Mumaversary

I’ve just celebrated my mumaversary, one whole decade since I pushed a human out. 10 whole years of keeping it alive, and some selfish people are taking my glory away by referring to the day as “Percy’s birthday”.

Here he is on every birthday so far….

Percy got a card this year saying, ‘double the digits, double the fun” which has inspired me to design cards for 100 year olds that say, “triple the digits, a very small fraction of the fun”. 

This year he decided to celebrate by going to “Arriba Arriba” the climbing wall with a Mexican restaurant. We tested it out in the summer and they had a lot of fun, so it was chosen as his birthday destination. He invited 5 friends and 4 said they could make it. The week before one of the friends said could we give them a lift, and we said yes. My parents were going to be visiting at the time so we already had 6 people but we do have a 7 seater so technically, yes, we could squash another child in no problem. Then on the night before the party, just before Percy went to bed, 2 of the parents messaged to say they didn’t know how they were going to get there. They were working or whatever and hadn’t thought about lifts. We put them in touch with each other to see if they could come up with something, but they couldn’t. 

We talked about many solutions. The place is 25 minutes away and not really accessible by public transport, we sort of felt like it shouldn’t be our job to fix the problem for the parents that hadn’t thought about this until the night before, but on the other hand Percy would be really sad if 2 out of 4 kids couldn’t come to the party. Eventually we offered a mad plan for my parents to get a train into town really early, because that’s when the train was and then they would get a taxi to the place. This would free up 2 spaces to bring these other kids, but the mum of one kid still didn’t agree because the kid would have to leave the non-compulsory holiday reading lessons that the school were putting on half a hour early. So that kid didn’t come, but in the end we made space for the other kid by Dan cycling and me driving all the kids plus my parents. So Dan did a 40k round bike trip that day just to make space for this other kid, what a hero.

Everyone had a great time climbing and eating Mexican food. We brought in a cake and sung happy birthday, and the kids came back to ours to play afterwards. Then in the evening we all watched an Ice Age film together. Percy had some lovely gifts, Eric got him a folder that holds Pokémon cards. He’s been planning this for ages, about 6 months ago I found him trying to work out how you would make plastic wallets into Pokémon card holders, which I dont know if there is a way but we just ordered a little folder that holds all their many Pokémon cards. Eric was possibly more excited about Percy’s birthday than Percy was. He loves to give gifts and he was really excited for the climbing too.

Percy is a big fan of saving the environment and wants to be a re-wilder.

We got him (among other things) the kids version of the game Cards Against Humanity. It’s where you make silly sentences and in the kids version it’s mainly about poo and bogies and farts and stuff. They giggle so much playing it, but what they think is hilarious is totally different sentence combinations to what adults would find funny.

Playing the game with Granny.

You might notice this is not a house. We were staying on a boat the last few days, on the Canal du Midi. I’ve done a lot of boating before but not on a river boat. I’ve done a lot of small sailing boats across the Channel, and a bit of canal boating. So this felt like a luxury in terms of space. And no one had to sleep in the bed on my dad’s old boat that we all referred to as a the coffin. 

What’s more exciting than a boat trip on the Canal du Midi? Pokémon.

See my boat tour video here

On the Canal du Midi every lock is manned or womanned by a lock keeper, and we briefly looked into how you get to be one and especially how you get a free lock keepers cottage. Every kind of employment is an option for us now. Well actually not quite every option, I got 2 offers of having a sugar daddy in the last month, really quite reasonable requests too for a lot of money, but I turned them down. They both came as private messages from guys after I had a viral video, which is currently on 5.5 million views. It turns out if 5 million people view a video about 1000 will follow you about 5 will private message you to say hello and 2 will offer to be a sugar daddy. It’s pretty flattering at my age actually.

Before the boating and Percys birthday we had a few more nice days with my parents. One was a lovely sunny day where we had a picnic on the beach, I swam in the sea and it was lovely until a jellyfish stung me. 

