Category — Travel

That’s right – we’re coming home!  Wow – we are so excited.  Not that we haven’t had the most magical five months of our lives.  But we miss our suburban oasis – the big backyard full of gum trees, the large house where we can all have our own room…or two, and the huge suburban shopping centre up the road that you have to drive to.  No – only kidding – we don’t miss that at all!  But we are very pleased to be coming home.  HOME!!

So – before we get on that plane I figured I better update this travel blog for the last time, becaue from next week it will revert to being a craft blog.  We’ve been in Paris for three weeks so it’s going to be kind of long.  Better get yourself a glass of wine and get comfortable

First there was Noël which we quietly celebrated in our apartment with good company (us!), good food…ok and some good champagne too.  It’s not everyday you get to celebrate Christmas in Paris now is it?

Then we celebrated New Year’s Eve at the Champs Elysée.  It was so beautiful – the lights glimmering in the trees all the way along the boulevard to the l’Arc de Triomphe.  I would show you some photos of the glorious fireworks we took the kids to see….except that we found at at 12.01am on New Year’s Day that they don’t actually have fireworks in Paris for New Year’s Eve. Oh dear – that took some explaining to the poor cold and tired kids who had been watching the Sydney spectacular on cable television earlier in the day as preparation for the big event. Whoops!

Anyways…we all got over the disappointment of the lack of fireworks and proceeded to visit some of the major city attractions…créperies, brasseries, pâtisseries, boulangeries, fromageries, and a few good restaurants to boot.  Mmmmmmmmmm…..soooo gooooood   Speaking of Parisian institutions – see what you can make of this strange site:

That’s people queuing in the snow to get into the local pâtisserie.  I was actually going there myself but was a bit turned off by this queue, so I walked 10 metres down the road to the next pâtisserie where I smugly bought my Galette des Rois from chez Paul without queuing. I didn’t feel so smug the next day when I passed another pâtisserie named ‘Paul’ at a Metro station.  It appears Paul is a chain store.  I wondered in horror…had I bought my galette from the Baker’s Delight of Paris?  Things weren’t helped by the fact that on closer inspection it appears the pâtissier from the establishment above has won first prizes for his galettes. It turns out he is the ‘rois’ of the Galette des Rois and has trophies to prove it!  Oh well – lucky for me he also has trophies for his baguettes and his croissants and I have consumed many of both to make up for my galette mistake.

Have I spent this entire post talking about food?  Hmmm – easily done!  I better wrap things up with some snaps of other things.  As I mentioned above we had snow in Paris and as if things here weren’t pretty enough we got to see sites like this:

this:

and of course this:

Do you think the kids look cold?  Well let me tell you they were, and so were we!

Right – nearly finished.  Since this blog is about to revert back to being a craft blog I thought I better post a few craft related photos to finish off.  Here is the first of 50 fabric shops I visited one Saturday morning in Montmartre:

This particular shop was literally across the road from this:

Pity the view from my local Spotlight store isn’t quite so nice!

Here is a clothes shop with a fab window display:

Can you see – the whole window is lined with vintage sewing machines?

And this is something I passed on the way to the Picasso museum today:

Wow – I could keep going about the wonderful things we have heard, seen and eaten in this great city.  It truly is spectacular.  But as I said – we’re very excited to be going home now.  Paris is sensational.  But home is home – and we miss it.

And since we will be leaving for home in just 24 hours time I better leave this blog now and pack my bags.

See you in Melbourne!

$2…$5…per glass? Come on – we’re in Paris!

$8..$12 per glass? Umm…remember the Euro and the Aussie Peso?

$15 per glass?

Nup.

