Back from our trip in Europe!

Hello all,
We're back from our trip to Europe, and back online again, so we can start blogging again. We had lot's of adventures, saw lot's of countries, drove lot's of miles and are now in South Africa.

So where do I start, at the beginning. The move went not so smooth as we hoped, the packers planned for 3 days with 3 people. We expected 3 days with 5-7 people, and it turned out they should have done that. So the last day ended instead of 5 pm at 12:30 am the next morning! A lot of grumpy men packing because they weren't too happy to work so many overtime, and the last items they didn't even pack and just put in the truck to pack later in the warehouse...I just hope these items ever arrive here in SA. We will see! I believe more than 500 boxed came out of that house on Bennetts Farm, can you imagine the chaos it will be when it arrives here in another 3 weeks??

The girls and us of course, but we had done these countries before, added Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Switserland to their list of visited countries. The first week we stayed in Holland with friends and family. Our friends Marisca and Martijn have a 2 year old boy Justin, who we only had seen as a baby, so it was fun to see them again. We had a wonderful time there, and they even organised a BBQ with the 'jaarclub' and we saw all our old friends with their families, it was great.
Our brother in law turned 50 so we celebrated that with his family, stayed for 2 days at their home and had lots of fun with our nieces Nienke and Sanne!

Then we drove 12 hours to the south of France to stay with Ginster our friend who we met in Thailand. She has a wonderful renovated farm house, close to the border of Spain in the Armagnac region, in Gers. They call it Tuscany from France, and indeed it looks a lot like it, hilly and beautiful scenery with the Pyrenees mountains in the back, so pretty!! We had such a wonderful and relaxing time, till the last evening....JJ got a high fever, we treated her with homeopathic medication, and normally it gets worse before it gets better, so suddenly she had such a high fever, she was hallucinating and had fever cramps in her legs. We really got all worried now, and Ginster called a doctor in town. But she lives in such a small town, we had to drive 20 minutes for the nearest doctor on duty. JJ was throwing up and not getting better, the fever didn't go down and we rushed through these little towns in the middle of the night. We were afraid she might have something serious, like meningitis because the cramps in her legs. But the doctor assured us it was either a virus or salmonella and she would be fine in a day or so. Which indeed was the case, but since we were traveling to Paris the next day we wanted to make sure. So he prescribed her some medication and we had to drive another 20 minutes to the nearest Pharmacy, this happened all late at night and the small towns in Gers were dipped in a deep sleep, just us driving through these small streets in between the fields and fields of corn and wine. A trip we won't forget for a while! Luckily with a good ending!
And the next day we went to Paris. An 8 hour drive and we had a stroll along the Eiffeltower, had some dinner and some wonderful dessert and watched the festive lights on the Eiffeltower, it was a special lighting for only 2 months, the tower was completely blue with white flickering lights, just magical and we could see it from our hotel room, since we booked right almost underneath the Eiffeltower. The next morning we went to see the Notre Dame, since the girls love the movie; the Hunchback of the Notre Dame and they always wanted to see where Quasimodo has his secret hiding space. They were a bit dissapointed that we didn't see Esmerelda and Quasimodo, but we promised we would go back another time and sure we will see them then ;-)
Our last week we spent again in Holland with other friends and family, it was fun to see them all again. The girls hadn't been to Holland for over a year, so everybody were surprised to see how tall they are getting.

It was a great trip, fun to see so many countries in such a small time, hearing all these different languages made the girls confused, and even now here in South Africa we hear many different accents and languages. It will take a while to understand at least where they are coming from.

Pictures I will add later, as soon as we figured out where the cable is to connect to the computer ;-)

I am glad I am back online, please send us an email and keep in touch!
love, Mireille