2019-09 Family Visit to France

On a mid-September morning, we started our 5-day trip to visit my family in France by getting the early ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe. We had a fantastic time eating Mum's home-cooked food, creating balloon animals (poor Ruby wasn't a fan when they went bang), staring at the stars without any light pollution (although Lee was annoyed with the full moon) and playing with our nieces Sophia and Ruby.

The weather was variable. When the sun was out, it was like a summer's day but when the clouds turned up, it turned a little cold and we needed to put jumpers on.

Mum's tomato crop was a big one this year and even though it was close to the end of the season, there were still hundreds of big, fat, juicy tomatoes to be picked, washed, chopped (apparently I wasn't very good at this according to Lee and Mum) and cooked up into sauce to be frozen. It put my measly 6 plants to shame!

Lee and I are always on the hunt for craft beer and Mum and Dad found a little diamond in Angoulême. V&B was a large bottle shop with a bar at the back of the shop selling craft beer. We of course had to try ever beer on tap along with a selection of the tapas which included large amounts of cheese and pate and whole saucissons sliced up in an electric Madeline. We may have ordered a little too much, it fair to say we were all French tapa'd out by the end of it. Following V&A, we headed into Angoulême for a final drink outside in one of the bars.

It was an energetic 5 days of playing with the girls who never seemed to get tired or bored of playing games. We tried to wear them out but they did a better job of wearing us out!

We had one afternoon walking around the truffle fields checking out our investment in Mum and Dad's truffle farm, more information here: French Truffle Tree. Our own trees were growing quickly and we hope to be collecting truffles from them in the next couple of years. We also saw the new fields which Dad had been planting earlier in the year and the bee hives that were being used to collect fresh honey from the pollen taken from the woods surrounding the fields and the wild flowers between the trees. We took quite a few pots of honey home with to enjoy on toast but also to experiment in beer!

Another highlight of the trip was our visit to Château de La Rochefoucauld. Sophia was so excited to be visiting a castle and kept telling me how it was Madame Gaston's House. I just naively assumed that Mum, Dad or my sister Kirsty must have known the owner and that Sophia must have met her at some point. It wasn't until we went to the dressing up room and Sophia started to talk about how Nana's dress was like Madame Gaston's that I realised something wasn't right. Who walks around in a canary yellow ball gown on a day to day basis?! Kirsty then pointed out to me that Madame Gaston was Belle from Beauty and the Beast.... it all makes sense now!

The trip came to an end all too quickly and before we knew it, we were saying goodbye and hitting the road again back to Dieppe to get the ferry back home.

Sam xx