Au revoir

The car is packed and we have just wandered home from another fabulous evening indulging in French culture and food with our wonderful neighbours Robert, Jinette and our host Brigitte.

I will have to keep this post short. The keyboard is not working for the tears that are falling on it.

Ten and a half weeks in France has been an amazing gift. It is so long that the children say they feel as though we live here. Hettie refers to our actual home in Wellington as ‘our other house’. I’m not sure she can even remember it. Matilda thinks we’ve been here for months.

We’ve seen the seasons change. The trees have gone from sculptural branches to leaf-laden shade givers. The grapevines were mere stumps at the end of April and are now a full, bushy sea of emerald green. The trees that were once just green are dotted with red cherries, orange apricots and in the past few weeks a deepening purple of the season’s first plums. The whole landscape is now starting to take on a tinge of yellow and brown as the pastures dry off in the intense heat.

It’s a cliche but this really has been a dream come true. I voiced my sadness to Jamie the other day that this dream was nearly over. He rightly reminded me that we could find another dream. We’ve never had trouble generating them in the past.

And he’s right. We’ll return home a different family for our experience in Provence. And we have much to look forward to.

Tomorrow we will hop in the car and leave around 6am for a day touring the French Riviera (Cannes, Nice, Monaco) on our way to the sunside Italian village of Bordighera. Then on to Tuscany and Rome. I’m not sure how often we’ll post blogs or videos in Italy, we are certainly planning to pop the laptops away for a bit. But no doubt we’ll have stories and experiences we occasionally want to share so keep checking in.

And now to bed for night 63 in Malaucene. I’ll let our farewell video do the talking.

Au revoir France. Merci beaucoup et a bientôt xxxx