I also took my 67 year old Dad to my roller dance lesson. That was a good laugh. Last week I was saying that I couldn’t come because my parents were visiting and they said bring them and my Dad actually did skate in his youth and once at my 36th birthday party. 

So he came along and did pretty well. There was a cute moment when 2 young people were trying to explain to him in quite complex french how to do a roller skating move, they were super patient with him. It’s such a nice little club there. The guy who runs the dance part of the roller skating club is 61 and an amazing roller skater. See my little video of Dad here.

This week coming is another week of half term. We’ll mainly be doing boring stuff like getting the kids to do their homework. I have some private English classes to teach and Dan has some jobs to apply for and a few bits of work, nothing fun but I am trying to do more art making. 

I started a kickstarter about 10 days ago which is now 78% funded! I’m so grateful to everyone who’s donated to it. If I make it to 300 pounds I’m going to buy a printing press and each person who donated is going to be sent some Hannah original artworks in the post made, with the new press. It’s all or nothing so you only pay if enough people agree to pay. But I only one need another 3 or so people to reach my goal. I really didn’t want to do it at first because I feel like I’m always sharing stuff on social media and asking people to come to my gigs or like my pages or watch my videos, if I could have afforded to just buy the press then I would have, but there’s no way I could have justified doing that given our current job situation, and it was too much to ask for for a birthday or Christmas present. So I’m supper happy that it looks like I am going to be able to get this anyway. I hope it will make my prints look a lot more professional, and I could maybe try and start selling more work.

If you want to support my kickstarter by buying a print click here

Ups and downs.

Last blog I talked about how the jobs I thought I was going to have in September failed to materialise and I ended up with just one job on Wednesdays teaching English (plus a bit of graphic design stuff) but now I’ve lost that one job! Or more accurately I quit that job, which I know might seem insane given the lack of work me and Dan have between us, but it got to the point where it was impossible to stay. I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say the things I was being asked to do, and asked not to do were becoming more and more unhinged, to the point where it felt more like we were in rival drug gangs, instead of just being two people in separate villages that want to teach English to children. So I’m doing it on my own now, I had a few kids come to a free trial lesson last week and then I did my first real lessons this week.

We had visitors last weekend, my lovely friend Helen and her husband Graham. Me and Helen have been friends since 2005, and have done many bizarre things together, like attend a medieval dance class at a Polish arts festival, went to a basket ball match in Palestine, got told off by the police for doing fire circus tricks in the park, and when I had only just passed my driving test I drove her while she held a fish tank full of water and fish, which sloshed around a lot. But these are the kinds of things that make a friendship. Helen moved out of Liverpool to the south in maybe 2009ish so we don’t get to drive fish tanks around much anymore. But whenever we do get together it’s always a good time. 

On an outdoor ice rink in Norway 2008

Força Réal 2024

That friendship group we were in was the absolute best. I’d already been in maybe 3 good friendship groups before that at school and sixth form and unfortunately I’m not friends with any of those people anymore. A lot of them are all friends with each other still, and I wonder what I should have done to still be in their crews. But anyway when I met this bunch I thought, “I have to stay with these people forever even when we’re not all living round the corner from each other, these guys are the best.” And I have, kind of. Everyone is more spread out now, internationally as well as nationally, and a lot of people have kids and partners and you just can’t hang out in the same way. If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t stop Hitler I’d just go back to a Saturday in 2007 where we just hung out in each other houses, playing board games going to the park, playing ready steady cook where we all buy the most obscure item we can find and then cook a terrible meal. 

So it was super nice to have one of the original crew in our little corner of the world showing her the sights. Our kids didn’t remember them at all but they quickly became friends, and got some great banter going with Graham. It was nice to have a break from everyday stresses and just be reminded of what a beautiful place we live in. 

