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Our first full day on holiday began with a lot of relaxing.

Kas went out for a run (which is what she does to relax) while the girls and me generally mucked about at the apartment, by which I mean that the girls went in the swimming pool, and I joined them after an hour or so. In the morning the pool was in shade, so we could get away with not doing the full suncream experience.

We had lunch at the apartment and then decided to go for a walk down to S’Agaro to the beach called Sant Pol, via a somewhat “scenic” route that Kas had run part of the way around in the morning. Whilst doing this I was trying to sneak in a few crafty geocaches too. It was quite hard going because the weather was warm and the coastal path was very hilly (a bit of a theme for this holiday, as it happens).

We made it round to beach just before the kids had a total meltdown about having to walk outside in nice weather. Once on the beach we grabbed a quick ice cream and then I went for a walk further round the nearest headland trying to find a few more caches, again with mixed (i.e. very little) success. Eventually I think I gave up trying and just went back to join the girls on the beach. When I got there I discovered that the sand was far too lumpy for building sandcastles, and they’d therefore contented themselves with just going swimming the whole time. I went and joined them for a quick plodge in the sea to get cooled down.

In the late afternoon we walked back uphill to the apartment and got cleaned up before walking back down to the same beach to find a beach bar for dinner. We had a range of tapas again, and our considered opinion was that the patatas bravas weren’t as nice as the ones we’d had the previous night, but they were still quite good.

We went back up the hill again quite early (it was still light) but didn’t do any beer drinking or snack eating. Everyone was too tired still, so we made it an early night and just dived into bed. Anyway, we’d got plans for the following day.

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I got up at 9am. It should have been 8:30, but my phone was in the lounge and Izzy didn’t think to come and tell me that the alarm was going off, despite sitting next to it for the duration. Kids, huh ?

Kas was already out running and was expecting we’d be somewhere near ready for going out when she got back. We weren’t, but we were fairly close.

The plan for the day was to drive to Girona for a look around. We weren’t really sure what that would involve other than some buildings and some ice cream. When we set off I’d got it in my mind that Girona was the setting for a William Shakespeare play, but that turned out to be Verona – completely different place. In a different country. Well, two thirds of the letters in the name are the same. It’s an easy mistake, especially if you’re not well versed in the bard.

Anyway, first of all we had to get there, which gave Kas a bit of a challenge because it was her first attempt at driving the Volvo. Because we didn’t know whereabouts in Girona we were trying to get to, we were unable to use Cynthia the SatNav to help. A recipe for potential disaster, but which thankfully didn’t come to pass until we were trying to get home again.

We parked up by some medieval walls on the east side of the city centre (it’s not a very big place) and decided to take a walk around in a clockwise direction. You can walk most of the way around the walls. Calling them “medieval” is a bit of a con, on the basis that they have had to be significantly upgraded and repaired to make them walkable, but it’s been done fairly tastefully and the overall effect is quite dramatic. In several places the walls are really rather high.

It was kind of a warm day, and we quickly found that the heat was getting the better of us all. The walls were quite exposed to the sunshine and the ambient air temperature was rather high.

After most of an hour we arrived at the heart of Girona’s medieval centre, the cathedral. The outside of it seems a little stark and plain when you’re used to the Gothic excesses of Northern Europe and the UK, and the fact that it isn’t symmetrical adds to a sense that it isn’t very cathedral-like (in my mind, anyway).

Before going inside we decided to grab a sandwich and a drink at a cafe in the square at the foot of the main steps. This is a location that you would normally describe as “Tommy Tourist Central”, but to be honest the prices weren’t too bad, and whilst there were plenty of passers by in the square they were generally, well, passing by rather than trying to get into this cafe. So it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience.

The cathedral itself offers a self-guided talkie-tour. Izzy insisted on getting one of the handsets to listen in, but then promptly handed it to someone else and didn’t pay any attention to it. The interior of the cathedral is large and church-ish. The experience was “improved” by the presence of someone playing a continuous scale of notes on the organ starting very high and gradually descending to a tone and volume that made you wish that the toilets were a little closer.

The cathedral also offers some cloisters, which are worth a walk around. No, not a Belgian tennis player. That’s Clijsters, you numpty. It’s an enclosed walkway forming a quadrangle and often attached to the warmer south side of a cathedral, and indicating a former use as a monastery. The cloisters allowed the monks to walk about outside without being disturbed by the riff-raff outside of the monastic life. Medieval monks took their monking pretty seriously.

Within a hundred metres or so of the cathedral stands the Collegiate Church of Sant Feliu, which is another large and entirely unsymmetrical church. It is also quite nice inside, although that might just have been because of the lack of bladder-bursting organ music.

Just down from here is a bridge over the River Onyar, from where one can take artistic photos of the pretty coloured buildings along the east bank.

From here we grabbed an ice cream and walked through the old town to find the far end of the medieval walls.

The route back to the car from there was all uphill, and therefore quite unwelcome. What was also unwelcome was my total inability to locate any of the caches I attempted on the walk. I eventually threw a hissy fit and gave up.

We left Girona at about 3:30pm and drove home, via the supermarket. When we arrived home the kids were in the pool before anyone could say Jack Robinson. Kas and I politely declined.

We made it “sausage and salad” night for tea and then sat down with Izzy to make a day-by-day plan for the rest of the holiday. We nearly stuck to it.

On that same evening I also started to make notes on the laptop for these blog posts, and I began reading one of the two Iain M. Banks books I’d taken with me – The Hydrogen Sonata.

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For our fourth day we decided to go and see what was on offer in the big city. Well, we sort of knew what was on offer, so on this day we decided to go and buy a bit of it.

We left home at around 10:15 after Kas had been for her run. The drive into Barcelona was pretty uneventful and Cynthia did a grand job of taking us along the main coastal road rather than through the middle of town. We parked up in a massive car park on the side of Montjuïc. I then decided I didn’t like where I’d parked, so I did another lap of the car park and parked somewhere I thought more acceptable. The problem was caused by the fact that it wasn’t obvious whether you were supposed to pay to park or not.

Anyway, back at the plot, on the top of Montjuïc there’s a castle which has been kept in pretty good order and which was surprisingly cheap to get into. We had a good old walk around the inside, taking lots of photos of both the castle and the views over the city. Of the three things I expected to be able to see from a high vantage point in Barcelona ( the Camp Nou, the Sagrada Familia and the Olympic Stadium) we only managed to spot one from up here. The Camp Nou was hidden in buildings and we didn’t know which direction it was in, and the Olympic Stadium is at the foot of the mountain hidden behind a load of tees. The Sagrada Familia stands out a mile from its surroundings. I think the surrounding buildings are being deliberately kept at a low height so that the cathedral stands out more.

After a while we found ourselves in an inner courtyard with what looked like a load of tea towels hanging out to dry. Turns out they are full of profound questions. The only question we had at this point was “is there a cafe in here?” and we found a member of staff to answer it for us. “No”, she said. “But there’s some vending machines in room 10 that contain cold drinks.” Well that’ll do us, because we had sandwiches and crisps in the backpack anyway.

Back outside after lunch we went for a walk around the path on the outside of the walls, partly for more views and partly to do a few geocaches dotted along the way. Some of these ones were actually there.

After walking all the way round we took the cable car down to the bottom (lazy, I know, but we’d have to come back up again at some point, and it’s part of the experience, innit ?

From the bottom of the cable car it’s about a third of a mile walk along flat ground to get to the Olympic Stadium. They very nicely keep this open at one end so you can enter on the mezzanine level and get some good photos around the stadium. There’s also a souvenir shop and a cafe inside. Excellent. Time for an ice cream then.

From the stadium we dropped down a level onto the big open spaces they built for the Olympics. There were a few more caches down there as well as a load of extra Olympic venues that were closed.

By the time we’d done all this it was getting a bit late, so we headed off home, via a drinks stop at the same service station we’d used on Saturday.

