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After a week of preparations and a morning of packing the car and tidying the flat, we picked up Piet from the nursery at noon, hoping he would not have contracted the swine flu affecting a member of staff, and left London in the afternoon of Friday 3rd July. We enjoyed our last London traffic jam, on the M25 before the Dartford crossing, and had a smooth drive through Kent to the channel tunnel. We spent the night in a roadside hotel north of Paris, the next morning in a traffic jam around Paris and reached our cottage in the Dordogne department at 7pm on Saturday.
We stayed the next 4 weeks at this cottage. Annigje joined us in the cottage with her family for five nights, while Hanna and family spent over two weeks at a campsite nearby. The cottage was one of four buildings in the village of Lavaur, the others being the church, town hall and festival hall.
Piet enjoyed the tractors passing by with the drivers waving back and the fighter jets flying overhead, but mostly he played around the house, on the terrace, on the massive gravel yard and the small strip of grass bordering the yard. He discovered that gravel is slippery when running, but he did not seem to mind the falls too much.
Piet and his cars
We had taken a small selection of toys with us, including a few vehicles, but quickly we discovered that was not enough. For a few euros we bought four
plastic cars, which proved very
popular. Piet
lined them up front to back on the
on the edge of the outdoor chairs and watch the cars at the front
drop off. He could not get
enough of it and continued doing it at our
holiday cottage, in a
hotel in Germany while travelling and at our
friend's place in Frankfurt.
Emma enjoyed sleeping and drinking and sitting in her bouncy chair. We all went for many short walks in the neighbouring forests, some visits to cute villages, a number of lunches and one tour of a castle.
Selected pictures, some of them taken by eldest niece Thirza, have been posted on facebook:
After the stay in the cottage, we drove off on 'black' Saturday 1st August to travel to Frankfurt in three relaxed days. There we stayed with Kirsten, Heinz and Luca for four days and drove on to Eindhoven to stay with oma Bep.
