Le Mont Saint Michel In the weekend we drove up to St Malo, stopping at Dinan for lunch. Dinan is a smallish town on the river Rance.  At it’s center is a walled medieval town with some fine buildings, some as old as 13th century. We had sandwiches, we found some fantastic postcards of classic…

In the mornings I usually walk down to the boulangerie in our street and buy some bread, which is still warm. The lady knows me now and smiles although the conversation is rather limited. “Bonjour madame.” “Un pain cereales s’il vous plait.” “Bonne journée madame.” That sort of thing. I have bread or toast for…

We’ve been in Josselin a few days now. We had an interesting trip from Paris first taking the TGV to Rennes and from there a bus which stopped at a couple of small villages along the way. We’ve been settling in, finding out how things work, unpacking and making ourselves at home. Yesterday we picked…

We very much enjoyed our time here, it’s a very liveable city as well as a stunningly beautiful one. We had a look inside Notre Dame, we read our books beside the Seine, we took a boat tour on the Seine, we followed the footsteps of Inspector Maigret from the Quai des Orfevres where his…

We arrived at Paris  Charles de Gaulle airport from Munich after a reasonably pleasant wait, helped by Lufthansa supplying free coffee, tea and newspapers at the gate. Pauline managed to sleep for a while. The cost of things in Europe became immediately apparent when I bought two bottles of water and was charged 7.4 euros…

The drive north to the border from Liberty was very pleasant, lots of forests and fairly light traffic. We stopped near Plattsburgh for lunch, and then drove until we hit the border about 5 hours after we’d set off. The Canadian border guard was mostly interested in how much money we were bringing with us…

From Niagara, we crossed the border into the USA and headed for Helen and Cas’s house in Liberty NY. The border crossing was rather relaxed compared to what it’s like arriving by plane, there were no forms to fill out and the border guy just looked at our passports, asked us what town we were…

We got here at about 5:30 am – plane to Paris leaves at 10:40 – still it’s a very nice airport. Anyway, from Peterborough we had to drive to a donut shop near Niagara falls as Simon was meeting a friend there and leaving us. So we had an interesting drive through the middle of…

It’s been a while since I posted but we’ve really been quite busy – on our last day in St John’s we had to go to the barber as it was a very nice traditional one, so Simon had his hair cut there. We also visited the Pharmacy museum, I’ve taken a few pictures. Naturally…

We brought our GPS with us, and in Montreal I downloaded the map of the US and Canada, and also the Homer Simpson voice, just for fun. He gives the directions but also puts in extra funny bits like “we’re going on the motorway, woohoo” and “you have reached your destination and can hold your…