When we got home we decided to go out for dinner again and walked down into Sant Feliu, where we found a rather average pizza place after having wandered most of the town centre looking for something other than the rather samey tapas bars that the town centre is filled with.

The walk back up the hill was quite slow after a long day, and once we got home Kas and Izzy went straight to bed while Ami and me sat up for a while reading.

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Today was one of the “don’t go anywhere” days, except that only really meant not going anywhere in the car. We were still allowed to go out so long as we walked there.

We had a lazy morning, with Kas going for her normal run and the kids mucking about in the pool.

On the day-planner we’d made on Monday night (see Girona) we’d put down “kayaking” for today, so we had a bit of exploring to do.

It was easy enough to find the phone number of the kayaking place on Sant Pol beach and they confirmed we could just walk up and take a couple of kayaks out. They had a formal trip leaving at 2pm but they thought that might be a bit much with the kids as the formal trips follow a set route and go at a certain pace.

OK, we thought, so we’ll just walk down for about 1:30 and see what’s what.

The kayaks were great big plastic things with seating for two. We split the weight approximately halfway by getting Kas and Ami to take one kayak and me and Izzy to take the other. This meant my boat was somewhat lower in the water at the back than at the front, but otherwise it was quite a pleasant sensation. Izzy was a very keen paddler but not particularly effective, so I was basically driving our boat on my own. Kas and Ami were a little more balanced.

The water on the sea was a bit choppy and was worse the further away from the cliffs, in fact the centre of the bay was quite bumpy, so we hugged the coastline quite closely for most of the time. First of all we paddled around the south side of the bay where all the interesting little bays were, and had great time paddling in and out of quite small but calm inlets. After this we paddled all the way across the bay to the north shore, which was somewhat less interesting. By this time we’d been out for 80 minutes of our 120 minute rental, but decided our arms were aching enough to stop, so we had a final paddle across the bay into the middle and tried to get up to “ramming speed” so we could get the kayaks up onto the beach quite well before trying to get out. Thankfully there was an attendant to help drag us up anyway.

It was still quite early in the afternoon so we decided to stay on the beach for a while, and this is where I made my biggest error of the holiday. I assumed the late afternoon sun wouldn’t be strong enough to burn me, so while the kids were playing in the water I took my shirt off and lay on the beach for a bit. When I got home I was bright red and itching all over. The itching stayed with me for the rest of the holiday. Oh, when will I learn ? Sunshine and me don’t mix well.

It was sausage and salad night again for tea, but sadly the accompanying beer did nothing to take away the itchiness.

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Today was a day in which the ladies of the house would be posting a blog page called “Not a Lot Happened”, or something similar to that. I had it pencilled in as a caching day, so I was far from inactive. Other things I was “far from” for periods of the day included “comfortable”, “home” and “enthusiastic”, although apart from “comfortable” none of the others lasted the whole day. I was mainly uncomfortable as a result of getting myself sunburned the previous afternoon. I’m not a clever bunny sometimes.

The day’s exploits began with Kas dropping me off on the far side of Santa Cristina, at some random junction with an old railway line that’s been converted into a biking trail and has subsequently been littered with lots of tupperware, spaced at approximately 180m intervals. Ideal. I was carrying a large quantity of beverages and some sandwiches in my bag as well as spare caches, pens and camera, so I was feeling a bit weighed down, and the bag was chafing against my hurty back, so I was a bit of a miserable bunny when I set off, but not miserable enough to stay at home and mope. The caching was quite slow going, partly because of the heat and partly because they were proving more difficult to find than the listed difficulty (in my opinion). My route took me along the old railway into Santa Cristina town (with a short diversion up a hill for three very creative caches). At one of these (just on the edge of town) I got spotted by the CO’s teenage daughter and she came outside to say hello and see if I needed any help. I didn’t, but it’s always nice to meet up with people.

As I passed through the town the first time I stopped to buy spare batteries. I think the rechargeable in the Garmin is starting to lose its oomph, especially when being used in bright light. There was a local newsagent that stocked the requisite. From here I headed around the south of the town (and the other side of the motorway) through a golf course and some new housing before ending up on the south side of Santa Cristina again. There was another series running along the southern edge of town, which proved to be good fun, before I walked back to the northern side to join the old railway line again. By this time I’d been out for 6 hours or so and had drunk plenty but not eaten much. I tend not to get hungry in hot weather. I’d found time for an ice cream though. Eventually I got back to the north-east corner of town, from where the railway line cut a sharp southwards turn towards Sant Feliu.

Ami had mentioned she might like to walk the final couple of miles into town with me, so I called Kas and they arranged to meet me at a little parking spot at 4pm, from where Ami and me would have about an hour’s walk to get home. She bought more drinks, which were very welcome.

The walk in was slower than expected, with a few more tricky ones and a couple of missing ones. We also overshot in an effort to get to the very end of the series, and then had over half a mile (mainly uphill) to get back to the apartment again.

By the time I got home it was well past 6pm and I was thoroughly exhausted. I’d found 75 caches in total, which is not a bad haul, but in UK conditions I might have expected to that many in two hours fewer. Nevertheless, it was a new overseas personal best for me, and I was (eventually) happy about it, especially once the multiple pastas and multiple beers we had for tea had settled in properly. The beer-based “rehydration” continued for some time, although I was alternating with non-beer too, just to make sure I got some benefit from all the drinking. The sunset was rather nice too.

I logged 75 geocache finds on the day. They were :

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The holiday plan said today was supposed to be “Barcelona – Gaudi”, meaning that we were going to attempt to go into Barcelona and have a look at some of Gaudi’s more obvious contributions to the city.

Kas decided to duck out of running in favour of having a rest day, so we managed to get up fairly early and head off for the big city at 9:20. Kas took the wheel and we gave Cynthia the job of finding us a car park. She failed, mainly due to an utter confusion of information on the map once you get into town.

We eventually found a car park close to where we wanted to be, and Kas very expertly managed to get into a parking space without hitting anything. Genuinely, that was a good achievement, and it became a running theme for the day.

The first place that we wanted to be was the totally whacky Sagrada Família. We were about a block away so we legged it around, expecting to have to join a queue to buy some tickets. The place is still being built, and it’s being funded by the entrance money they charge for having a look around. One wonders whether the fees for entrance have been steadily increasing as further parts of the building are completed. Anyway, from the outside it looks like a massive building site with some quite nice looking bits of stonework in fantastic design.

That proved to be all we could manage there on this day though. They limit the number of tickets per day, and when we arrived at 10:30 am on a midweek day they had already sold out until the end of the day. No more tickets, nada, sorry. I guess you have to pre-book online. Still, we snapped a few nice pictures before buying a very over-priced drink and getting back in the car.

Our second planned stop proved to be equally frustrating. Cynthia did a grand job of negotiating our way through the city up to Park Güell, which promised a plethora of Gaudi-related goodies. Parking proved to be even more of a nightmare than the Sagrada Familia. There’s a big bus park but otherwise you’re stuck with housing estates and an abandoned and unpaved void between tower blocks that has very limited access and lots of really precipitous slopes. Eventually, after much farting about, we found a small car park near some shops in the middle of a hairpin bend going up into the hills. It was probably half a mile to walk back down, but at least the park was paved and relatively easy to get into. More of that later.

Park Güell also has a limit on the number of tickets they are prepared to sell for the inner sanctum. And they’d sold out for the day. This was becoming a theme. We decided to go for a walk around the free part and made a lunch break our first order of business once we got inside. The parks themselves are still really nice. It would have been nice to go into the paying area but we decided whilst walking around that we probably weren’t keen enough to come back on a different day just to do that.

After lunch beneath the walkways we walked all the way up to one of the upper levels, passing a couple of geocaches on the way, and then descended to the far end of the park before walking back along the road past the main entrance to the paying area. It was more than enough to get the general feel of the place, I think. If you were going to pay to get in, you’d probably spend all day there. We contented ourselves with about 3 hours though.

