Summer

Gel's brother (the one that lives in Brussels) has four kids, and his partner has three. All grown up. Trying to pin them all down to specific dates for a holiday is a bit difficult so they picked a couple of weeks, booked somewhere (in Provence), and declared open house. Andrew and Annike were very gracious to invite us to come down too.

Seemed like a good opportunity to get some sun and rest, and we were very happy to accept their invitation.

We arrived at Manchester Airport for our first flight to Schipol, dropped our baggage in, and then got a text saying our flight was cancelled.... :0(

This was a pain as we were only going for four nights.

After an hour or so at the KLM/Air France desk, and on the phone to Andrew, we had rearranged flights the following morning (VERY early) and, quite nicely, an extra day before returning.

We got up at three the following morning and got our flight and then realised we'd have about 25 minutes to get across Charles de Gaulle (CDG) to the boarding for our connecting flight to Marseille (MRS). This included another security check and passport check since UK is not part of the Shengen group.

We legged it and arrived in time to board, but when we arrived at MRS I got a text telling me that our bags hadn't been as nippy as us. Andrew met us at the airport, and was going there later so we asked if he could pick them up then? Of course not. That's not what the process was.....

Over the next 2-3 days we, or rather Annike, had a number of conversations with Air France telling them what a bunch of bums they were until our luggage arrived three days after we did. We all resolved to have three wardrobe changes for the rest of our stay.

Anyway, other than the cancelled flights, the unearthly start, and the lost luggage we had a great time. Mostly because we were looked after royally.

Provence lunch.

We had a couple of quick trips out. To Contignac:

Sleepy cat

Town Square

Pheebs and Lizzie

To Carces market where my camera was wrestled from my hand by a burly Frenchman to take our photo:

Literally across the road from the house, was a smallholder selling fruit and veg, so we had fresh food every day. The peppers in the middle of the pic had been picked from the plant a matter of seconds before I took the photo.

We also had a wiffwaff tourny, and here's an action shot of the Gel v Thibaud game, with Andrew refereeing.

All in all we had a great time, with love and thanks to Andrew and Annike and all the 'kids' for looking after us so well.

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Here's a question from the interweb I thought was very interesting:

                What's the first major news story you can remember living through as a child?