Vacation!

Alright, here goes. Betsy wrote a bit about our vacation, and I've been filtering the dross out of the, oh, 500 pictures we took. So, without further ado, since we've been at this for 2 hours / 4 days (depending on how you count), here's the first installment. (Don't miss the links to pics below, and I'll be adding more in the next couple days - really! As a teaser, here are some pictures from the Guy Fawkes Night party we went to.)

Hi everyone, sorry for the long silence. Aside from the blog outages, we've also been on vacation, with most of the modern conveniences of about 1980, but not 2006... The kids had a week and a half off school for Toussaint holidays at the end of October (after all, they've had to slog through six whole weeks of school this year already) and my huge meeting finished around the same time, so we rented a car -- another Smart for Four, of course -- for the week and headed down to the Atlantic Coast of France. We stayed at a wonderful gite (basically a rental house) that was part of an old mill. There was a huge yard with a rose garden and a playground, a little stream running next to the mill where the kids tried their hand at fishing (but didn't catch anything, which is pretty much the same as the fishing I've done in my life), and nice walking along the canal and the Charente River nearby.

We also took a few day trips to the coast and other nearby cities. The Atlantic Coast and the region going inland around the Charente River have a really interesting history. It was along Roman travel routes, and has some interesting ruins, including one of the oldest known Roman arenas. In the middle ages, it fell along a major pilgrimmage route to St. Jacques Compostelle, which is reputed to hold the remains of St. James, who was largely responsible for the conversion of Spain to Christianity. There are some amazing Romanesque churches. They're much simpler and more austere than the famous Gothic cathedrals in France, but have very elegant architecture, and it's really incredible about stepping into a building that's 1000 years old. The coast itself has some great beaches and also major ports and marinas. Since about the middle ages, the area was fought over between the English and French for a few hundred years, and there are lots of fortified ports and towns that are reminders of this. Quite a few of these served only briefly or not at all for military purposes (military technology outpaced building technology by quite a bit, apparently, so a few were militarily obsolete even before they were completed), but they were brought back into service as prisons during the French Revolution and other uprisings.

It was a full week, and it will be too much to cover all in detail here, so we'll post a bunch of pictures and here's a few highlights:

(1) The beginning of the week was unseasonably warm, so we headed to Royan. The city was bombed badly by the Allies at the end of World War II, because it was one of the cities the Germans retreated to when they were nearly defeated. There are a few old shore-front buildings that survived, and a beautiful crescent beach. The kids waded into the ocean and built sand castles and generally had a great time while Chris and I wandered around in our jackets and picked out oyster and clam shells. We had a great seafood lunch at a restaurant overlooking another beautiful beach a little ways down the coast.

(2) At Rochefort the next day, we explored the Corderie Royal, which was used to make ropes for royal ships for several hundred years beginning in the 1670's. (Under Louis XIV, a first-class sailing vessel carried over 100 TONS of ropes, which laid end-to-end would cover more than 100 kilometers.) The building is unbelievably long to allow manufacturing ropes of the length needed for ships--almost 400 meters long, which is about the length of 4 football fields.

(3) We walked all through Saintes, which includes the Roman arena, several pilgrimage churches, and a beautiful old abbey.

(4) La Rochelle was our favorite city of the visit. It has been an important port for hundreds of years, continually fought over, and the harbor is flanked by three towers for defense. Between the two at the very mouth of the port, they used to run a giant chain to block off the entrance (not to mention the ramparts for shooting cannons....). We climbed up all three towers and the kids got to ride the oldest carousel in France. It's been in operation since 1883 and only three families have owned it during its entire history.

(5) On our last day, we drove around some of the coast, the second-largest island of France (after Corsica), and visited the La Palmyre Zoo. We were pretty amazed that they actually sell popcorn intended to feed the animals (but "in moderation," and you're not supposed to feed the monkeys). After visiting zoos our whole lives with warnings about how bad it is to feed the animals, we just couldn't bring ourselves to do it. But we saw tons of cool animals, pretty up close and personal, including lots of babies (elephant, kangaroo, monkey, zebra, wildebeast, and sea otter babies).

Whew. And that's just the highlights... we had no tv, no internet, no telephone, so we felt a little out of touch with you all, but had no problems keeping busy. Lots of wine, great seafood, and the chance to just hang out. Now we're just trying to get used to our normal routine again.

Love, us

p.s. Yes, we were gone for Halloween. The French don't celebrate Halloween quite as much as we do, and the costumes didn't easily fit in the car, so we didn't have a chance to celebrate much on the day. But Nan sent them Star Wars costumes which they're getting plenty of use out of... you would be surprised at the number of occasions that call for kids to be Obi-Wan and Darth Vader. Every time someone comes over to dinner, for example... Tomorrow they're going to go model their costumes for our friends at the bike shop, with light saber battle demo too, no doubt!