be terrible, and the girls just poke at it, but we’re famished and eat it anyway.
Champsaur Valley, Day 3: Via Ferrata. We shop for lunch stuff again, this time at the better shops in Saint Leger, and drop Bree off for one more day at the creche. We drive to the city of Gap, where we meet Bernard, our guide for the day. We’re doing two activities today, and the morning’s activity is a Via Ferrata: a sort of rock climbing that’s aided by an “iron way” of cables and iron rungs that let novices traverse slopes or cliffs that they otherwise couldn’t.
Bernard drives us to the town of Veynes, site of a gorge called Gorge d’Agnielle. Bernard outfits us, Anya, and Liya with climbing harnesses and helmets, then leads us up a slope to the base of an ever steeper slope. The four of us get roped together – Jan, Liya, Anya, Angela – then we clip into the safety cable and we start climbing. At the beginning it’s not much, mostly just scrambling up and using the occasional iron rung for leverage. But within 10 minutes we’re traversing sideways across a cliff, maybe 50 to 60 feet up. The activity itself is pretty safe, but it’s still unnerving to see how high up we are. The girls, meanwhile, are utterly unfazed. At one point we hear something, and realize it’s the girls humming.
There’s a point where we enter a tunnel that goes through a promontory, then emerges out the either side. We eventually end up at a path that goes up a bit, and there’s a fork in the path. Bernard directs us in the direction of the path labeled “Via Facile”, but despite the promise of being easy, in another few minutes we’re out making a very long traverse of the highest cliff yet. We’re moving pretty quickly, and eventually catch up to another group, who stop at a cut in the cliff to let us pass.
After we’ve been going for an hour or so, Bernard stops us at another cut in the cliff and announces, “Now we abseil (rappel).” We peer over the ledge to look some 5 or 6 stories down. Bernard rigs up Jan first. The hardest part of the abseil is the very first part, where you have to go from standing on your own feet on solid rock, to leaning back out over the edge, trusting that the rope is going to hold you. After that it’s just being lowered down on the rope. “Like a spider”, says Bernard. Anya goes next, and is disappointed the ride down is so short.
Champsaur Valley, Day 3 continued: Canyoning. The second activity of the day is “canyoning”, or scrambing and sliding down a canyon carved by a small river. Bernard drives us a bit down the road to another gorge, where we stop for a picnic lunch, then head further up the gorge to a parking lot. We don wetsuits and another kind of climbing harness, then walk about 50 minutes up the canyon. Hiking in a wetsuit gets us hot in a hurry.
The trail finally brings us to a small pool, into which Bernard says we should get in and get used to the temperature of the water. It’s really cold. Anya yelps when she gets in, as does Liya. Once we’re acclimatized to it, we start going down the river itself. In some places, we just walk down in the river. In another places, the water goes down a sloping expanse of rock, and we simply slide down on our backs. And in other places, we come to waterfalls of varying heights. These we abseil down with the aid of a rope. The descent occasionally gets much more, er, exhilarating in places where the frigid water comes cascading down right on top of you. There’s also a question of how deep the water is at the bottom: in some places shallow, in other places over our heads.
Near the bottom of the canyon, we come to a very small but very deep pool: probably six feet across but eight feet deep. This pool lies itself in a narrow little (7 or 8 foot deep) gorge between the sides of the river. After traversing the pool, Bernard leads us out of the water and back up to the side of the little gorge overlooking the deep pool. He says that we can jump down into the pool from there. Jan goes first, but nobody else wants to. Eventually Liya says she’ll do it if Jan does it again (so she can see where to jump). Jan obliges, and then Liya works up her courage and does it herself. Bernard eventually cajoles Angela into jumping in, but Anya will have none of it. From there, it’s a short walk back to Bernard’s van, then a drive back to our car in Gap, and from there back to Saint Leger to pick up Bree.
It turns out that Bree had a fun day at the creche. They went for a walk to a nearby garden, and had a picnic there. Bree’s a little sad to say goodbye. We walk to the nearby shops so that Bree can pick out a “brave award” for doing such a good job staying at an unfamiliar daycare (and one with a language barrier). At a souvenir store, she picks out a little white fluffy bunny. Anya and Liya decide to get bunnies too as souvenirs.
Champsaur Valley, Day 4: Tree Climbing. For our last day of activity, we drive to the nearby village of Pont du Fosse. Bree’s old enough to meet the minimum age for this activity, so she’s along with us as well. We meet a guide, Olivier, and another family of tourists, this one from England. Olivier leads us a short walk into a nearby forest, where we meet another guide, Philip. The trees around us all have ropes or rope ladders hanging out of them.
The two guides hand out climbing harnesses (“Another day, another harness”, quips Angela), then give us an orientating briefing. We’re simply climbing trees, although the benefit of the harness and rope means we can climb up much higher, and in harder-to-climb trees, than would be safe or possible otherwise. There’s a rope ladder to the lowest branch, then from there you’re on your own. Anya, naturally, scampers right up to the top. Olivier impressed; he says the previous day’s group had had 12 kids, and only 4 made it past the top of the rope ladder. Liya, Jan, and Angela acquits ourselves admirably as well. We also take turns at climbing a rope by sliding two loops knotted onto a main rope. It works but it gets tiring quickly!
Bree’s content to just walk around on the ground and watch. Olivier and Philip have also set up a big rope swing that can clip into the harnesses we’re all wearing, and all the girls – even Bree – are delighted to swing. For fun, Olivier clips in both Anya and Liya, who laugh as they sail back and forth. Finally Olivier clips in Sabriya as well, and there’s a big clump of Miksovsky girls swinging and laughing.