Eric looks like he’s in love with Graham

The beautiful town of Eus

And I’ll probably look back on this time the same as 2007 like, “remember that time we lived in France and the kids were at a fun age and we went to beautiful places” and I won’t remember all the stress and the times when the kids are grumpy. While Helen was here, we still had to do annoying things like fail to get my new ‘I’m still allowed in the country card’. I am still allowed in the country but I have to wait another month for my card, which is in turn delaying any benefits I’m entitled to.

But it was fun to then forget about that and hang out with my mate. We phoned some of the old crew including Will in Australia and Joy in L.A. And Josh in the Lake District. We haven’t spoken to them for years! And it’s mad that you can call someone for free and video chat but we rarely do. If you want a video chat let me know, I know some people find them weird but I’m always up for them. On the last day we were seeing Helen and Graham we were having lunch together and there was a knock at the door. It was a signed for letter from our landlord telling us what we roughly knew anyway. We have to leave this house by 11th April. Cheers for ruining our lunch landlord. It was kind of a sad goodbye after that. I don’t know when I’ll see them again because although we do come back to England its tricky when there’s lots of people to see and you dont have a car to make it down to the middle of nowhere south. 

It is an odd feeling not knowing where we’ll live or even which country we’ll be living in, in a years time. But that’s enough sad stuff now, let me cheer you up with the happy news that we won a weekend away in a holiday park! Maybe we should go there on 11th April and then just squat. 

In the summer we had Dan’s parents visiting us and they very kindly paid for us all to stay in a local holiday park in Canet. And while we were enjoying our free holiday I saw a sign for winning a holiday by sharing a photo on social media so I shared this photo:

And we won second place! Which is a weekend in any of their parks. We could go to a local one with a nice pool or we could go anywhere in France or the Netherlands. I’m tempted by Paris because we wanted to go there anyway, and although it doesn’t have any nice pools it is a free weekend’s accommodation just outside of Paris.

This week I’m in an art exhibition which has been nice, and a definite bonus of living here, there are a lot more inspiring things to paint. These are my painting from the exhibition it’s on until Sunday if you’re in the area.

The other bizarre kind of fun thing that happened this week was, for the second time ever, I had a video go viral. Really viral like at its peak it was getting 2000 views per minute.  It’s slowed down now but it’s on 2 million views. Unfortunately I dont make any money out of it, but I have got what money can’t buy….a lot of data about what people call a “Chinese Burn” in other countries. Wow it’s a minefield. Very interesting. I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge now. I might actually be the current world expert on this very niche subject having read the majority of the 10k comments.  Here’s some of that data on a map…. 

And last bit of happy news for this blog is Dan has an interview next week for a remote job. Thanks for reading.

Déjà vu

After about a year of living in France I finally learnt what Deja Vu literally meant. “Already seen.” The same with Prêt À Manger. One day (the day I learnt the word Prêt) I was like, oh that makes sense it means “ready to eat” not just “pretentious sandwich shop”. Anyway I am having some kind of déjà-vu with where we are now compared to last September. Last September Dan had been made unemployed by his job based in the Czech Republic (did you know it’s now called Czechia?) I know someone who’s still calling it Czechoslovakia. Anyway Dan had no job and I had one job on a Wednesday. A year went by, loads of stuff happened, we both got more work at different times. Dan got screwed over with a job that didn’t pay him, then there was a nice 3 months where Dan had a good job, we thought everything was sorted and we bought skis, and then it all came crashing down and we’re back where we started. 

Except this time we are getting some good benefits, because we’ve been poor for a year apart (from that 3 months where we were living it up). French benefits are eventually really generous. We didn’t get anything last year, we just used up all our savings on the very dull task of staying alive. There were probably some things we could have got, but we didn’t understand the system and you have to be poor for at least 3 months before they care. Now I almost feel bad to be receiving so much more than the UK would ever give. (Except for the fact our silly car just cost us 800 euros in repairs.) Dan gets 56 euro per day for 150 days, and we got this August back to school payment that we just missed out on last year, which is over 400 euros per child for us to spend on their back to school stuff. And 100 euro per child for clubs which are already very good value. For example, Eric’s roller skating club is 180 euros for the year. It’s so generous that one day I might even be able to afford a keyboard with the euro symbol. 