We just paid $18 per glass. And we ordered 3 glasses…

Ouch

Ta-da!  Miss Zoe in her hand-knitted cardigan

I really enjoyed knitting this for Zoe.  It made me remember how enjoyable knitting can be.  And seeing the finished product makes me remember how frustrating it can be.  It’s a cute cardi – extremely practical considering how freezing it is right now and since this is her only woollen jumper she is getting heaps of wear out of it.  Would I knit it again if I were about to embark on my trip again?  Yes!  Am I about to start on a new one?  No!  Which is a bit unfortunate because Hamish keeps asking me when I’m going to knit him one.  I’m thinking I’d like to do hats, which should be much quicker and much cuter.  I wonder how he will feel about a hat?

I have not forgotten that this was started as a craft blog – not a travel blog. It’s just so hard to be crafty in a tiny little van.  It’s not that craft has been far from my mind – driving for thousands of kilometres around Europe has given me plenty of time to mentally plan projects for when I return.  And there is the knitted cardigan for Zoe which is not only finished but is being worn every day (I’m having trouble photographing it because it’s been so cold it would be cruel to make her stand outside without her jacket on).

I did however have a bit of a crafty highlight late last week when we dropped in to visit Hilco fabrics in Germany.  Finally I got to to touch the beautiful fabrics I’ve been ogling on the internet – and it was every bit as good as I had hoped.  I was so restrained I walked away with just these two pieces:

This one is velvet and so much prettier in real life (it’s one of those days in Germany when it’s practically dark at 4pm).

This one is stretch:

And I bought my very first Ottobre magazine.

I also found someone to chat to about importing some of Hilco’s fabrics for my shop.  Oh…did I mention I’m opening an online shop?  Hmmm – I think not.  But I am!  I am so excited about it – just wish I could think up a decent name.

Better go – we take our van back in 2 more sleeps now and there’s a lot of mess here for such a tiny van!

Ahhh…back in the van….back on the road. Always mixed emotions about that!

On our way out of Italy we stopped at this famous site.  Zoe once called it the ‘Learning Tower of Pizza’ and the name has kind of stuck.  It was a freezing day when we went there, and to be honest we were feeling a bit of tourism fatigue after pounding the pavements of Rome for 11 days.  So we arrived, took some photos, walked around the tower and got straight back into our van.  Actually we would have gone up it, but the kids need to be 8 years old, so we penciled it onto the list of places to come to again.

We then drove up and stayed a night at Como, just under the Swiss border, ready for our assault on Zurich.  Just one hour into our journey the next day and we had crossed the border, consumed several Toblerone bars and stopped and played in the snow. Low and behold Switzerland was there and then unanimously declared (by both children) ‘the best country in Europe’ – pushing both England (where they speak English) and Germany (where they drive fast) off the top spot.

Here are the kids (all three of them) mid snowball fight:

We stayed 3 nights in Zurich and the beauty of the place was quite simply gob smacking.  Of course it helped that during our second night the city was covered in 3 inches of snow (and quite frankly even the rubbish trucks look beautiful in the snow), but I bet this city looks stunning any time of year.

Now we are back in Germany and we are on the count down – just four more sleeps until we drop the van back at the hire depot.  Hamish told me he would give it a good hug and say goodbye when we leave it – which is quite amazing considering the kid has lived in the tiny little thing for the better part of the last 4 months.  Mind you that was before he jammed his fingers in the door   Ouch – the poor little man.  He’s ok now though, and I think he’s forgiven the van too.

I know – you don’t recognise her because she’s not wearing the blue fleece jacket she arrived with from Melbourne.  Did you know that wearing fleece in Italy is a crime punishable by horrid stares on the street and poor service at restaurants?  Earlier in Europe we were actually a family of criminals as each member of the family had a fleece jacket – but then you can get away with that kind of thing in some places.  Italy is another story though.  Luckily by Rome we had each managed to shed our fleece…except me…who was feeling very a) cold and b) fleecy.  That was until my loving husband took me shopping and I came out with this beautiful jacket.  I asked him to take this photo just after I bought it (I wore it out of the shop) but he got a bit dazzled by the Pantheon behind me and you have to use your imagination a little about the jacket.  Still, you can see it’s not fleece.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it…but our Aussie dollar SUCKS and having to double the price of everything we buy makes being in Europe REALLY expensive.  I know I droned on about a $10 bottle of water in Berlin, but today a guy asked me for 12 Euro for 3 lemonades today.  That’s $25 worth of lemonade!!!