One set of trees has hammocks strung between them, stacked up one on top of the other, up to a point perhaps 25 feet off the ground. Everyone except Bree climbs up to a hammock, and then Olivier lifts Bree up by a rope so that she can be in a hammock too, so for a little while we’re all up in the trees.
Champsaur Valley, Day 4 continued: Hiking. We drive to a national park called Les Ecrins, eventually reaching a tiny little town called Prapic at the literal end of the road. We eat lunch on a terrace of a place called Auberge Prapicoise. There’s a stream of hikers going by, all heading up the valley to a waterfall called Saut du Laire. There’s our general destination as well, although we’ve learned not to expect much when it comes to hiking with the girls yet. It’s a beautiful day for a hike, and the valley’s charming: green fields that lead up to green slopes and rocky peaks. An added bonus is looking for the valley’s famous inhabitants: marmots. We see several poking up in the fields and running around. As expected, we only get about halfway to the waterfall before the girls begin to flag, but we reach a gorgeous spot by a river. The girls all play around in the river for a while, and then we head back down.
For dinner on our last night in Ancelle, the girls have been agitating for fondue again, which we all eat heartily.
Ancelle to Paris. After a final breakfast in the hotel, we pack up the little Alfa Romeo and drive back to Grenoble. The endless twisty hairpin turns prove a bit much for Bree, who gets carsick. We eventually pull into Grenoble, and search for somewhere to fill up on gas. (Diesel!) Even that simple transaction has its own complications — we’re not sure how to prepay to fill up, and Angela ends up having to go back to the attendant a couple times. We return the car, and board the TGV for the 3 hour ride back to Paris. (In the “silent car” again, as it turns out.)
We’re staying one more night in Paris at the same hotel as before, the Hotel d’Aubusson in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. All of us are happy to return to a place that feels familiar, as well as one that has more room (and doors between them!) than the country hotel in Ancelle. The girls all want to have gelato at Amorino one more time. Afterwards Angela wants to buy some more tea, and takes Liya with her. Anya wants to have another grenadine soda at the same sidewalk cafe, Cafe Jade, where we stopped our first afternoon in Paris. For dinner we follow the hotel’s recommendation at a place just down the street called Le Christine. It was described to us as “casual”, but it’s actually slightly nicer than that, a trendy if also a somewhat touristy-heavy place. The girls do pretty well despite the haute cuisine menu.
Paris to Seattle. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, we have a devil of a time getting our boarding passes: the machines won’t work, and various agents keep sending us to different check-in areas. A manager finally helps straighten everything out, and even manages to get us all seated together for once. (Airlines, as a rule, can’t seem to fathom that children would need to be seated somewhere near their parents.) The departure’s delayed by a good hour or so, but on the plus side, we’re traveling on the same flight back as our friend Sabine and her young daughter Eva. The girls hold themselves together throughout the long 10 hour flight. Jan’s mom picks us up in Seattle, and drives our whole sleepy crew back home.
Liya is teaching Bree tap dance steps. Bree loves to dress up and put on Liya’s old tap dance shoes. Angela found a board for Bree to dance on, and Liya’s taught Bree a number of basic tap moves. This morning, Liya and Bree made up paper tickets for a short tap performance, which Bree performed in the bay window in Anya and Liya’s room.
Anya and Liya make their own Poog plushies, recreating their favorite character from the “Akiko” comic series.
Liya’s birthday campout sleepover. Liya has invited four friends—Bronwyn, Ella, Nora, and Rylie—over for a backyard camping party. Per our tradition, Anya’s has been allowed to invite one friend of her own, Kaila. (Bree is over at her grandmother’s for the night.)
We set up the tent we bought earlier this summer (we’ve already gotten some use out of it!) in the backyard, and all the guests are happy to put their sleeping bags and stuff into it. Jan gives them all a quick lesson in how to sharpen a marshmallow stick with a pocketknife, and they all prepare their own sticks. Dinner is hot dogs grilled on the barbecue, served on folding camping plates. After dinner, the girls watch “The Princess Bride”, dutifully squealing at all the parts that are scary or involve kissing. This is followed by a fire on which the girls toast (or immolate) marshmallows.
When it’s time for bed, Liya and her crew get in bed and spend close to an hour arguing over whether a nightlight should be left on and, if so, which light and where it should go. Things spiral down a bit. One girl, exhausted and rattled by all the arguing, suffers an attack of homesickness. Her crying chases all the other girls out of the tent, and they drag their sleeping bags into Bree’s room. This is followed by another hour of girls going back and forth from the tent to the house as they alternately try to comfort their friend and decide they’d rather sleep inside. The homesick girl finally declares she’s going to sleep in the tent on her own—and she does. Everyone else collapses.
The next morning finds everyone somewhat rested and feeling better, and the girls eat a camping breakfast of oatmeal and pop-tarts. We walk en masse to the neighborhood playground for some run-around time, and then back home in time for the girls’ parents to take them home. The homesick girl wants her parents to buy her a tent.
One of our favorite local restaurants, The Madison Park Cafe, is closing. We’re sad–a visit there years ago was one of our very first dates! We have one last lunch there on the day before they close.
Liya turns eight! We spend the afternoon doing a first-time-ever family bike ride down the lovely Lake Washington Boulevard (closed to cars on Sundays in the summer) all the way down to Seward Park, where the girls explore a new playground.
Back at home, we have a small family dinner including Jan’s mom, Lyn. Liya’s asked for Jan to make a favorite dish of hers, breaded sole, and Jan’s ginger fruit salad for dessert. Lyn gives Liya the “Hex Bugs” (little vibrating electric bugs) Liya had asked for, and after dinner we run a series of bug races to see whose bug completes a maze first.