I was thinking I would have plenty of work for September but unfortunately, one of the jobs I was going to do (homeschooling 2 kids who are here for 6 months) has not materialised. Even though I met the kids and the mum and it all seemed a definite plan. And then my Wednesday afternoon English teaching is not going to happen anymore due to less kids signing up, so I’m going to try starting my own little English classes in my house for kids of this village.

Dan’s still thinking about his options. He’s still applying for jobs of course, but financially there’s no point him taking a minium wage terrible job right now. He’s got a bit of time to learn something or do something. He’s thinking about either learning computer programming or doing a bus drivers course, he’s going to a bus driving open day tomorrow. It’s not the most exciting job but it’s a job in demand, and today we were talking about how maybe one day he could train to be a train driver. And I said driving “le petit train Jeune” has to be the ultimate train driving job. Everyone is on it for the views and a good time. If there’s delays you’re never going to get angry commuters wanting a refund.

I’m so happy the kids are back in school! They are happy too. The summer is too long, we were all going a bit crazy with no structure. Percy is going into his final year even though he’s only nine. In England he was one of the oldest with an October birthday but in France he’s one of the youngest, because they do the year from January. He wants to go to secondary school here in the next village and live here forever. We have no clue what we’ll be doing in a year or even where we’ll be, we have to leave our house in April. You can’t rent another house without a good job. Our worse case scenario plan is we stay till April and then put our stuff in storage and live in our friends empty house from April until the end of school in July and then move back to England and try and not be grumpy about it. 

There was a time when I was 19 and I just came back from an amazing time volunteering in Palestine, and had a month in my leafy village of Burton Green before I left for uni in Liverpool, and I was really grumpy about it. I hated everything about that village for a month, I will try not to do that if we come back. But I will find it hard to enjoy Crosby beach. I know someone who has lived in the Caribbean and they find it hard to enjoy the Mediterranean. I guess the lesson is, never go to nice places. If I do go back I’m going to hold the biggest jonesfest ever and I’m going to try and be a comedian again. But our best case scenario is we somehow both find amazing work, and we buy a house here and put on a jonesfest here. Either way I promised at our leaving party a big Jonesfest in 2026 when I’m 40 and it needs to happen!

Jonesfest 2021

Happy September.

The Long Summer Holidays

Anyone else reaching that point of August when you’re counting down the days until your kids go back to school? We’ve had some lovely moments but two months is a bit much right? Since we got back from our France road trip we had two weeks of boring trying to get jobs done, me and Dan taking turns looking after the boys while the other one does some work.

And then there was a week where I was running an English learning holiday club from my house, which was actually pretty fun. The preparation is boring but then when you’ve got a fun day planned with all the materials ready for different activities and a timetable to follow, it’s kind of an easier day than a day at home with the boys where I’m just suggesting things and they say no, and then I just let them do their own thing until they start arguing. This week made me feel like a better parent because we were doing nice things like making pizza and clay pots and my kids actually wanted to do this stuff because other kids were doing it too.

It was still hard work. On the pizza day I had 6 kids making pizza, one of whom was gluten intolerant and nothing we were using could touch her special pizza, which looked absolutely rank. I really feel for kids with allergies your food is disgusting, and you have to live with a constant fear of death.

At the end of the holiday camp week it was the Olympic opening ceremony and we had a party where everyone brought a dish from another country. It was one of the best parties we’ve had. Everyone was very generous and the range of random food we had to eat was incredible. We ate the leftovers for the whole next week! 

The boys stayed up until the end of the opening ceremony, until 11:30! The latest they have ever stayed up. Percy was particular interested in watching all the countries and their boats, I feel like our family flag knowledge has at least doubled in the last few weeks.

