Vive La France... finale!

Righto, where were we?

Yes, France, obviously... our final night in the castle was great - the weather was super; lovely and balmy, perfect for dinner in the huge garden, under the equally huge tree... more French food mmmmm.
Photos of the castle... and the feast etc here:
The weather packed it in that night, with a ferocious storm howling its way through Jaulny; pelting the biggest hailstones (proper big too - they were somewhere between the size of a large pea and a broadbean, not pathetic ones like we get at home) into our somewhat fragile window. This was accompanied by quite a large amount of precipitation, most of which, it seems, ended up inside our car, as we left the windows ajar the night before so it wouldn't be so hot. Kent remembered this as it was teeming down, and thoughtfully risked life and limb to wind them up; I pretended to be asleep... my hero!
The abysmal weather continued for our last day, which was mostly spent driving... We decided that forking out another €20 just for the privilege of driving on an extra-fancy motorway was a bit over the top, so we made-do with the fancy motorway that TomTom took us on... not realising it went through two other contries before it reached our ferry terminal... infact, had we blinked and missed the letter 'L' in an oval on a road sign, we might not have even realised we had driven into Luxembourg... the same goes for Belgium an hour or so later... ah border control, schmorder control!
It was lucky we did take that slight detour though (it was only 20 min longer than the toll route) as we hadn't managed to track down Asterix in Flemish on our earlier sojourn into Belgium - they'd sold out in the bookshop in Ypres! Surprisingly, there's no setting on TomTom for "find us a town that's big enough to have a decent bookshop, but small enough to find parking on the main street", so after a bit of hasty map-reading, we ended up in Poperinge, in Flanders, where we managed to unearth the blasted book from under about 200 copies of TinTin...
With that task ticked off, it was back to the Corsa, which by this stage had started to make a funny grinding-y noise...hmmmm... Oh well, let's just keep driving and see what happens...
Made it to the Dunkerque Ferry terminal in time, no smoke, or tears from the car - phew!
And here endeth our French trip, or "ad-French-ure" as I like to call it... looking forward to going back - it was just wonderful.

In case you're wondering, the funny noise continued all the way from Dover till we got home... it's evidently the noise your engine makes when it has NO OIL in it!
Oops, Kent's bad.
It's all better now... although we did run out of petrol on the way home from the Sex and The City movie (clearly, this wasn't Kent's first choice for entertainment) a couple of days later... we're thinking walking could be a good option from here on in!

Take care,
Kent & Eryn x

Vive La France...part deux!

Tuesday morning saw us leave our B & B - which, it must be said, had the best shower I have ever had in my life, if you're in France, go there... worth it for the shower alone!
We hit the road on our 438km odyssey to our next digs - an 11th century castle in the Lorraine region near the border with Luxembourg - but more about that later.
We did more war-ry stuff, stopping off in Le Quesnoy, a fortified town that NZ soldiers liberated after 4 years of occupation in 1918... naturally, the people there were pretty stoked by this and are quite fond of kiwis; there are several streets named after NZ, Avenue des Neo-Zelandais, Rue de Nouvelle Zelande, Rue de Waikato and Rue de Cambridge... as well as a Square they re-named Place de All Blacks! It was so nice to see bits of home when we're so far away, although certainly not what we expected to find in rural northern France!
Photos here:
Bonus find in Le Quesnoy: Asterix, in French, in the supermarket... for €5! Hooray!
We embarked on a walking tour (again in the bloody rain - grrr) which was a bit of a task in map-reading and patience on Kent's behalf, but it took us around the town's fortifications, which date back to Napoleonic times, and to some of the memorials to the New Zealand troops... and past the biggest Maori fulla you have ever seen (check the photos below and you'll see what we mean!)
Back in the car, and onto the toll motorway... €20 poorer and several hours later we arrived at the castle in Jaulny, thanks to the magic of TomTom... there is NO way we'd have managed navigation without it.