When we got back the car parked in the middle of the hairpin bend we were faced with the biggest driving challenge of the holiday so far. We’d squeezed into a space that had a line of cars in front, and it was quite easy to get in, but when we came back a couple of cars had formed another line in front of us that was somewhat closer. We spent a little while pondering and very keenly all jumped in the car assuming that the parking sensors could get us out safely before deciding that wasn’t going to work. The parking sensors go completely ape when you’re half a metre away, and the exit route was so tight that we couldn’t afford to lose a half a metre. So Kas jumped out and acted as a somewhat more human parking sensor by showing me exactly how far away I was from everything. It took about 5 attempts at going backwards and forwards on full lock before getting the car out of the space, but I did get it out, and I didn’t at any point hit anything else. I was fairly proud of our achievement. I say “our” achievement, because there is absolutely no way I’d have got out of the space without Kas’s help.

So up to this point the day had been a bit of a disappointment. However it was still only mid-afternoon, so we thought we’d have time for one more thing before going home. We read that there are quite a few things to do up on Tibidabo so we thought we’d go for a look. When we got there it appeared to be closed. It wasn’t, but it was very quiet. It was the day after the terrorist attack on La Rambla and we wondered whether people had just decided to have a day at home instead. There were quite a few armed police around, including at the top of the road leading up the mountain.

We checked out the form for the fun park and decided it was probably good enough for a whole day later in the holiday, which left us with the opportunity to go up the Torre de Collserola. At least, once we’d found the entrance……

This was also very quiet, but that gave the advantage that we had the place more or less to ourselves. I think there were no more than two other paying punters and two staff on the viewing level the whole time we were there. The view from up there really is quite spectacular. You can see pretty much the whole of the city from the viewing level (including the Camp Nou, the Sagrada Família and the Olympic Stadium all at the same time). They also have little plaques at various points indicating the distance and direction to other major cities in the world.

By the time we’d finished up the tower it was past 5 pm, so we decided to drive home (through the Friday night rush hour) and go out for dinner in Sant Feliu. The drive home was uneventful and we had a quick shower break before walking down to the same restaurant we’d been to on the night we arrived. It was the best place we’d been so far, and it was nice again.

While we were getting ready, a massive cruise liner drifted by. On the sea, obviously…….

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This day was our mid-point, not that we celebrated the event in any particular way other than figuring out how to use the washing machine at the apartments.

Kas went for a run, as ever.

The daily planner said we were having a day of not travelling far. We’d checked out a few local activity places and we decided to go for Parc Aventura just on the outskirts of Sant Feliu. It’s one of those places where you have to make your way across various assault-course things like tight-ropes, rope bridges and zip wires whilst being fastened to an overhead rope. However, unlike ones we’ve been to near home, this one is in the middle of some beautiful wooded hillsides, and with fantastic views back down over the town.

Parc Aventura has three or four different courses you can go on that have varying levels of difficulty. Kas, Izzy and Ami decided they were going round while I took the photos. They did the easiest route and then stepped up to the second easiest. Ami was going so quickly that she had time to step up to the third level too, which was good because it actually challenged her enough to have a scared moment.

When we’d finished all of this it was definitely ice cream o’clock. We ended up going all the way down into the sea front at Sant Feliu to find one. Thankfully we’d chosen to go on foot, which allowed me to swap my ice cream for beer.

For dinner we had a fairly simple affair of chicken in various forms accompanied by salads (in the kids’ case, you have to allow for ketchup being classed as a salad).

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Every holiday has a day like this. The one where we don’t do anything of note.

The kids spent most of this one in the pool, while Kas went for a morning run and I spent much of the day doing the washing and staying out of the sun.

We had thought about going to the beach in the afternoon but then the girls decided not to bother, so we didn’t go.

In the evening we walked into Sant Feliu and found a nice cafe gastro-bar place which did excellent food and rather nice beer too.

While we were walking back up the hill to home we stopped in a bar to watch a bit of the Barcelona vs. Real Betis game on telly, but it was a bit dull and we’d missed the only two goals. On Saturday evening we’d toyed with the idea of buying tickets to go and see the match, but by the time we got onto the website it was going to cost about €65 a ticket to go, so we decided not to bother.

Such is life.

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Today was the planned day for a bit of monk-on-a-mountain action.

It started (as ever) with Kas going for a run. She went early, which meant we were able to leave the apartment just after 9 am, albeit that we hadn’t had any breakfast.

We attended to the lack of breakfast situation by stopping at a random motorway service station. This also allowed us to fill up the trusty Volvo with some motion lotion.

Our target for the day was the monastery at Montserrat. We got there just before midday (we’d spent at least an hour having breakfast) and managed to find a parking spot quite easily, although at some distance away from the actual monastery. Meh! Walking is good for you.

Our first activity was to wander around some of the buildings trying to find a few caches and soak a few rays.

We gave up for a late lunch break at about 2 pm and had lunch in the onsite cafe. The food was actually quite good, which surprised me.

After lunch we adventured our way up the Funicular de Sant Joan for a walk around the top of the mountain. It was a warm day, so we’d already concluded we weren’t going to attempt any long stretches of walking, but up the top here we were able to trudge our way along a relatively flat path to visit a couple of little chapels. At one point, I had the direction arrow pointing to a cache but couldn’t see any way of getting there. At another point, we walked along a bit of path cut into an overhanging cliff and of a sufficiently small size that at least one of us couldn’t walk straight. And finally, there was one further cache at the top of what could be described as a rock staircase going upwards, if you were being generous. If not, then it would be better described as a bit rough. It was rough enough that Izzy didn’t fancy it, so Ami and I went over while Kas stayed with Izzy. There were some pretty spectacular views from up there though.

When we came back down to the bottom it was definitely time for an ice cream, which was consumed whilst sitting outside in the shade. After this Kas escorted the girls for the obligatory trip around the shop while I dashed off to find another cache that was some way below the incoming rack railway line.

By this time it was getting on a bit, so we did one final cache and photo stop at a rock outcrop near where we’d arrived in the morning, and then made our way down the road to the rather distant car park.

The drive back to Sant Feliu was duller than a dull thing. When we got there we made a quick stop to buy snacks and some things for breakfast before going back home to consume most of those snacks with some cold beer, whilst typing up the handful of caching logs that were due. It had been quite a long day.

While I had the PC out, I decided to pre-book some tickets to go around the Sagrada Familia. We decided we had time to go there in between leaving the apartment and needing to be at the airport on the day we were going home.

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Over the previous couple of days it had become more obvious that I was going to have to deal with a cracked tooth I’d picked up somewhere in the previous couple of weeks. I think a bit more had come off it, and it was pretty much at the point where it was grating really badly against my tongue. Something had to be done. Anyway, it wouldn’t be a proper holiday for us without at least one of us needing to see a doctor, dentist, or other medical practitioner. Normally that’s me, but occasionally it’s someone else.

So I googled for dentists nearby and phoned one first thing in the morning to find out the sketch. The sketch was that they could see me at 10:30. The dentist’s surgery was down on the harbour at Sant Feliu and it was very nice inside, albeit well hidden behind a very non-medical looking door to what I think was a block of apartments. The dentist decided she needed to hack out a bit of tooth and then fill it. The whole thing was done in half an hour and it cost me less than it would to have the same procedure done at home. In fact, it was so little that it was below the excess on the insurance policy, so I just paid it and wandered off without waiting for much in the way of documentary evidence. Because the plan for today said “Waterpark” I’d also scouted their website first thing. The Waterpark did good discounts on entry for people well organised enough to book online a day in advance, so I duly did that and then swapped “Waterpark” and “dad’s going caching” around on the day planner. Caching day then!

On the radar for this day was a long walk through woodlands up to a local viewpoint called Pedralta (“High Rock”) and then an equally long walk back down into Sant Feliu. Kas dropped me off at the end of a new and quite plush looking housing estate on the west side of town, through the back of the golf course I’d crossed on my previous caching trip ( see Santa Cristina ). In fact, it probably dumbs the place down rather to refer to it as a housing estate. I’m going to change my mind and go for “collection of substantial residential properties” – seriously, I don’t think they have a lot of poverty in the area. What they did have though was a lot of biting insects. Little scumbags. I got bitten twice while I was still switching the GPS on and finding a pen.

