Oh the Places

We had a great day today exploring our new part of Spain.  Although staying in La Herradura on the Costa Tropical, we heard about some caves in the next town along called Nerja, which is on the Costa del Sol.  A bit of googling brought to light that the Cueva de Nerja are free to visit on a Monday between 9.30 and 1pm, so today was our day.  http://www.thenerjacaves.com

The boys have never seen stalactite/stalacmite caves and have always wanted to and we haven’t seen them since childhood ourselves, so with 4 votes yes we were off.  I encourage everyone to dress nice and warm assuming that the caves might be cool.  We arrive and get our free tickets (gotta love free!) and splash out 2 euro for the audioguide.  While standing in the queue for the caves we read the rules and were pleased that we wore our runners for a change as flip flops are not allowed.  That would have been very, very annoying.

These caves were amazing, in the actual meaning of the word not the teenager meaning.  We were all stunned at how varied and complex the beautiful patterns of the formations were.  People used to live in these caves and we could all see what a beautiful, safe and temperate place it would have been. Our imaginations could easily pick out where we would sleep, eat etc.   I for one would love to spend a night here if they ever open it as a cave hotel.  It is not cold down there at all and with all the steps we are soon taking off some of our many layers.  The audioguide was great and we all loved it, and it kept the boys focus during periods we were waiting.  Anything for some screen time!

By the time we came out we were invigorated and did not feel like going home so decided to check out Nerja.  We only made it as far as Burianna Playa and the beach there was so good we didn’t make it any further.  There were at least 4-5 playgrounds on the sand on the beach, the bay was small, sheltered and hot and the water was almost swimmable.  There were lots of little restaurants, even out of season, and many offering beach service and sun loungers.  We had the best pizza and a nice cold cerveza before hitting the beach.

 

We were still dressed in all our warm, caving clothes of jeans and shoes so were sweltering.  After sweating for about 30 mins we gave up, bought the cheapest swim wear we could find from the shops and dived in.  The water was cold but just swimmable and even the boys got in with much screaming and yelling.  The Spanish locals on the beach stared, shocked and amused but it felt so good to be immersed in the sea after so long.  We are definitely coming back here again.

 

 

I really don’t know what I expected Portugal to be like before we got here.  We had said before arriving that we really didn’t know much about it at all as a country, apart from some famous explorers hundreds of years ago and an old boyfriend of mine who was Portuguese.  Not a huge amount of useful information really.  We knew the weather was going to be a nice change to being hot after a long English summer.

I have, in all honesty, have never seen somewhere like this.  It looks like what I imagine Mexico to look like (having no idea as I’ve never been!).  The colours are all shades of tan, with some silvery green of olives trees, cactus and gum.  The odd darker cork tree (never even knew there was such a thing) stands out.  The houses are white adobe style and seem to all be perched on a hill or pressed tightly together in the villages.  Roads in the villages are often barely passable for our little Toyota and we thank goodness we do not have a campervan.  It is dusty and sandy with no green grass at all. Our hosts told us that they have not had any rain since March.  Coming from New Zealand where water falls out of the sky by the bucketload this is inconceivable.  The good thing is that water doesn’t seem to be an issue, they are on mains and have no restrictions.

We stayed our first few nights in Sintra, the Pauanui or Omaha of Portugal by all accounts.  Rich and royal folks in the 1600-1800’s had their holiday homes/palaces here and they are dotted on every hill, some painted in bright reds and yellows.  We visited one of these, Quinta de Regaleira, on the recommendation that the gardens would be fun for the kids.  It was a folly type garden including tunnels, wells you can walk down, hidden lakes with stepping stones to cross, paths going off in every direction to hidden grottos, towers, chapels and yet more caves, wells, lakes etc.  Jasper took off at a run and we all just followed him.  It was a total adventure of a garden, no-one was bored.