We got quite into the Olympics too, we watched a lot of sports including gymnastics, trampolining, skateboarding, climbing, diving, breakdancing and basketball. Me and the boys even made up our own artistic swimming routine in our paddling pool, and we made the sink and a ruler and lego people into an Olympic diving pool.

Between that party and last week we spent a few weeks considering moving to a chateau near Carcassonne after seeing this advert:

We spoke to the guy and then were going to arrange a trip to visit. It would solve our job and housing problems but would create other problems like, being trapped in a job that you might not like and the boys having to move schools, and in Dan’s words he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a “chateau bitch”. In the end we were turned down because the guy decided we were too poor to be his servants. He said we would need more than just the 20 hours a week each of work he would give us and then he worried that working for him wouldn’t be a priority. He wants a richer couple who want to be his servants for fun and have nothing else to do in their spare time.

Last week our best chums the MacMaster family arrived to visit. Or as Eric writes about them in his diary “the Max”. We’ve known Jude (the mum) for almost 20 years but we got to know them as good friends in 2016/17 in my pregnant and homeless stage. Jude was also pregnant a few months behind me but ended up having a very premature baby and then having another baby a year later and now our kids look a bit like quads together, they all have the same hair and are roughly the same size. Their youngest Theo (6) is almost as tall as Percy who will be 10 soon!

It was so fun to see them. They were the family that hosted us in our last week in Liverpool so we could clear out our house and they were meant to come and visit us in 2022 right after we moved, but unfortunately chicken pox struck at exactly the wrong time. So gutting. But we made up for it. The first day we went on these big inflatables in lake Vinca, I’ve got no photos so you will have to trust me that it was epic! What’s not to love about basically a big bouncy castle obstacle course on a lake on a hot day? People who go to museums and see culture on holiday are missing out. Also I got to test out a new French word that I just learnt the week before “zizi”, when Eric fell down an inflatable climbing wall and the life guard wanted to know he was ok. “What has he hurt?” He shouted across the lake. He then started shouting body parts at me in French just to help me out. I tried subtle pointing but then I had to resort to shouting “penis” and I had no idea how rude the word I was saying was, like was it the equivalent of shouting “willy” or “dick”?

That evening we went to a really nice restaurant , where I recommended people having a burger where instead of bread it’s like a hash brown kind of thing. It’s so good. For a lot of the week the Macs were staying in a holiday park by the coast, and we had been fortunate enough to be housesitting for friends. If anyone wants a house sitter I will happily sit a house like this that has 1) a pool 2) a trampoline 3) air con all over not just in one spot like ours 4) lots of space 5) British TV 6) no pets not even any plants that need watering. 

The Macs joined us one night for a meal but were very late arriving. When they got there their shiny bright hire car was brown, and they looked very stressed, their sat nav had taken them a ridiculous way though many fields. A few hours earlier our sat nav had tried to do the same but we ignored it, I said to Dan, “shall I text the Macs and tell them not to drive through any fields?” “No,” he said, “they’re coming from a different direction so they’ll be fine.” It’s all Dans fault. If fact if he’d have taken that job with google maps he could have fixed that. 

One day we went to a water park, we have been wanting to go to for ages, it was amazing but incredibly busy, the queues for some big slide were nearly an hour. We were there from 10am until 6:30pm and guess what time Eric decided he did actually likes water slides? 5pm. So in the morning he was in a grump he only wanted to go in the wave pool or lazy river, so Dan went on the lazy river with him while Zac had the other 3 boys on the smaller water slides leaving me and Jude to queue for a big halfpipe one. While we were in the queue we saw Zac at times wondering around with only 2 kids, looking worried. Jude left the queue to see what the problem was, while I tried to work out the how to argue in French that my friend only left the queue for a minute please let her back in. We were almost at the front of the queue when Jude returned to say that Percy was missing. Which meant I had to leave the queue or everyone would judge me. Sorry, I mean I had to leave the queue because my child’s safety is my top priority. Turns out Percy couldn’t see Zac for one minute so had just wondered off to find Dan and was having a lovely time on the lazy river while poor Zac was panicking that he’d lost someone else’s child. The whole morning was a bit of a right off but the day redeemed itself in the afternoon, and everyone left happy.