My walk took me through forested land in a downwards and then very steeply upwards direction, heading vaguely south and east. The caches were fairly close together for most of the way but they lacked hints and a few were well buried, so progress was a little slow. It was also very warm and the trees took away what little breeze there might have been. You get the picture. I was getting hot. Just as well I had an earth-shattering quantity of cold drinks in my bag then. The objective of all this uphill walking was the Pedralta, which, according to wikipedia, used to be the largest rocking stone in Europe. What there is up there is a little chapel, a big rock balancing precariously on a somewhat smaller one, and a big plateau with a viewpoint, from which you can see most of the surrounding area. It was a pretty decent view from up there.

Where the walk up had been all through forests and on rough paths, the route down followed a tarmac road, which meant that the walking became somewhat easier. The caches were a little easier to find too. I made pretty good progress back down the hill and soon found myself by the side of the new dual carriageway running round the western side of Sant Feliu. From here I followed cycle paths and wide footpaths around to the harbour (collecting more caches as I went). I eventually found myself at the old monastery in town (couldn’t find the cache there) and then found my way to the beach, where I found another cache and a place to buy ice cream.

There were two more caches at “our” end of the harbour that I grabbed on the way past and then walked back up the hill to rejoin the girls. The kids had decided they were having another “can’t be bothered” day, so the three of them had been at the apartment the whole time.

Tea for the evening consisted of a very welcome combination of pastas, sauces and beers. By the end of the day I’d found 43 caches. They were :

We’d written on the holiday plan for this week that we’d do a waterpark or similar during this week. The closest was Aquadiver in Platja D-Aro. It turned out to be cheaper to pre-book online to get one of their advance-purchase family deals, so we booked tickets the previous day and went there on this day.

The place was easy to find except for us missing the motorway junction on the first pass and having to drive a few miles in the wrong direction and then coming back again.

When we did get there the parking was a bit dodgy, but this seems to be endemic in Catalonia so there was nothing particularly surprising about it.

Entry via pre-paid tickets downloaded to the phone was easier than Easy Jack McEasy, so we avoided some quite long queues and decided to make a base camp under the trees and chuck our valuables into one of the lockers.

I have to say I wasn’t personally looking forward to this day as it’s something I didn’t think I’d really enjoy, but once we got into it a little bit it turned out to be one of my favourite days of the holiday.

We started off in the big wave pool (but didn’t stay long) and then headed to the big rubber-dinghy-slidey-thingy (name unknown). We went on doublers, which was a laugh except that Izzy came with me, so we weren’t exactly level in the water. It was a big slide though, so I’m not sure imbalance in the water was a big issue.

After this we moved up to the “business” end of the park, where there were some rather larger looking slides and rides. The queues were a bit variable all day, and after making the initial mistake of joining a long queue for something we fancied, we then started just going for the relatively short queues. This proved to be a much better option, although it did mean we went on the “kamikaze” quite a lot.

We took a lunch break at one point and then an afternoon ice cream break too, and ended up staying until all the rides had shut at about 6.45pm.

It was such a good day that I can’t remember what we did for dinner. Probably not very much.

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We had a fairly slow morning before taking a leisurely drive towards Barcelona for our planned day out at Tibidabo.

We got there at around 11 am and then bought some tickets and went for a drink before attempting anything else.

After drinks, we went for a wander around the big church up there ( the Sagrat Cor ). The view from the top was quite impressive. Once down again we spent a frustrating few minutes searching for a fake padlock on a proverbial fence covered in padlocks. There was one that supposedly was a geocache. That’s a few minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.

After the church, we wandered around the upper levels of the park for a while before grabbing a seat and eating our lunch. We’d taken sandwiches with us, but the kids didn’t want to be limited just by that, so we found a restaurant where you were allowed to eat your own stuff too, and then we supplemented our apparently inadequate rations with some cold drinks and chips. Chips fix most things.

The lower levels at Tibidabo, below the church, are where all the rides are. The rides at Tibidabo were a bit variable, to be honest. None of them was very long and all bar a couple were a bit boring. I guess the park is designed for somewhat younger children. The Red Mountain rollercoaster and the log flume were OK but the rest of it was a bit dull, in my opinion, and because there were also some long queues for some of the rides it felt a bit like a waste of money. We did our best to eek it out for a while and had several goes on both the rollercoaster and the log flume before giving up and getting ice cream.

After this, we spent a little time taking in the view of the city from the top of the hill.

We drove back home at about 5 pm, which put us into the evening rush hour again.

Once at home we got changed quickly and walked halfway down the hill to the Guixols Cafe to have some beer and burgers. It was really rather good.

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Today was a day of preparing ourselves for the inevitable end of the holiday and the looming reality that we’d have to leave the warm weather and the seaside behind.

The strain of it was all so much that we ended up doing nothing of any note. We offered the girls he option of a trip down to the beach, but neither of them could raise the energy and they were perfectly happy to stay at the apartment and play with their two new friends, both of whom were called Victoria.

I spent most of the day finishing off the book I’d started reading before mustering the energy to walk to the top of the hill to fetch a cache that had been winking at me all holiday. The view from the top was impressive, but possibly not good enough to offset the pain incurred when I brushed against a cactus and got covered in cactus barbs. I spent a chunk of the afternoon sitting very still while Kas pulled bits of cactus out of me with some tweezers, and I decided not to bother with attempting to recover either the shirt or the trousers. Both were riddled with barbs and I couldn’t be bothered to try to get them out.

In between all this, the four of us spent bits of time packing things away into our suitcases, as we had a fairly early start planned for the morning and we couldn’t afford much time for packing then.

By late afternoon we’d had enough, so we got cleaned up and took one final walk down to the seafront in Sant Feliu and revisited our favourite restaurant so far – called Meraki. It was excellent again.

The walk back up the hill would be our final time, and there was a lot of slightly miserable joking about everything being the “final” time. I certainly won’t miss that hill though.

We got tucked up in bed fairly early, as we’d got a long day in front of us.

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Today was the day for going home. Boo. hiss, and grumpetty-grump, and all that. Our two weeks by the seaside had been rendered down into a large collection of memories and photos, and a requirement to make one final journey in the trusty Volvo.

We didn’t quite go straight home though. We got a little side-tracked on the way to the airport.

A week and a bit previously, when we’d tried to do our “Gaudí” day (see Not the Full Gaudi/), we’d been unable to get into the Sagrada Familia as a result of us not having thought to book tickets in advance. So we decided it would be a good thing to do on the way home, as we were being chucked out of the apartment at 10 am but weren’t flying home until 5 pm.

We had an 11 am appointment at said massive, half-built church, but we were all ready to go quite early, so we loaded up the car a little after 8 am and carried the last sack of rubbish down the hill whilst stalking the carrier in the car. We’d done most of the rubbish clearance the previous night, on the way down to the restaurant.

We stopped for some breakfast at the place we’d stopped on our day of arrival (only on the other side of the road). This allowed me to disappear under a bridge to find a lurking geocache. Might as well. We were parked within 30 yards of it.

When we arrived in Barcelona it was relatively easy to find the Sagrada Familia itself, but a little more time consuming to find a car park. What we eventually found was an underground one beneath an apartment block which was available for public parking as well as residents. It was a bit tight getting in though. I got Kas to get out and confirm I wasn’t about to scrape the car on anything, and I wasn’t looking forward to having to get back out again.

We walked a block or so down to the Sagrada Familia and discovered that there was no option to get in earlier than our tickets said, so we were left with three-quarters of an hour or so to waste. We used it wisely by checking out some touristy artwork and finding a couple of caches in the park outside.

