Day 1 in France

We made it!  We are in France.  The Taxi driver came promptly at 6:00 and we were in the airport by 6:30.  Mi Espanol es muy bueno.  Sadly, it turned out we could have slept in an extra hour.  John remembered that our plane was departing at 8 something.  It turned out to be 8:55.  With time to kill we sat down and watched ball dancing/hula hoop dancing on T.V..  Not something we normally would do but we were all very intrigued with it.  We all slept the entire hour of the flight.  When we went to get our rental van John realized there was no way we were going to fit our giant bags in the back so we had to upgrade to a bigger version.  Europeans like to keep things asap.  As small as possible.  They gave John a ticket to get out of the parking garage.  He was a little frustrated when it wouldn't work until he realized that he had pulled an old carnival ticket out of his pocket.  The correct ticket worked like a charm.  Go figure.

We were sad to leave Barcelona.  As we were heading to the airport we drove by a bull fighting arena that we didn't know about.  Also wish we could have seen the Picasso Museum but it didn't work out.  We still have yet to see much of the new area we are in.  After we checked into our place we headed to Carrefour.  Sorry Douglas family.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it's like Super Walmart only I think it's bigger.  The workers often wear roller skates to get across the store.  I was first introduced to it in Brazil.  We again forgot to bring our bags so we had to transfer each item from our basket to our car individually.  Also, the shopping carts were all locked up and had keys hanging on them.  We tooled around with them for a while looking like primates and then finally went inside to customer service to ask how to get them out.  The lady could not or would not speak English  so John pretended to push a shopping cart and she immediately gave us a token.  I used this same technique later on at the pool to ask someone if I could use his chair.  I pointed to the chair, then to myself, then gave him a thumbs up.  He nodded his head enthusiastically.  I am relieved to know that we speak French after all.

When we got back the kids went to the pool at our campground and had a blast on the water slides.  With no supervision and no line, they went down in any style they wanted over and over again.  Trains, backwards, on their stomachs, etc..  Can life get better for a kid?  Then I went back to our bungalow and cooked the first dinner that I've made in 17 days.  It was a little bland since the "rice-a-roni" that we thought we bought was not seasoned at all and we forgot to buy salt.  We did our best to season it with the "ranch dressing" type stuff that we had bought.  It's hard to know what exactly you're buying since there is absolutely nothing with English translations.  I couldn't even read the directions on the "rice-a-roni" package so I just had to wing it.  It's a good thing everyone was hungry because flavorless or not, it all got consumed.

We were going to drive to Antibes or Nice after dinner (we are somewhere in between) but the kids were so exhausted that they just wanted to stay in and play card games.  They did that for a while but are now wrestling and making a raucous in our tiny bungalow.  Good thing I hauled all those games for the last 6000 miles.  It entertained them for about 20 minutes.