On their last day they gave back their hire car and we were going to give them a lift to the airport in our bag car but as just Dan and Zac were driving on the way back from the hire car place a warning light came on our car AGAIN! Not the same one as on the previous blog. This was not a reliable car to take them on a fairly long journey to get a plane. We looked into trains which are also not very reliable and sort of annoying because you need to get to the station and then get a connecting bus from the town to the airport. So Dan made the embarrassing call to the family we were house sitting for. “Hey Matt you know you let me stay in your incredibly nice house, and have our friends over, please can I also borrow your car?” And being the incredibly nice family they are he said yeah sure no problems.

So they all got to the airport safely only to discover they were there at completely the wrong time! Not in the very bad way though they were 4 hours early instead of 2 hours and there is NOTHING to do in Carcassonne airport. But thankfully Dan was only 5 minutes down the road so he turned round and took them out to see the lovely city of Carcassonne, which was the original plan which got lost a bit in the stress of our car being an absolute zizi.

Camping part 2

Eric’s holiday diary:

(I did 1 bellyflop! I was happy and hired a pédalo with a slide. I went down the slide 3X. For tea I had nuggets and chips and salted caramel ice cream.)

Percy has written in his diary that he did 77 farts this holiday.

I finished the last blog on a cliff hanger: we were stuck with a broken car in the town of Evian. And sorry to disappoint you, but we did make it back fine. I know most of my blog readers prefer it when I’m in some kind of jeopardy. Most of my everyday life kind of blogs get 80 -120 views. But when something is going bad for me I get around 300 views. That means there about 200 people who think, “oh Hannah’s fine, just enjoying her life, I’m not reading that.” You guys reading this now are mainly the good guys though, “camping part 2” is not a very clickbaity title, so you must actually like me or my writing or just be very bored and procrastinating doing something. Either way thanks for being here.

There was a little bit of jeopardy. Check out this giant spider that I found in our tent:

Also the car went to get fixed in Evian and while they were fixing it they said ,“by the way your tyre is dangerously worn.” You could actually see the metal bits poking out. This was on a Friday afternoon and they didn’t have time to fix it, so even though the orignal problem was fixed we were still stuck with a dangerous car and we couldn’t fix that until after the weekend, and a long drive to Lyon.

Evian was fun. It’s the French bit of lake Geneva, they actually call the lake another random French name just to be awkward. Like people who say vacuum cleaner and vulva when hoover and vagina work fine. Anyway we went to see the home of bottled water, there’s a bit where water constantly flows from a pretty mosaic and that water is proper Evian water, people fill up bottles and bottles of the stuff. 

But we did a blind taste test for Dan and he couldn’t tell the difference between tap water and Evian water. So there’s really no need to be filling bottles. Nearby is a sort of Evian water museum, like a healthy Cadbury’s world. You can buy Evian merch and learn how they get it out of the ground.

We were staying with Dans parent’s in an airbnb that was right by the lake, there was a nice little playground where we had a picnic on the last evening and went for a swim. On the return journey we stopped in at Geneva, partly so the kids could say they’ve been to another country. Me and Dan have been before on our big 2013 adventure so the fact that it was a different country was a mild inconvenience, it’s not even in the EU so you would get charged a lot for using a phone and the currency was different. We went to the same lake beach we went to in 2013 and we went to see the massive fountain. We were taking bets on how many daddies high it was, the answer is 76. 

We left to Lyon while trying not to use the sat nav so we didn’t get internet charges. Geneva is very near to France on 3 sides of it, so we figured it couldn’t be that difficult to get to the French bit and then put the sat nav on for the rest of the ride. We did not go the most efficient way! But we got there despite our dangerous tyre. Unfortunately the airbnb lady for the apartment we were meant to be staying in didn’t tell us the code to get in and was not answering her phone, so we had a while standing around on the street needing a wee googling other places to stay before she finally bothered to tell us the code.