We’d booked the self-guided tour with no tower-climbing, which meant we were free to pootle around at our own speed, reading the displays and admiring the architecture as we went. It really is a stunning building, and I’m sure it will be great when it’s finished. It’s weird to look at in some areas because some bits of it have been there so long that the rocks are quite significantly weathered, and these sit right next to chunks of rock that look like they were placed yesterday. The thing is constantly growing and developing too. It was considerably bigger and more complete than the picture I had in my mind from doing basic research in tour guides and on Wikipedia. The inside is particularly spectacular. OK, so I know that Gaudi’s fairly unique style is not appreciated by a lot of more traditionalist worshippers or students of ecclesiastical architecture, but my personal view is that if you’re going to believe in paying homage to an omnipresent super-being, this would be a pretty good place to be doing it. I can’t understand why people would rave over the massively detailed decoration on cathedrals in Milan, Rouen or Cologne and then lambast this one for being a bit over the top. Maybe I’m biased on the basis that it’s also a bit of a geological sensation, and I find that interesting. I find it inspiring the way that Gaudí wanted to use differing stones, as well as glasses, woods, coloured tiles and lights to impress the eye with a cascade of colour throughout the structure. And it is certainly unique. I have never seen another church that looks even remotely like this one.

Having had our fill of Sagrada Familia, we had a brief break to buy souvenirs and make some enormous bubbles before making our way to the airport, via a refuelling stop. We were hopelessly early for our flight but once we’d left the Sagrada Familia we’d all pretty much decided that the holiday was over, and it was time to go sit somewhere peaceful whilst waiting for an aeroplane.

We had a rather busy lunch of pizzas and pastas in the “pre-passport” zone before plodding through to our gate and sitting on the relevant airport spur watching planes going in and out.

There were a couple of huge ones parked up beneath us when we got there.

We also saw the King of Spain (no, not the King of Spin) land for his walk around central Barcelona with tens of thousands of others in memory of the people who’d lost their lives in the previous week’s terrorist attack on La Rambla.

Our flight home was nicely on time, but sadly Luton Airport wasn’t. It took flippin’ ages to get through, mainly because of a massive bottleneck in passport control.

The car was where we left it, but there was a bit of early grumping when we discovered one of the brakes had seized a bit and was making nasty clunking noises until the first time I really push the pedal hard. I suppose the car had been standing there for 15 days.

The house was pretty much where we’d left it, and Izzy and me made haste with the unloading while Kas and Ami very kindly went out to fetch curry and wine. It had been a long but very rewarding holiday, with many things achieved, including a bit of family bonding.

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Up and Atom, Fallout Boy!

So the day arrived of the main event. We had travelled over specifically to attend the Brugse Beer VII event. Funnily enough, the seventh iteration of an annual event in Bruges. However it’s not named after beer. It’s named after a bear. What? Well it’s Flemish here, so beer is bear not beer, because beer is bier, not beer. The bear is the symbol of the city of Bruges. And beer is also a symbol of Bruges too, but not the symbol of Bruges. That’s a bear, which is a beer if you’re Flemish. I’m getting confused now. Let’s move on.

Event day started with breakfast at our hotel. Technically, I suppose it started with getting out of bed and getting dressed, but you know what I mean. The hotel breakfast was a fairly modest affair of the continental variety, including cheeses, cooked meats, bread and a few cereals, but it was also of the “unlimited” kind, so Ami did her best to eat them out of mini pains-au-chocolate while I had a crack at some bread rolls with pâté and then croissants with chocolate flavoured honey. Nice! It felt a bit expensive at €12 a pop, but then I realised I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and I wasn’t going to get a filling breakfast for both of us anywhere else for less than €24, so fair enough. It had the advantage of not needing to go out, anyway.

One-Day Eventing

From here we headed off to the event. I took the car up and we arrived plenty early at about 9 am, although the car park was already three-quarters full. I think they were doing a welcome breakfast, so obviously a few people turned up early enough for that. They were only just getting the event stalls set up when we arrived.

We picked up our goody bags and realised that we’d actually just got a bunch of tickets for going elsewhere. One-stop was to get a GPX file downloaded onto my GPS that contained all the new caches they were releasing for the event. These were also printed in the event book, of which we obtained two copies in “Engels, dank u wel.”

From here we wandered through the event site finding the locations of a few of the lab caches and the cafe. We had a quick nosey around the various geocoin shops. The event was being held at the very nice looking VIVES Hogeschool Campus in Bruges, which was about a kilometre from our hotel. The weather was rather warmer than the previous day, and I was glad I’d picked up my hat.

Lab O’Clock

The lab caches were quite good fun, partly because of the variety and partly because the physical ones were quite creative. One involved completing a circuit on one of several variations of mad cycles, with either eccentric wheels or dodgy pedal configurations. Another involved the proverbial curly-wire-with-electrical-contacts game. Yet another involved finding the one and only stuffed bear in a heap of 500 or so stuffed toys. A couple of others involved solving or doing things printed in the event book, so we completed those whilst sitting down mid-morning with a refreshing drink. On the day we managed to obtain the answers to 13 of the 19 they’d set. I won’t say we “solved” 13, let’s just say that we acquired 13 answers by various means. Norfolk12 would have been proud. Ami enjoyed the daft bikes though.

After we’d had our drink we schmoozed a bit further and met up with a family from our Beds, Bucks and Herts area who were attending the same event. We also bumped into a bunch of cachers from Essex that we’d met the previous day in Adinkerke, and a Flemish couple we’d also met in Adinkerke, and the German guy who’d been biking around the same series we drove around the previous afternoon. Small world, innit?

Is It Lunchtime Yet?

At some point I noticed also that the GPX file hadn’t downloaded correctly onto my Garmin, so we went back for another go, and this second time they managed to get it sorted.

We’d also spent quite a while walking up and down the car park collecting trackable numbers. Might as well. There are some challenge caches that require you to have logged a certain number. Otherwise I’m not really bothered, especially when the CO has just put a list of codes in the back window of their car. It’s just as well there’s LogThemAll to help out with bulk logging too, otherwise I just wouldn’t have the patience.

Back at the plot, it had worked its way around to being lunchtime. We grabbed the traditional Belgian snack of frietjes met mayonnaise from the lard wagon and sat on the grass. The lard wagon in question was staffed by members of a local motorcycle gang, apparently. They did good chips.

Let’s All Go on a Tupperware Hunt

After lunch, we decided it was time to break free from the event and do a bit of caching. We went for a walk around to the north of the event site, collecting about 7-8 caches on the way, and then noticed that a lot of the new caches for the event were in the Sint Michiels district, just north of our hotel. We’d both had enough of walking the previous day so we decided to drive around Sint Michiels collecting some of the caches. It was quite easy-going. Basically, every time we saw a bunch of people standing in the street, we stopped and signed the log. I think we did about 13 that way.

A Night on the Town

By the time we’d done a few of those it was getting quite late and we had an appointment up in the old town to find the information for another of the Lab Caches, so we got ourselves cleaned up and poshed up (a bit) and caught a bus “up the toon”. We completely failed to register the necessary information about buses back again, but more of that later.

There was general apathy about what to do for dinner and we’d agreed we weren’t doing any more caching. We’d been at it hammer and tongs for most of two full days. So we wandered around a bit and I took a few photos in the still-lovely evening sunshine. We ended up in another restaurant on Waalplein, just over from where we’d eaten the previous night. It was a fairly basic affair. Basic meant a little cheaper though, so I wasn’t bothered apart from the fact that they didn’t take credit cards. They cleaned me out of cash. We both had lasagne, I think, then Ami had a pudding while I sampled another beer (bier, not bear).

Rick Shaw

It wasn’t quite dark when we’d finished, so we legged it off to the station in search of a bus, only to find (as ever) that all the day buses had finished and the first of the hourly night buses had just left (it was literally waiting at the traffic lights in a place we couldn’t get to safely). So this time rather than going for a motorised taxi again we saw some bike taxis. Basically, posh-looking rickshaws. The driver (rider/pilot/whatever) offered us a relatively reasonable price for the journey back home. In fact, he managed to get us back before the night bus would have because the night bus goes quite literally around the houses.

