France 2017

Hey folks, it's RANAD here. We're in France this year, bonjour!


























We started out cycling along the Loire, and checking out some chateaux.

Danced in grocery aisles in Brittany (Aaron and Aviva)

Had picnic lunches everywhere (this one's pretty classy, at the covered market in Vannes, Brittany).

Question: How the heck do the French get down these narrow lanes without breaking their side view mirrors?


















Answer: They don't. They break their mirrors.

Lots and lots of broken side view mirrors!

And thankfully none of these were our car!

In Bordeaux we visited a couple of wineries, a 350+ year-old family owned Château and a cooperative started in the 1930s

Nice green shirt on Rob, eh? Minutes later, during a wine tasting, a fellow wine taster,who'd had a bit too much wine to taste, kindly provided some abstract art to that shirt, in the form of several large purple splotches. Bye bye green shirt 😭


Europe's largest sand dune, The Great Sand Dune of Pyla, is outrageously fun to run down

Did you know that France is loaded with prehistoric caves? Did you know you have to wake up at 05:30 so you can sit on a bench with numbered seats for 3 hours, to be able to get a ticket so you can be one of the 52 people allowed in to see said prehistoric caves?


Of note, we failed on our first attempt, arriving minutes after the last family got their butts there. So we were determined not to fail on our second attempt. We arrived at 06:45, and as our numbers attest to, we were definitely not the first! (For those more organized than us, there are 28 seats available online...2017 has been sold out for quite some time!)

The caves are primarily in the Dordogne region. You can't take pictures in them, but here we are paddling along the river named after the region (or is the region named after the river?)

Here is a small collection of some signage, that as native English speakers, we find curious/entertaining/incoherent....

Next we had the hair brained idea of cutting clear across the whole country so we could visit Verdun. This World War I museum and memorial was sad and overwhelming and well worth the visit. The green mounded and forested area is a former WWI battlefield where there once was a village. The mounds were created by all the shelling, and some of the trenches have been restored.

We're glad we went. We also visited Vimy Ridge (yay Canada) and Dunkirk (now we should see the movie).























Of course in addition to all the history and culture,.....there's been the food!!!

And today, we went on an awesome foodie tour in Paris, which included eating meal worms and crickets

And this amazing picnic at the end.

Included on the tour was "Tommy the cork screw". Rob got to unscrew the wine for our picnic with Tommy's help.




















All the best till next time...
RANAD!

RANAD 2016 NEW ENGLAND BLOG:

Hey there, we're going for a one entry blog entry this summer. Why? We don't know. It's just how we rolled this year.
And where did we roll? Exotic New England!!















First stop: The Berkshires.



Of course any trip to the Berkshires in summer must include a couple of shows at Tanglewood. On the Saturday night, we got ourselves a picnic dinner (although our neighbours' looked much prettier), and had a night of John Williams music.



As a prelude to John Williams coming out to conduct the second half of the show, the heavens decided to provide us with a sound and light show of their own. We had a 45 minute intermission and deluge of rain as well as unbelievable lightening during which those of us on the lawn were required to cram together with those already seated in the shed (covered seating)



Although a tough act to follow, John Williams and the Boston Pops were pretty good too.

Unique to this vacation, RANAD actually was only a full RANAD for two hours in Brookline MA. Aaron only joined us after the Berkshires, and Aviva flew off from Logan airport to start school in Columbus before the next leg of the holiday. Damn schooling, it gets in the way.


We went to our house on Tabor Place in Brookline, MA, and reminisced about the early years of RANADishness.




Over the next couple of days in Boston, we visited with old friends from the hood and took in a bike tour.



Next we headed back to Logan airport to fetch Grandmommy (Eva P) and headed to Cape Cod, where we had never been during the whole time we lived in Boston. We went to beach, beach, beach, and beach for 5 days.



Some more friends joined us there and we all swam across Cliff Pond ...including GrandMommy!!





From Cape Cod, we headed back to Logan Airport to drop Grandmommy off for her return flight and headed up to Ogunquit Maine. For Rob and Diane's 25th anniversary, we all spent the night in a KOA Kabin. Last year our anniversary was spent on "The hippy bus" in NOLA, and the year before it was a shack in rural Norway, so this just seemed fitting.




The next leg of the trip was to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where we scaled it back even further, into our tents.

After 3 days of increasingly challenging hikes for us and our car, we were ready for the final ascent on foot up Mount Washington. Just before that, Rob got himself this t-shirt.

