Mylene served tea, coffee, or hot chocolate in bowls. The kids LOVED drinking from them. They have all become tea lovers. I can see tea at breakfast at our house in the future.
Our awesome hosts with the kids. They bought their B&B about 12 years ago as an abandoned old house and totally rennovated it. It's beautiful.
We left Normandy on Tuesday am. Just in case you're not getting the ash cloud updates like we are, or you have your nose in the books, like Jacque, the situation is that almost ALL European air travel shut down. Plus the railroads in the south of France were on strike. We have met stranded people in lots of places and are so thankful to have had pre-puchased tain tickets, car rental and lodging up until now. We had to shuffle Tuesday to make sure we got to Rome by the 24th in order to catch our ship.
Anyway, we began Tuesday by saying goodbye to our wonderful "innkeepers" Christian and Mylene and the dogs. It has been my favorite place to stay and I hate having to leave early but it will have to be one of the "when I come back" times.:) We drove 3 hours through the most beautiful countryside. We arrived at the Chateau d'Usee around lunchtime. The Chateau is the same one the designers of Disneyland used as a model for Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland. We had so much fun climbing all the stairs and going in the alcoves and nooks. They have put scenes from Sleeping Beauty in many of the rooms and it was fun finding them all.
Then we drove about 8 more hours to Aix, France. We got there late and thought we had gone back in time when we got to our "hotel", if you can call it that. It looked like something straight out of Much Ado About Nothing. I read that it was built in the 15th/16th century. The only problem was that their "lift" (elevator) was broken. We were on the first floor, but to get to our room we had to go up stairs to get to reception, down a long flight of stairs to the basement level, back up another flight and then up a spiral stone staircase to get to our room! All with 7 suitcases and 6 backpacks! (notice I tell you how many quite often). But we made it and woke up to another beautiful day.
We drove another 2 hours to Nice. The scenery wasn't as pretty in the south as in the north. Many more cities instead of villages and rather poor looking. We spent an hour waiting on our driver at the Nice airport. (We weren't allowed to take our French car into Italy, otherwise we would have kept it and driven to Rome). We drove about and hour into Genova, Italy and bought our train tickets to Rome. Here we also had our first gelato- Italian ice cream. Mama mia is it good! We got on our train and had the coolest seats- a compartment with 6 big seat, 3 facing 3, where the door closed! It was great. Just like in Narnia or the I Love Lucy episode where they are on their way to Italy and Fred gets compartment seats instead of a sleeper so he can save $. We trained 3 hours to a town I don't know the name of. Then we waited 2 hours (in a park that had a monument to Christopher Columbus) and got on the second train. No compartment this time but we still had plenty of room and as time went on we and one other couple were the only ones in our car! The kids watched Craig's DVDs of Dick Van Dyke (they're hooked). Ellie finally fell asleep. We got to Rome around 11:30, got to hotel and crashed to sleep again.
Anyway, we began Tuesday by saying goodbye to our wonderful "innkeepers" Christian and Mylene and the dogs. It has been my favorite place to stay and I hate having to leave early but it will have to be one of the "when I come back" times.:) We drove 3 hours through the most beautiful countryside. We arrived at the Chateau d'Usee around lunchtime. The Chateau is the same one the designers of Disneyland used as a model for Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland. We had so much fun climbing all the stairs and going in the alcoves and nooks. They have put scenes from Sleeping Beauty in many of the rooms and it was fun finding them all.
Then we drove about 8 more hours to Aix, France. We got there late and thought we had gone back in time when we got to our "hotel", if you can call it that. It looked like something straight out of Much Ado About Nothing. I read that it was built in the 15th/16th century. The only problem was that their "lift" (elevator) was broken. We were on the first floor, but to get to our room we had to go up stairs to get to reception, down a long flight of stairs to the basement level, back up another flight and then up a spiral stone staircase to get to our room! All with 7 suitcases and 6 backpacks! (notice I tell you how many quite often). But we made it and woke up to another beautiful day.
We drove another 2 hours to Nice. The scenery wasn't as pretty in the south as in the north. Many more cities instead of villages and rather poor looking. We spent an hour waiting on our driver at the Nice airport. (We weren't allowed to take our French car into Italy, otherwise we would have kept it and driven to Rome). We drove about and hour into Genova, Italy and bought our train tickets to Rome. Here we also had our first gelato- Italian ice cream. Mama mia is it good! We got on our train and had the coolest seats- a compartment with 6 big seat, 3 facing 3, where the door closed! It was great. Just like in Narnia or the I Love Lucy episode where they are on their way to Italy and Fred gets compartment seats instead of a sleeper so he can save $. We trained 3 hours to a town I don't know the name of. Then we waited 2 hours (in a park that had a monument to Christopher Columbus) and got on the second train. No compartment this time but we still had plenty of room and as time went on we and one other couple were the only ones in our car! The kids watched Craig's DVDs of Dick Van Dyke (they're hooked). Ellie finally fell asleep. We got to Rome around 11:30, got to hotel and crashed to sleep again.
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