It was still, still light when we got back, but we were planning a busy day on Sunday, so we went straight off to bed to grab some ZZZZZZs.

The caches we found over the course of the day were :

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A Cunning Plan

Our third day in Belgiumshire began with another hotel breakfast followed by a trip to a local bank (because the restaurant on the previous night didn’t take plastic and so cleared me out of Euros cash) and then to a Carrefour Local supermarket to grab some essentials for a day of caching, namely drinks, pastries and Pringles. We had an appointment with an event on a beach, and then a walk around the wonderfully-named Knokke Heist.

Down on the Beach

Our first target for the day was to head for an event on the beach near Zeebrugge that had been organised by a friend from the Beds, Bucks & Herts geocaching group. He’d been to the Mega too and needed to attend an event beginning with a “Z” to help complete a challenge cache he’s working on. Obviously there was some scuttling around the dunes to collect caches before the event. And there was an obligatory photo at the webcam cache on the beach.

While we were at the event we also managed to (cough) acquire the codes for the 6 Mega Event lab caches that we hadn’t managed to get the previous day, from a bunch of Polish blokes. Result. Full house. Except now I’ve found 99 lab caches (because Brugse Beer broke with convention by not doing lots of ten). I will now have 99 lab cache finds for the foreseeable future. And my number of lab finds will continue to end in a 9 unless I attend an event and deliberately throw the result by only logging one of them.

Knick Knacky Knokke Heist, Knicky Knacky Noo!

Sorry about that, but I just had to do it! It might equally well have been called “Knicketty Knacketty Knokke Heist”, but anyway, that’s by-the-by. It’s out of my system now. I can move on. Anyway, we had some serious cachin’ to get done.

Anyway, from Zeebrugge we made our way around to Knokke-Heist, or more particularly to Heist-aan-Zee, to begin our main walk of the day. This was the “Kalf” series. It runs in a big loop to the south of the town and quite close to the Dutch border. It was quite a long walk and the weather was warm. By the end of the 4 hours we spent doing it we’d had enough. We had done fifty-something caches by that time though. We’d walked along a variety of terrains, most of which were pretty quick to walk over.

So by the end of the walk it was most definitely ice-cream o’clock. I stuck another couple of Euros into a parking meter and we retired to a nearby bar. I had a giant coke and Ami had a vanilla milkshake, and we shared a rather fantastic strawberry coupe. It contained strawberry and vanilla ice creams, squirty cream, strawberry sauce and a handful of fresh strawberries. You get the picture. Strawberry flavour. Lots of it.

Border Posts

We sort of toyed with the idea of doing a few drive-bys in Knokke-Heist but eventually, we decided that we’d found a decent enough quantity already, so we were off home for an early finish. Before going back though, we popped over the border into the Netherlands at Sint Anna Ter Muiden to do a single cache that celebrates the most westerly point of the European part of the Netherlands. Obviously there are some other bits of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean, but Sint Anna Ter Muiden is the most westerly bit in Europe. The geocache we did there was based specifically around the mistaken view of many Dutch that the most westerley point is up on the coast near Heist-aan-Zee, but it isn’t. It’s here.

There are a couple of boundary marker posts at the roadside here. One yielded the necessary information for the geocache, and another (the most westerley itself) nestles conveniently in the formal garden at the front of a restaurant/bar, which is entirely in Belgium apart from its conservatory and its car park. As with all border points on this trip, it’s a non-entity. There’s signs by the roadside advising you that the speed limits are different, but that’s about it.

The way back proved more challenging. I tried to get Ami to navigate on Google Maps. That wasn’t the problem though. The problem was that they were building a new motorway around the south of Zeebrugge. Google Maps got its knickers in a twist.

When we got back to Bruges we were quite early, so we chilled in the hotel room for an hour (tending to our suntans) before heading out in the car to try out the pizza place we’d failed to get into on Friday night. We succeeded this time, but only because we agreed to sit outside.

The caches we completed on the day were :

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What’s the Story?

So this day was, fundamentally, our last one in Belgium. We had to go home. “Boooooo!” and “Hisssssss!” and all that. It started with a quick hack around Bruges and ended up at a big white nose.

We had some breakfast at the hotel again and then fetched some more money from the bank. The previous night’s restaurant didn’t take credit cards.

Which left the small question of what to do about caching for our final day.

Animation

One of the newly released series for the Mega Event was the “Cartoonwonders” series. It was over on the east side of town. It seemed to have 20 caches, designed to be easy for kids, with a few add-on extras for good measure. We didn’t really have time for a long series. To be honest after Sunday’s exploits we didn’t really have the legs either.

We parked up as per the guidance and began our quest for the day. The brief said it was pretty much hard paved all the way round, so we took the decision to not bother with walking boots. That proved to be a good decision. Relaxed feet and free ankles. Mmmm! I really must try getting some boots that actually fit my feet.

Back at the plot, we couldn’t find the first one. And we couldn’t find the second one either. But then we caught up with a local couple who literally lived right next to where we parked. They gave us some pointers on the first two. We then spent the rest of the series either walking with them, or catching up / leaving them. It was like a “with you, but not really with you” thing. We exchanged some pointers on the cartoon characters that were required for the bonus. They also helped us quite a lot (maybe we helped each other) with finding info for the accompanying multi. I would not normally have done a multi with 9 waypoints, but we were sort of walking around them anyway, so I thought we might as well.

The series proved to be much as described – flat, fast walking, and mainly paved. We thought we’d boo-booed with the bonus codes because we hadn’t been writing down the numbers associated with each character in each cache, but shhh, don’t tell the locals, you didn’t actually need any of them apart from the last, which was good. Anyway, it was located much where I expected. There was a suspiciously large looking gap between the first two caches.

To the Cachemobile

So with the add-ons that put us back at the car having done 21 caches in three hours. Slow going caused by the multi, but a decent series nonetheless.

After this we decided to revert to “drive-by” mode so that we could stop whenever we felt like it and scoot over to Calais for the train home. So we made our way around central Bruges for the last time and followed a quiet country road westwards, stopping every few hundred metres for another cache. We did about 16-17 this way before deciding that we better get a shift on. It was also time for lunch.

Lunch was had a the Mannekensvere services, and this time we included some fuel. I guessed I’d need €40 to fill up. I guessed a bit under, but at least that meant I didn’t have to go back into the shop to get a refund of the surplus. It was close enough anyway.

Cap Blanc Nez

From here we bashed our way across the motorways until we were at Calais and found ourselves with two and a half hours before our scheduled train departure. We had catered for this possibility by allowing for a bit of time up at Cap Blanc Nez, a cliff just to the west of Calais from which you can see Dover, and see the continuous trail of ferries crossing the Channel. It was a clear day, so the White Cliffs of Dover were clearly visible on the other side.

There’s a big monument on the top of the hill dedicated to the Dover Patrol, and this was the setting for a virtual cache. We did a few traditionals around here too before deciding we’d had enough and heading back to the Tunnel Terminal for the trip home. We arrived an hour before our scheduled departure but we couldn’t get on an earlier train. That proved to be a good thing because if we had got an earlier one, we’d have missed it as a result of having to queue for so long to buy something to eat in the terminal. Eventually, though we did get some food, and we did the necessary toilet trip, and dashed off to join the train loading lanes. As it happens we did get put onto one train earlier than we’d booked. That saved us a whole 12 minutes (according to the schedule).

Back in Blighty

Once we got to the UK again the drive home was boringly easy. That’s just how I like it to be, and we got back home at around 9:45 pm. Ami had slept much of the way back through England.

When I did all the final counting over the following days, having typed up all the field notes, we’d logged 208 regular caches and 19 lab caches, which I think is a decent return for four days. Ami was along mainly for the ride, so I didn’t do as much caching as I might have done if she’d not been there. To be honest, on the longer days of Friday and Sunday we’d done over 60 caches, and I regard that as plenty if you’re out for a 4-day burst. Eventually, even I got bored and want to stop.