Literally minutes after buying it, a guy screeched to a halt in the parking lot, left his engine running and family waiting, and jumped out of his car saying, "Where'd you get that t-shirt, man?! It's awesome!

For the ascent up Mount Washington we spent two nights in "huts" along the trail. They provided us with bunk beds in communal rooms
and yummy dinners & breakfasts each day (including challah one night).

There we learned about "thru-hikers"; people who take off 4-6 months to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine. Pretty hard core folk: muscled, bushy bearded, and ...pungent. We overhead a story about 2 legendary thru-hikers, one of whom goes by "wild man". Apparently they were both bitten by a rabid skunk this year. Wild Man, who is known to be hard core to the core, refused medical treatment so he could keep hiking. The police became involved and apprehended Wild Man, forcing him to receive rabies treatment. Sorry Wild Man!

Montreal was our last stop. Noah, flew home from here ...NOT from Logan Airport as 3 times to Logan was already plenty for one trip.

Later that day, Rob, Aaron,and Diane hiked up Mount Royal. We came across these Mounted Montreal Police officers, who not only agreed to let us photograph them, but invited us to take a selfie with them. This is NOT photoshopped.



The following day we did a walking foodie tour from China Town up Saint Laurent and ate ourselves silly.

Good thing we didn't need this bowel buddy grenade, which we happened upon later at a drug store.











Here's a small sampling of some of the Americana we saw along the way this year (note the "patriotic popcorn" demo'd by Noah and Aviva).

As always, we love your comments.

Xoxo,
RANAD.

AUSTIN, TEXAS – There really are a lot of food trucks in Austin, and designer coffee, and yoga studios. And…wait for it…more bats!

At the Congress Ave. bridge, thousands of bats come out just at dusk, like in Carlsbad, fanning out over the river. Photo on the left is of people waiting for the "show".

The gray haze in the photo on the right is actually 100's of bats flying out from under the bridge!





Apparently there’s a great music scene, which we weren’t able to partake of, because you have to be over 21 to get into the venues. But more about that when we get to New Orleans.

No trip to Texas would be complete without tacky hat pictures, so here they are.

Here’s a small sampling of the contrasts that are so very Texas.






GALVESTON ISLAND, TX Our next stop was Galveston, Texas. We went to the off shore drilling museum where we learned that apparently oil is a renewable resource with little to no impact on wildlife or the environment. Boy, what a relief!

This is NOT the day we went to the beach....






JENNINGS, LOUISIANA:

So there’s nothing particularly interesting about Jennings, Louisiana…. except for this frog in the window of a restaurant we ate at. ….oh and the awesome Cajun food we had in said restaurant.









NOLA: After Jennings, we moved on to New Orleans, where we were able to enjoy a ton of music…in bars….with our kids, two of whom are still considered minors in the US of A. Why were we able to do this? Because in the State of Louisiana, children of ANY age, can be in a bar and drink alcohol IF they are with their parents! Since A & N were with the two people who pose as their parents, they were able to try local craft beers and awesome Bourbon; no questions asked. And the jazz was so cool too!!

While in NOLA we stayed on the hippie bus. We rented bikes from our quirky landlady and rode all over the city.

One day, we went to one of the 2 Katrina museums – only it was closed for the day :( We asked the gentleman next door for more information, and ended up spending the next hour with him. Why? Turns out he's chief David Montana of the Washitah tribe. He performs at Mardi Gras time and spends all year working on the costumes – doing the bead work and feathers for it as well as running programs to teach youth about this tradition. He did a couple of impromptu chants and songs for us at their centre. It was quite remarkable! For more info, here’s a link to a huffington post article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenny-klein/indian-red-new-orleans-ma_b_5002930.html


CHICAGO: To get back to Chicago, we once again took Amtrak – this time we had enough beds for everyone and the trip was uneventful. En route we got word that our tickets for a Second City show had been cancelled due to a fire at their offices :( So this past Saturday night, we went to the Chicago Dance festival instead.

We saw amazing performances by a wide array of companies, including three pairs of tappers (shown here) who did an ensemble performance of flamenco, Irish river dancing, and black American tap. We also saw a duet from the American Ballet Theatre as well as a fabulous ensemble from the Joffrey Ballet. And all of this was during pretty much non-stop rain at an outdoor venue ….with no raingear!


FLIGHT HOME: At the moment we are on our way home, seated near one of the loudest snorers on the planet….seriously, this guy needs surgery or something!
We look forward to hearing from all of you and seeing many of you in the near future.
XOXO,
RANAD