 

We also managed to get to the beach a few times and Andrew even managed to get in, but to be honest the water was super cold, so I worked on getting my vitamin D intake up instead.  We throw ourselves into learning a new language, trying out the local wines, beer and food and checking out the Portuguese way of life.

We left Sintra and headed to Central Portugal, only 16kms from Spain.

We are staying here at a Workaway with an English family who have bought some abandoned land with an old stone farm barn and outbuildings and have been doing it up.  They also started a bilingual school in the area and so are flat out with both projects.  We are here as an extra pair of hands and the boys can attend their school.  They have 2 kids and within minutes of us arriving they are all off running around with sticks and on some imaginary jaunts.  Our home for the next month or so (dependent on when it gets cold) is a caravan with awning and attached shower and compost toilet.

This part of Portugal is very traditional and the pace of life is slow.  Within the first week we literally see people travelling by donkey and cart, as well as these funny little tractors with a top speed of about 7km/hr.

Sometimes traditional communities can be resistant to change and new people coming, but apparently the locals have really embraced the new influx of families from other places in Europe and are happy to see children coming back onto land which has sat fallow for so long.  The bilingual school they have set-up in the area was specifically to meet the need of these families whose kids don’t speak enough Portuguese to go to the local school, or have moved here to get away from the rigorous academia of their own country and don’t want to replicate it here.  The local council (camera) has embraced the new school and given them the premises of an old secondary school which shut down a decade or so ago.  They have fixed all the old windows, cleaned and repainted it ready for the new kids.  So Penamacor is becoming a centre for new families to come to.

The Expression Small School is aligned with a North American international programme  which has a structure called Agile Learning.  It take a democratic and child led approach to learning, but how each school interprets this varies between centres.  The school has 2 classes so far and our kids love going.  They study Portuguese language every day and then can choose from a few other options each day.  One of the teachers only teaches in Portuguese and the other teaches in both English and Portuguese.  The school really focuses on making each class and subject really fun and it certainly seems to achieve that from what we hear back.  The science classes are a firm favourite and seems to involve blowing things up, electricity, and other exciting physics lessons.  They are also working on dismantling an engine, art and computer coding on top of some maths and reading skills. The boys love going, each day we say to them that they can stay in bed if they want but they will miss their lift to school and they leap up, not wanting to miss a day of fun and learning.  So there is land, kids, dogs, cat and school = Happy days!

 

 

Way back in Sri Lanka we stumbled upon the idea of going to a music festival whilst in England when an advert for Kendal Calling came up on Andrew’s facebook feed.  Despite the rather considerable expense for a four day music festival paying GB pounds on the NZ dollar, we decided to go for it.  There were some great acts we wanted to see and we fancied the idea of a “Summer” (haha) camping festival in the Lakes District.  Obviously we are not from the north of England or this would have probably seemed foolhardy and we would’ve chosen a camping festival much further south.

In the days before the festival it became apparent that the forecast included rain and cold so we frantically stocked up on wellies (strangely hard to find in kids sizes), raincoats and some warm clothes/blankets, and hot water bottles.  Once in to the festival, there really wasn’t any way back out and you had to hike everything in.  We opted for pre-pitched tents in an area called Tangerine Fields. This turned out to be the absolute furthest from the carpark and involved carrying all our stuff a few kms at least through lots, and lots, and lots, of mud (LOTS of mud).  Being pre-pitched though saved us on having to drag a large tent and bedding through the mud, and also saved us on having to pack down wet gear at the end.

After having spent some rather balmy days in France getting up to 37degrees, spending nights in a tent in England with thin nylon and Summer weight sleeping bags between us and 9 degreesC outside meant for some chilly toes. Coupled with one air mattress that went flat every night without fail, and some raucous neighbours partying until 6am, there was not a lot of quality sleep going on, but it was still fun.