I managed to eek it up by one more cache because the two virtuals we did at Cap Blanc Nez allowed us to claim a challenge we’d done in Kent the previous weekend (see Greenhithe). I was happy with that total.

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No, not the Iron Maiden song, just a post about heading from the relatively flat expanses of mid-France up into the distinctly mountainous bits down the eastern edge.

The day began with breakfast at the Novotel Suites in Reims, where we’d been staying overnight. It was a fairly well provisioned continental job, so the kids managed to find something they’d eat and drink.

I was getting increasingly concerned about my right eye. It had been hurting through most of Friday. I’d initially believed (or hoped) that it was just caused by some hayfever, but by Saturday morning it was hurting a lot and had swollen up quite badly on the upper eyelid. The hotel receptionist kindly advised me there was a pharmacy 200m away which opened at 9 am, so I scooted over there with Ami as soon as I’d finished breakfast. The pharmacist gave me some anti-septic eyedrops and told me to use them “up to six times a day” – I wasn’t convinced but thought I’d give it a go for a day, if only because we didn’t have time today for mucking about trying to find a doctor.

We were on the road by 9:30 am.

We made our first stop at the Aire de Perrogney, between Troyes and Dijon, and very conveniently just inside the Department of Haute-Marne – convenient from the point of view of there being a geocache there.

We spent a good hour or so there and had a “full monty” lunch, albeit smaller than the previous day’s lunch, followed by ice creams and a bit of running around. We also filled up with fuel on the way in. We weren’t exactly running on vapours but I also didn’t have enough left to run for another 2-3 hours.

About two and a half hours later we’d made it to 60km short of Geneva and the Aire de Ceignes-Cerdon. We were expecting a full-service stop here too but the restaurant block looked rather abandoned, so we ended up just doing a toilet stop and ice-creams at the garage and wandering off into the wooded area to find a picnic bench. The one we chose was cunningly about 30m away from the geocache at the site, so another easy find and another Department (Ain) successfully coloured in.

From here the rest of the drive all got a bit messy. We’d seriously thought from here that it would take about an hour. It actually took us closer to two hours and we seemed to be continually telling the kids it’s a bit further than we expected. We got there eventually though, and made our way to the rental agency to pick up the keys.

We’d used booking.com to find somewhere to stay. We found it very easy to use this site to find good looking properties in Chamonix, and the agency we were dealing with ( chamonix-location.net ) were very good with providing information. They were also fairly easy to find, even in Chamonix’s one-way system.

Finding the apartment proved to be a little more difficult, partly because the car parking location was a couple of hundred metres away and the apartment itself was on the top floor of the building that houses the cinema right in the middle of town. It required 3 printed photos on the instructions to find the correct building and door, and then the instructions involved climbing two full flights of stairs, turning left, climbing more stairs and turning right. In truth, it wasn’t that difficult, but we made the mistake of attempting to do this whilst carrying four suitcases and about eight assorted smaller bags between two adults and two kids, after having been sat in the car all day. There was a lot of backwards-and-forwards action involved because the kids seem to have lost all ability to carry anything, follow instructions or walk without getting in someone else’s way. Next time, we’ll park up first and then me and one of the kids will make multiple trips between car and apartment whilst Kas settles us into the place.

Once we were settled in we noticed that time was marching on and we needed to find food for breakfast. A quick google revealed the location of a nearby Super U and it turned out this was open until 8 pm on a Saturday, so we dashed off and spent (as usual) a lot more than we expected on somewhat fewer items than we thought. We did manage to find breakfast stuff, fruit and beer though. That’ll do us for now.

For tea we were feeling lazy so we dropped ourselves into an Italian place nearly outside the apartment door. The girls all had pasta and I had pizza.

There was just enough light left to take some stunning evening shots of the Aiguille du Midi before retiring to the apartment to drink beer, snooze and watch the Olympics (in French).

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Our first full day in Chamonix began quite slowly for me and the girls. Not so for Kas, she had some running planned and set off at about 8:30am to go find a mountain to run over. We’d arranged to pick her up again from St Gervais les Bains at about 1pm. She was only planning to run 13 miles or so, but because the route took her over the top of the ski domain at Les Houches she was expecting it to take at least 4 hours.

I’d been noticing on the way down to Chamonix that my eye was getting progressively worse and I’d picked up some antiseptic eye drops from a local pharmacy in Reims on Saturday morning, but it didn’t seem to be helping much, so as we’d got a morning of waiting for Kas, essentially, I decided I needed to get it looked at.

We made the assumption that health services might work a little bit like the UK, so planned to drive to Chamonix’s small hospital to see what was what, because in Milton Keynes there’s a walk-in centre that caters for non-critical stuff outside the hours of normal doctors’ surgeries.

As we walked out to the car we noticed loads of people paragliding down off the mountains.

It turned out that the procedure in France is that you dial the emergency health care number (112) free from any phone and they will connect you to someone. I managed to get through a few layers of phone call on the payphone at the hospital before eventually getting connected to the local doctor who was on call that day, Dr Pache-Ville, from Les Houches. Her English wasn’t great but we managed to converse in garbled Franglais well enough for me to establish that I could drive straight to her surgery and see her. So me and the girls did just that. It was, after all, only 10 minutes away. She prescribed me some antibiotic eye drops and cream. Drops to be applied 3-6 times a day and cream every night at bedtime. For seven days. That’ll be €49.50 please.

The “on call” pharmacy for the weekend turned out to be one in central Chamonix, so we drove back into town and walked into the pharmacy to get my goodies. That’ll be another €17 please, including some sterile eye wash that I couldn’t quite understand what to do with.

After all this exploration of the French healthcare system it was time to go and fetch Kas. She’d been doing some running in three dimensions.

The road from Chamonix round to St Gervais takes a half hour or so because it has to go around the mountain that Kas was running over, so we headed off and I got Ami to navigate a little bit on Google Maps to try to get us there. We’d agreed the location to meet Kas at “the church” in St Gervais, but neither of us had any idea what the location would actually look like on the ground.

What it looked like was a church in the middle of a busy little town, quite close to a small square filled with market stalls. We had to do a lap of the town centre before I realised that the car park I’d driven past was the closest parking to the church, but it was both free and underground (i.e. out of the sun). Did I mention anywhere that the weather was warm ? Or “hot” is probably closer to the truth. It had been warm all the way down and the bright, cloudless and warm weather had stayed with us into Sunday morning.

Anyway, back at the plot, there were quite a lot of cafes and restaurants around, so we picked one and sent Kas a text telling her where we were. “Quatre persons” I said to the waitress. “J’attend ma femme”

We ordered a few drinks and then received a menu which indicated we were sitting at the “restaurant” bit and if we wanted to just eat snacks we’d have to move over to the “snack bar” bit. We waited for Kas to arrive and drank our drinks quite slowly before asking about this though. They weren’t exactly busy so it’s not like we were denying anyone else a table.

Once Kas did arrive the kids didn’t seem particularly bothered about eating anyway, so they had a restorative ice cream and we jumped into the car to return to Chamonix for the afternoon’s planned event – a trip up the Aiguille du Midi. Kas had run over the top of a mountain and had needed to run a couple of miles further than planned due to the non-availability of a path in a location where the maps said there was one, so she was a bit kippered and needed a quick wash-and-brush-up first.

