Livin’ the life..

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.

Back to the Ol Dart
Our Paris tour was over after 3 packed days and we took a train to Le Havre and a cross channel ferry to Blighty.  Yay!  

How we had longed to reach an English speaking country!  Funny that the first person we spoke to didn’t have his teeth in and came from somewhere in Northern England and I couldn’t understand a word he said!

We had a great day at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.  Old ships, new ships, naval history and pirates – not to mention modern navy simulators – every kids dream.  We had to drag the kids out of here!

From Portsmouth we headed to Littlehampton to stay with Paul’s brother and his partner.  They spent a week going around all the places they used to live and reminiscing about the “old” days.

London
We love London – it now has the official endorsement as our favourite city.  The architecture is wonderful, you can get around easily on the Tube or on a bus and we fell in love with Sainsbury’s supermarkets. 

We had a room in a hostel in Earl’s Court, within easy walking of the Tube and the shops and settled in for two weeks.  Luckily, we were there at the right time of the year and Buckingham Palace was open so we included that with the Royal Mews.  We went on a free walking tour with our old favourite New Europe, which covered all the usual sights and prepared us with a lot of historical information for our trip to the Tower of London.

We discovered that a bus to Oxford was free for kids, so we spent the day exploring Christ Church and saw some of the other places filmed in Harry Potter. 

 Great Bardfield
We were very excited to go back to Grandma and Grandad’s, where we spent a relaxing week  – and were spoiled with some traditional English food – family roast dinner, full English breakfast and scones with jam and clotted cream! 

Party in the USA

All to soon, our time in Europe and the UK was over and we were flying into JFK Airport. 

We walked up and down and all over New York City; checking out Ground Zero, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square, walked the Brooklyn Bridge and went to church in Brooklyn.  There are so many iconic places in NYC and we saw most, if not all of them.   We even saw a few movie sets, including one that was set up outside our apartment.  Not as exciting as it sounds though – trust me it was getting very old at 3am when the director shouted ACTION! for the 5 millionth time..

We Megabussed down to DC to check out the White House and Capitol and all the memorials and then Megabustook us to Philadelphia to catch the Amtrak to Lancaster County.  What can you say about Amish country – beautiful countryside, really interesting people and all those horses clip clopping – I loved it!

Pretty soon we were back at JFK, this time to jet on down to some warmer weather in Miami, Florida to board our Carnival cruise for the Caribbean.