The mud theme, as is typical of any English festival I believe, became part of the experience itself and most people seemed to embrace it and move on.  It didn’t faze the boys at all, with us spending the long walk from our tent to the main stages comparing the different types of mud.  The boys decided on several varieties of mud including sloppy mud, sucky mud and slippy mud.  It made the walk take a very long time, so we went in after lunch and stayed until after the last band. It tended to rain through most nights and early mornings, so despite the mud, we managed to stay relatively dry during most of the music.

First night, Thursday,  was a bit of a warmup night with the big name that evening being Franz Ferdinand. The band we’d really come to see was Stereophonics, who played the main stage on Friday night.  That was our first time seeing them live and it was definitely the reason we chose to come so this was definitely the highlight of the weekend.

By the second day we discovered that the kids we saw walking around collecting cans and cups were not altruistic greenies but were earning cold hard cash, earning 10p per can or cup collected in the main music area.  The boys embraced this completely and took to carrying a bin bag around filling it up and cashing in their earnings.

They earned heaps and spent some of it on lollies, including these giant gobstoppers (does it count if it’s too big to fit in your gob??).

Saturday night we got to see Brian Wilson and Pet sounds, Brian being best known as singer songwriter for the Beach Boys, so it was a bit of a time warp to hear.  The headliners on Saturday were the Manic Street Preachers, which was great.  We met some friends for us and the boys, had a few ciders and spent the set belting out all the words we knew along with thousands of other people.  Good times.

The festival sold itself as kid-friendly and it delivered with all sorts of activities and spaces designed for families.  The boys loved the learn to dj desk, the cinema tent, the Woods and the Tiny Tim Peakes area.  There were some pretty professional festival going families around with their wagons and chairs.

So despite the cold and mud we had a great time and there really was something for all of us at the festival.  I’m not sure that i could do the 3 nights of no sleep again any time soon, but everything else was awesome.

 

 

After a long day of travel involving car, train, bus, plane, shuttle and finally rental car we arrived at our accommodation in Kilmuckridge, County Wexford. We were all desperate to just be there and stop moving by this point (10pm), so we were thrilled to find that our cottage exceeded our expectations.  We walked in and it was lovely and warm with 3 massive bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, with jacuzzi even.  Bliss, it’s always so good when something is better than expected.  And the cottages are so cute! And there is a kids playground over the road.

The cottages were conveniently situated right next to the local pub, where a wedding party was in full swing.  With “Whiskey in the jar” belting out we tuck the boys into bed, wait the requisite 15 minutes and then pop to the pub for a wee warm up.  When we left England Andrew said that his one regret was not visiting enough pubs, so with this he decides to have a Guinness a day challenge.  We are only here for 7 days so it should be easily achievable.  It really feels like we are back in Ireland now, with the wedding music, the friendly bar staff, the warm pub and the beer.  We lived in Ireland about 12 years ago for just over a year, before kids, and we loved it, so it feels great to be back in the craic.

Our first day we visit the local beach only 6 kms away and it is so nice to see the ocean again, despite the chilly 14 degrees. The boys are energised and run like crazy climbing dunes, collecting stones and having a ‘stand in the cold water’ contest.  On our way the highlight is when the man on the radio says “third” which due to his accent sounds like “turd” to our ears.  Jasper is thrilled and spends a lot of the day saying thirty three and a third in his newfound Irish accent.

We visit Wells House and the boys love the gardens with fairy walk, giant chess, animal farm and adventure playground.

We are all really enjoying Ireland. We love the accent, watching the RTE shows (with the same presenter as 12 years ago), the soda bread, the Guinness, the people.  There really is something about the Irish people that is so warm and friendly without any artifice, I just love all of it.  Tomorrow we return to the Peoples Republic of Cork, where we lived and worked years ago.  I can’t wait to hear the Cork accent and see if i can understand a single word of it.

