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!