The town itself is the stuff of postcards, overlooking a valley, on a hill and most of the buildings are hundreds of years old - the kind of place you'd like to fold up and put in your pocket... and the castle is breathtaking - I could go on and on about it, but it might just rank as my all time favourite place EVER... I think Kent is in agreeance.
Again we had a lovely host, Anna (who spoke great English, which was a godsend, as my French doesn't stretch much further than the standard yes, no, thank you and hello... and Kent's is virtually non-existent), whose family has owned the castle since the middle of the 1800s. Some of the castle is a museum, with full suits of armour, a summons to war (in French, obviously) and so many priceless treasures - and they actually belong to her and her family!
Her loveliness just proved that the reputation the French have for being rude is clearly unfounded, I suspect it might be the English habit of refusing to learn or even try to speak the local lingo and just speaking slower and yelling that might evoke this legendary attitude, but we saw none of it from anyone; they even smilingly put up with our pidgin attempts at speaking French. The language thing does sometimes cause a few crossed wires - a great example: after Anna suggested to us that we visit "Noh-See" the next day... we were stumped, until I asked her to write it for us, and found that it was Nancy... which immediately led me to think of 'Allo, Allo', as I'm pretty sure I remember a scene where Rene tells someone both he and his brother were "Nancy Boys". She said the city was beautiful, and very special, and she wasn't exaggerating... very European, with a large square and gorgeous architecture, beautiful park etc etc etc...
On our way back we checked out Pont-A-Mousson (about 20mins from Jaulny), yet another beautiful town... there are just so many of them around!

More photos:
Last installment on it's way shortly...
K & E x

Vive La France... part un!

It's been awhile. This can be attributed to two things:
1)Eryn discovered Facebook... and what a huge time-thief it is!
2)We spent loads of time getting ourselves sorted for our road trip to France, which was ace!

We madly decided to take the mighty Corsa to the continent with us... I say mad because there is an engine light of some description that just keeps going... but so does the car, so it can't be all bad! I'm picturing Dad rolling his eyes at that last bit.
First lesson - Driving laws in France are quite different than in the UK - obviously there's the whole 'other side of the road' thing, but in addition, you have to carry a high-vis jacket, one of those red triangle things, a fire extinguisher, spare lightbulb kit, first aid kit, ownership/registration and insurance papers... information that might have been more useful to us, had we found out BEFORE we boarded the ferry. Evidently checks on foreign cars are frequent and the punishments handed out are quite harsh... so that had us a bit anxious before we even docked at Dunkerque.
They take their Sundays quite seriously over there, so there was practically nothing open when we arrived, but we did manage to find a great Maritime Museum with all sorts of bits in it, particularly about the mass evacuation in 1940... if you're not interested in war history, best stop right here, as the rest of the trip was full of it.
We stayed in a very cute B & B, our host, Nelly (whose husband is Jean-Luc - could he be any more French??!) was lovely, despite protesting that her English wasn't very good (it was better than some of the students Kent has encountered in England) and sent us to La Coupole, a huge concrete dome, built by Hitler & co in WWII to launch V2 rockets at London, the next day. It was impressive...even though it was abandoned towards the end of the war. Probably for the best, methinks.
From there we were headed to Ypres/Ieper, which meant we needed to cross the border... well, I say border, but really it was more like a petrol station forecourt, unmanned, where you don't need to slow down, into Belgium. My hopes of getting another stamp in my passport were dashed... thanks very much, EU.
Cue lumps in throats for both of us... which might seem a bit on the dramatic side, but when you consider that Ypres was the focus of much of WW1 - it was pretty much destroyed during the war, then rebuilt afterwards with money paid in reparation by the Germans, and that it's surrounded by Comonwealth War graves sites (we saw at least a hundred signs for different ones from the car), it certainly makes the whole thing seem so much more real than 5th form history ever did... We were lucky enough to see the Last Post played at the Menin Gate in Ypres that night, something they close the road for and have done every night at 8pm since 1928! It was very moving, as the gate itself is a giant memorial to 50,000 fallen, with every single one of their names engraved in the stone.
I was mildly put out as I couldn't find any Kiwis but it turns out that it wasn't big enough for all the names they had orginally planned, and the NZers decided to put the names of our boys on one of the other memorials - Tyne Cot - fortunately, it was just down the road at Passchendaele. It was raining at this stage, which seemed quite fitting. There are 11,856 men buried there, with a memorial to a further 35,000 missing - and an entire bit of it dedicated to Kiwis - which started the waterworks again - we were really just blown away by the sheer numbers of people, mostly younger than us, who died for their countries. Just thinking about it still makes me feel so incredibly humbled... but enough being maudlin for now... That's not even halfway into the trip...

Photos are here:
More soon,
K + E x

Dublin Photos... finally

Before I forget, after the whole "Oops, Kent? I think I lost the camera..." debacle, here are the photos from beautiful Dublin...
Would love to hear what you've been up to...
Eryn x