 

England was the first country we had been to in 9 months where English was the official language.  We were excited at the idea of being able to fully communicate with everyone we meet, eat some familiar food we were missing and the general ease of doing anything when you can fluently speak the language.  While we enjoy the challenge and interest of learning language and customs of new places, it is also nice to have a  break.  Sometimes  travelling can feel a bit lonely as we have been unable to fully communicate with people we meet along the way.  I think before leaving New Zealand I thought that we would find common ways to get past it, and this has been true at times, but I would say that most of the time I simply do not have the words to communicate more than absolute basics and neither do they.  I’m a real people person and I like to chat and talk about anything with anyone, so found this language barrier isolating at times.  It also puts more pressure on the 4 of us, as we are then all each other has.  It doesn’t really matter how much you like someone when they are all the communication you have and there are no new novel topics as we know each others story and daily events intimately.  I had had a taste of this on a recent (brief) trip to London, where I revelled and delighted in chatting to all the shopkeepers, strangers, ticket sellers etc I met.  It was just so easy.  I was really looking forward to 3 months of this.

We flew into Manchester and made our way to our first stop which was a Workaway stay near Worcester.  Workaway is a work exchange for room and board and we were there to help with some gardening and building projects, as well as helping with minding the seven new Golden Doodle puppies which had been born less than 2 weeks prior to our arrival.  Our hosts Ruth and Mark were absolutely lovely and to say the puppies were gorgeous is such an understatement.  It is so rare to be able to see and touch puppies at this age.  The boys were entranced by these small, blind little creatures, but did not get much hands on time due to them being so little.

We enjoyed the work, which was quite physical and it felt good to use our bodies for something other than sitting and sightseeing!  It was also nice to see the result of a project and the garden and new patio started to take shape. The boys joined in and loved digging, feeding worms to the chickens.

We also enjoyed talking with new people and eating some English food.  We made a list of things we should eat while in England.  I have lost the list but I think it had; pies, mash and gravy, chips and curry, Indian food, Ploughmans lunch, Sunday carvery with yorkshire pud, salt and vinegar chips and Devonshire tea. Alex has certainly done his bit with the pies, eating at least 3 each week.  We also had wheels, having bought a car, so it was great to be able to venture out wherever we wanted. England is just so pretty to drive around with the tidy hedgerow fields, leafy lanes and narrow roads.

This stay was interrupted by a trip further up north, first to the Kendal calling music festival (there is a blog post specifically on this muddy topic) and then a two week house/pet sit in Manchester.

We returned to Ruth and Mark’s and the puppies were now 5 weeks old; running, jumping, biting, yipping, balls of fluff and clumsy energy.  Like toddlers with four legs and sharper teeth, but times seven.  The good thing is that they were utterly adorable (or adorabubble according to Jasper) and they regularly passed out in a jumbled heap allowing us all to catch our breath.  The boys were besotted and the challenge was to make sure they didn’t love the puppies too much.

One of the highlights from this part of our stay was enjoying the English countryside.  We rambled through fields (that unique English thing where you can walk all over the countryside) picked lots of blackberries, made blackberry turnovers and blackberry jam, made huts in the woods and marvelled at cute cottages and large country estates.  We also enjoyed visiting charity shops and being able to get as many books in English as we wanted.

While there is an endless number of things to do in the UK (castles, country houses, gardens, historical ruins and forts, movies, jump worlds, soft play centres etc etc)  we really can’t see them all, the children would kill us if we tried and it would break the bank.  Like most countries we have visited we made the conscious decision to see a few key things and relax and enjoy the “being in England experience”, rather than trying to see it all.

We did see a movie (in English yay!!!) and had a full day at Warwick castle; which included a jousting show, falconry display, firing the trebuchet, lots of weapons, suits of armour, maze and playground.  It was a great castle and even though we had a full day there we didn’t quite see everything.

 

We finished up with Ruth and Mark, said goodbye (many times, involving much kissing of puppies) and headed south to Dorset for our next house sit.