We arrived in Lyon on Bastille Day but neither of us could be bothered to go out and see the fireworks, we just sat and half watched the England Spain football thingy. Spoiler alert it’s not coming home. But I did have a nice text conversation with my Spanish friend who I can only talk to in French saying things like “bravo” when they scored, with football emojis to make up for the lack of sentences. I bet I would have been a great ancient Egyptian. I love emojis, I prefer cats to dogs, and I just like their whole fashion vibe, I’d really have to practice my eyeliner technique though.

We didn’t see a lot of Lyon. On the Monday Dan finally managed to get the tyre sorted, while me and the kids got lost in a massive shopping center. We managed to get sleeping bags though, in preparation for the next bit of camping. We also briefly went to a great park that had a free zoo in it! 

Percy was concerned the ducks were getting less attention than average in this park so he made sure to talk to them.

Our final stop of the road trip was Vallon Pont d’Arc which was amazing! Our pitch overlooked the river beach which was just 1k from the famous natural rock bridge. We only had one full day there but we made the best of it by doing a 3 hour 7k family kayak trip. You get dropped off at one end so that you’re only travelling with the river and then we kayaked right past our campsite and through some rapids and finally right through the arc. I was nervous, the minimum age was 7 and we had to prove Eric was 7 because he looks so little. They told us one of the rapids was especially difficult, and I just didn’t know how they would cope if they were scared. But they coped really well. At first I was with Percy, and we got stuck on some rocks in a rapid and ended up going down backwards but he was fine. Then we swapped kids and Eric was also doing a great job, at one point he said, “paddle mummy, this is no time for taking photos!”

We stopped for a picnic lunch, or as the French call it a pique-nique (I just really enjoy that word). We made a stop to explore a cave including one that you can walk in and at the back there’s a hole that you can crawl in and then you come out kind of on top of the cave and from there you can jump off into the river. So fun.

In the evening I decided to not go to my online French lesson, it would have been hard with bad internet and no way to charge stuff, and instead go to a night market in the local town. It was such a big market, lots of cool stuff to buy and also an exhibition of the kayaks from previous Olympians that are from the area. The only thing we bought was ice cream. 

On the last day we packed up our tent early and went to see the Tour de France. They were starting about 45 minutes away from us and Dan has been wanting to see it for ages. He said if you get there at the right time you can get free stuff, hats and T-shirts and things that companies throw out of their vehicles. We made it in pretty good time but it was busy and difficult to park. We followed the crowds to a car park where all these mad cars were, there were cars shaped like Orangina bottles, and laughing cow cheese and washing detergent bottles, loads of different mad stuff which was cool to see. We saw the cars leave the car park on their journey but we weren’t in the right place where they were throwing out the free stuff, and we couldn’t get to that bit because of the crowds and the police. Eventually we made it there just as they were finishing up with throwing stuff. It was very cool to see all the fun cars though.

The actual race doesn’t then start for at least another 2 hours, you see the big coaches with the teams in them and all the bikes on car roofs, but from where we were you can’t easily get to a bit of the race where we could actually see them race. We waited around for a while and then finally found that in the village they had made a stage and they were introducing the cyclists team by team and then they would do a little practise cycle through the village center. There were also more people giving out free stuff and we managed to get a shopping bag two awful hats and 3 cans of non alcoholic beer.

Dan wearing an awful free hat with some cyclists in the background.

We saw Mark Cavendish and a guy who I like to call “egg on a barn owl” (Colombian cyclist Egan Bernal). Dan was a bit disappointed to not get to see any actual racing but next year we’ll be prepared. It was nice to arrive home from holiday and it’s still hot and sunny. In 48 hours we managed to get 5 loads of washing done!

Feeling very grateful that we got this time away and that our car works now, and feeling very motivated to make things work here so we can stay and have more Europe adventure road trips.