Category — France

Fasten your seatbelts,  it’s time to get up to date with the blog! 

C’est la vie
Our next stop after Spain was living the French life in a beautiful medieval village in France – Montaigu de Quercy.  Lucky for us, Paul’s father and step-mother own a cottage in this fantastic place where you could easily forget the rest of the world even exists.  We spent almost 2 idyllic weeks “speaking” French with the neighbours, eating fresh baguettes, cheese and pate.  We didn’t do any sightseeing or go anywhere; we just lived (including the kids doing homework and I actually shopped and cooked!).

 Paris
As four of us had already been to Paris on a couple of occasions, we were pretty relaxed about what we saw.  Saying that Paul walked our legs off!  We found a brilliant hotel – cheap but in a great location (see our accommodation page for that recommendation) so we were able to walk all over Paris and occasionally caught the Metro.

We did all the usual stuff including the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Arc de Triomphe.  Possibly my two favourite places in Paris are the Tuileries Gardens next to the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gardens – in fine weather there is nowhere better.

I had always had Versailles on my list and had never managed to visit there on any of our earlier trips.  Unfortunately, we thought the whole place was a disorganised debacle and somehow we fell mistakenly onto a guided tour, which although was informative, I’m not sure was worth the lining up and ticket cost. [Read more →]

As I mentioned, we found Munich super family friendly.  We settled into our cheap deal hostel for a week and spent some days doing school work and some out and about.  We learned about Hitler and his rise to power; some stories about the resistance of the Munich locals as well as the atrocoties committed at the thousands of concentration camps set up around Europe, when we took a day trip to Dachau. 

Michael finally had his dream of seeing a “real” castle fulfilled when we went to Neuschwanstein; and we sang along to the soundtrack on a day trip to Salzburg for the Sound of Music tour. [Read more →]