 

Our 90 day period in France was getting close so we left Toulouse, the school and our friends both sad to be going and excited for a new adventure.  We had hired the worlds smallest car (Opel Adam) and planned a road trip from Toulouse, through Dordogne, up to St Malo, Normandy and onto Paris.  We literally only just squeezed in with luggage piled all around the boys, if we crashed we were all toast.

Before arriving in Dordogne we had been in cities and towns for a really long time and hadn’t realised what a huge change it would be to be in the country again.  We picked an airbnb near a small village called Daglan mostly at random. When we arrived, the address provided led us to an empty field and there was no mobile signal so we were unable to contact them for further instructions.  We retired to the village bar while we tried to figure it out.  Within minutes we had met a UK travelling family who had Alex playing petanque and Jasper had been invited up to see some kittens.  Andrew went in search of signal while I enjoyed a glass of rose and watched the boys happily running around. Eventually we found our way and said goodbye to our new friends. We turned up at the airbnb and fell in love with this beautiful stone farmhouse set between hay fields and walnut trees.  The hosts had 2 boys of similar ages so again the boys shot off to explore this new place and friends.  No similar language but that didn’t seem to deter them.  The common language of kids was enough.

We were invited for a drink and decided to have a quick wine before heading off to find somewhere for dinner.  2 hours later we are still enjoying the company of our hosts and their friends when we realise the local restaurant had closed, so our lovely hosts invited us to eat with them.  A delicious dinner later, kids are tucked up in bed and we keep chatting away until the wee hours, having an absolute ball with such lovely people in a mix of French and English.

What a start to our trip to Dordogne; happy kids, happy parents, beautiful setting. Next day we are up and off early to go canoeing on the river Dordogne.  This was so much fun and just ridiculously scenic.  It almost feels like a film set because it is too perfect.  Paddling slowly past stunning chateaus, castles, countryside, stopping along the way for a swim, ice cream etc.  Magic day all round.

We spend 3 days here in Dordogne and every day is lovely; exploring the market of Sarlat la Caneda, the gardens of Macqueyssac and the local villages. The boys wake up every morning and run straight outside to play, no mention of TV, tablets, no arguing.  They start some game in their imaginations which grown ups are not allowed to see and seems to involve guns and speaking in American accents. Dordogne becomes our favourite place in France pretty quickly.

We need to leave though as we have grandparents arriving in northern France and we haven’t seen them for about 8 months.

 

We venture to St Malo and spend 3 days with Andrew’s dad and step-mum, who are on their own world tour.  It is just lovely; so nice to see familiar people and speak a familiar language.  St Malo is a lovely seaside fort and we stay right inside the fort in the old part of town.  Another ridiculously beautiful town; seriously France, is there anywhere ugly?  It is so nice to see the ocean again, I really miss seeing it but it is just too cold to swim.

We spend quiet days wandering around town, eating ice cream and catching up.  We are sad to leave but they are heading to Sweden and we have a date in Paris.

 

Paris

We are being spoiled with overseas guests as then we are off to Paris to meet Andrew’s mum and stepdad.  We have kept this a surprise from the boys and it is very cloak and dagger stuff trying to meet in the same place at the same time in a city neither of us know at all.  But it works and the look on Alex’s face was absolute gold, he was literally stunned.  Could not figure out what these people from Hobsonville were doing in this new world of his, France.

We had 3 lovely days with them, which just happens to coincide with Bastille Day, which is very special to see (apart from the total lack of public loos – come on France!).

Paris was, as expected, beautiful, delicious and wonderful.  The Jardin de Tuileries, the Louvre, the Seine, the fromageries, Tour de Eiffel – it was all just as wonderful as we imagined.   Some amazing works of art all over the place, lovely architecture, delicious food and friendly people – unlike their reputation.

Then our time is up, we stayed for exactly 90 days and must move on.  France was a surprise, totally hooked me and I’m sure we’ll be back one day.  Maybe once I’ve learned some French – that would be excellent.  Onwards to the UK we go.  Au revoir!