The good news is – we’ve worked out a way of making back some of our money. We’re going to use our secret weapon – Zoe.  It was ‘jolie’ in Paris, ‘que guapa’ in Spain, and ‘que bella’ in Italy.  It seems whatever the language (providing it’s not English because of course red heads are a dime a dozen in England) our little red head turns heads . But in Italy she creates traffic jams on the streets as the old ladies/men/nuns/young people/police crane their heads to get a better view.  And yes they take photos!  Some of them ask, but we catch others doing it on the sly. So – just like the guys dressed as Romans who stand outside the Colosseum posing for a fee – we figure we just need a couple of Euros per photo for each snap of Zoe that’s taken and we’ll make back our lemonade money back in no time.

Here a few recent photos of our beauty who is no doubt in family photos albums around the world by now.

Hamish is reading 100 facts about Gladiators, Zoe has a book of Greek and Roman mythical beasts. They were both very annoyed when we told them it was time to move on.

My little man is currently fascinated with natural disasters and loves to discuss their various forms.  I’ll be driving through the city streets of Europe, trying to avoid all manner of hazards on the road, and he will call out ‘Mum, what is your favourite natural disaster out of floods and tsunamis?’.   I say it’s floods.  He says ‘why?’. I clench my teeth and swerve to avoid a pedestrian. He says ‘muuuum’….

Of course whilst being fascinated in natural disasters Hamish is also quite scared of them, and we have been told which countries we can and cannot visit depending on which natural disasters occur there.  Sadly China and Japan are now off our list of possible holiday destinations (due to risk of earthquake, mudslide and tsunami of course), but the good news is the United States is back on, as long as we stay on the East Coast.  Phew.

Anyway, due to the little man’s intense interest in natural disasters, I thought he would be fascinated to see how the Venice we visited last week which looked like this:

now looks like this:

In actual fact he was more interested in the game of gladiators he was playing with his 4 year old sister (apparently it’s not a flood…and hence a natural disaster if nobody dies (insert shaking my head in bewilderment icon here)).

Lucky for us we visited the sinking city of Venice last week, and spent this week avoiding another natural disaster down in Pompei.  I told Hamish that Mount Vesuvius was extinct, but did you know it is considered the most dangerous volcano in the world due to the 3 million people who live within the effective range of the volcano and the fact that it’s well overdue for an erruption? So strange why anyone would want to live sandwiched between the ancient ruins of the Romans and the still active volcano that destroyed them.

Our first day visiting Pompei was not quite as wet as for the poor guys in Venice…but it wasn’t far off – here’s Miss Zoe looking suitably drenched:

So we packed up the van and headed further south until we found a beach and some warm (if rather windy) weather.

We then visited Pompei again on the way back up north, and as you can see the weather was much kinder to us by then. Here are Hamish and Zoe posing as gladiators in the arena:

We then jumped in the van and headed to Rome – where it proceeded to rain some more. Lucky for us we’re now out of the van and into a lovely dry apartment just a few hundred metres away from the Colosseum. We will be here for 10 more days so there should be time for more updates before we leave. For now though – it’s arrivederci from me!

We were looking forward to arriving in Barcelona and being able to spend some time on the computers catching up with blog posts, emails, websites etc.  Unfortunately the second day we were there poor old Richard’s computer died and before we knew it we were all fighting for the one laptop.  The upside of this was more time for knitting and after sending an S.O.S. to my mum for more wool I managed to finish Zoe’s cardigan.  Well I finished knitting it….sewing it up is a completely different story.  I have sewed and unpicked various seams at least 10 times.  GRRRRRR!  Anyway, the laptop was kindly fixed by Apple in Barcelona under warranty and I hope to have the jumper sewn up some time soon so that it can be worn before we return to summer in Australia.  Watch this space!