Aiguille du Midi does a great impression of looking like a Bond villain’s not-so-secret hideout. It is a spectacularly huge mountain sitting right above the town of Chamonix (2700m above the town, in fact). It is accessible by the two-stage cable car from the town centre. This forms a part of the Chamonix skiing lift system and so can be accessed using one of the multi-pass options. We bought ourselves some 3-day passes and then joined the back of a queue waiting to get up the cable car. It was busy. We were told there was a minimum wait at the top of two-and-a-half hours because it was so busy. We didn’t want to rush back anyway, so we jumped on our assigned car and began the fairly awesome journey up. The first stage takes you from 1,000m above sea level in the town to about 2,400m on the Plan d’Aiguille. You then change to the second stage cable car, which speeds you up and over the now distinctly high-alpine terrain to the head station at about 3,750m. Yes, you read that correctly. The height difference between the town and the mountain is three times the height of England’s highest peak, Scafell Pike. You’re not finished there, though. Because there’s a lift that takes you up a further 70-80m inside a rock pinnacle and up to the upper viewing platform. There are actually two rock pinnacles with buildings on. The cable car comes into the slightly lower one.

The view from the top can only be described as breathtaking. The world of the town below you looks very small, and you are surrounded by much taller peaks. Aiguille du Midi is one of the lower peaks in the Mont Blanc Massif, so everything else up there is higher, including the “big one” itself, which is a full 1,000m higher than the Aiguille du Midi. It doesn’t seem to be, but then I guess that’s the old “small but close” versus “large but far away” debate.

It’s called the Aiguille du Midi ( “The Midday Needle” ) because by all accounts if you stand outside the front of the church in town then the sun is directly over the top of the peak at about midday. I don’t know whether the church was deliberately built where it was to achieve that effect, or whether it was random. And it makes you wonder what the mountain was called before the church was built. It also made me wonder whether that’s midday CET or midday CEST, but then I’m just weird like that. We were unable to put any theories to the test, because the only day we were in the town at midday happened to be the only day when it wasn’t sunny.

We noticed that late in the afternoons the mountains can start attracting a bit of cloud, and today was no exception, so our visibility was drifting in and out a bit, but I think this made the experience better.

Unfortunately, something else that was drifting in and out a bit was Izzy’s breakfast. She seemed to get an attack of altitude sickness. Either that, or she suffers high-anxiety. Entirely understandable from up here. So Izzy and Kas missed out on standing in the glass box, as it was due to close at 5pm. Me and Ami just made it. While we were up at the top part, we also assessed the necessary materials for the earthcache that is placed up there ( Aiguille du Midi ), and did all the requisite photos.

From here we decided to go meet up with Kas and Izzy, who were by now queuing up in the very busy mountaintop restaurant attempting to buy chips. Ami and me arrived just in time to get chips too, and to our amazement, we discovered that the world famous Gardner parking karma seems to work with tables in mountaintop restaurants too.

Izzy didn’t eat many of her chips. She was very pale. Oh dear.

So I dashed back out onto the roof of the restaurant to grab another cache ( L’aiguille du midi ) and take a few more photos before we decided it was all a bit much, and we’d better get Izzy back down to somewhere where the air was a bit thicker. It was a shame really, because she missed out on quite a lot up there, but it is understandable, and I have to admit that I felt a little unsteady up there too.

Sadly, while we were queuing up to leave (and discovering that the cars were running later than we’d been advised) Izzy needed to barf again. This time they didn’t quite make it to the toilets and Izzy’s jumper took a bit of a beating, so when they came back I tried in my best broken Franglais to talk us onto an earlier ride down. The guy was very sympathetic and put us on the next one, although by this time it was only a queue jump of one place anyway.

As soon as we got below the mid-station Izzy started to perk up again and she was OK as soon as we were at the bottom, albeit a bit dirty and in need of feeding. By this time it was 7 pm.

The feeding in question involved crepes at a small restaurant on the main street. Izzy decided she didn’t much like hers though, so she basically just licked the nutella off the top. She had some more stuff at home.

What turned out as a slow morning for me and the girls turned into a fairly spectacular afternoon, and once we got home we made do with a couple of beers, some Olympics coverage in French, and an early night.

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Today we planned to take the Chemin de fer du Montenvers up to the Mer de Glace. We didn’t have any plans after that, as we wondered if that would be enough for a day, so we set off suitably armed and arrived at the train station for about 10am. It was a bit busy but not too busy.

The train apparently runs on adhesion with the rails whilst in the stations at both ends and then engages a rack system when climbing or descending, to cope with the gradients of between 11% and 22%. Whatever the engineering situation, it trundles up the mountainside very nicely and provides some great little glimpses of the valley through the trees. When we got to the top we were greeted by some pretty amazing views ( I seem to be saying that quite a lot on this holiday ).

One thing that got me was the apparent rate of retreat of the glacier since I was last here in 1993. When the train station was built in the 1820’s it was at the same level as the ice on the glacier. In the 1980’s a telecabine was built from the train station to allow descent of the 100m drop down to the ice level at that time. There were three steps below the telecabine to reach the ice at the time it was built. There are now 442 steps. Overall the ice is estimated to be lowering at about 25-30cm a year (and has been so since the 1920’s) but the effect is significantly greater here because this is the snout, and this is retreating up the mountainside as well as losing ice from the top, if that makes sense.

Anyway, they are apparently planning to extend the railway line about 700m up the valley to a location where they think they’ll be able to maintain access to the glacier until about 2040. Without entering into a debate about global warming and what causes it, there is no debate that this glacier is retreating significantly. Here’s a couple of comparative photos showing the glacier levels, taken from pretty much the same spot. Obviously the modern-day one was taken in summer, so the usual dump of winter snow on the top of the glacier had gone, but nevertheless you can still see a significant difference in the height of the ice..

From the train station we decided to walk down to the glacier rather than take the telecabine. Specifically, I asked the others if we could, because there is a geocache about halfway down the telecabine run which can only be accessed by walking. I think this gives better views as you descend though, despite it being a fairly rough path.

As we were walking down, we started to pass signs on the rock walls indicating the layer of the ice at various points in time. There was a very marked downward trend. When we got to the telecabine I hadn’t quite realised how many steps down there were. I’d more or less told the kids it was flatish from the bottom of the telecabine, because I don’t remember having to make a huge climb up any stairs when I’d skied down here, but that was 23 years previously so my memory has obviously faded a bit as the 1990 ice level was quite a few steps down, and I skied here in 1993.

So we descended and descended, and then we went down a bit, and then a bit more. After this we lost a bit of altitude and went down a few stairs before descending a bit. You get the picture.

Near the bottom of all the steps there’s another geocache, which took no time at all to find but then took me ages to replace due to the constant stream of people coming down the stairs.

We weren’t really sure what to expect of an ice cave that is carved out of the glacier each year. There’s a few photos available online but you can’t get much of a sense of it. Anyway, inside, it was great. You get a bit wet at the entry point as on days like this there’s always a bit of surface melting going on. Once inside it was pleasantly cool compared to outside, and the ice itself is amazing. What struck me most was the absolute clarity of it. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting – probably more of a mushy mass of compressed snow with boulders in, but apparently above a certain pressure the air gets more and more squeezed out and the ice takes on a beautiful crystal clarity that you can see right through, and the suspended boulders are visible at various points.

Within the grotto they seem to fit various bits or artistic lighting and carve out a few interesting little statues as well as hanging a few photos and information boards about the scientific research that is conducted into the glacier and the movement of the ice as part of the programme of creating the cave each year. It is well worth a visit, especially if you’ve never been inside a glacier before.

After the grotto we climbed back up the stairs but decided to take the telecabine back up to the train station instead of walking up the path again. We weren’t carrying any drinks or food and the kids were starting to fade a bit, so we decided on lunch here. The cafe at the train station is (not surprisingly) tourist central, but they had a decent selection of fresh sandwiches, which we accompanied with some crisps, drinks and ice creams.

After lunch we mooched about and took a few more photos on the terrace before heading back down into town.

Back down in town we weren’t quite sure what to do and Kas had a desire to ingest some caffeine, so we grabbed a seat at a cafe round the corner from our apartment and had a drink. I wanted to go up Le Brévent to grab what is supposedly Europe’s highest wheelchair-accessible geocache (at around 2500m). The girls all wanted to be wearing shorts as they were a bit on the warm side. So after drinks they scooted off to get changed while I rummaged around the base of the church trying to find a different geocache (unsuccessfully).

Le Brévent is the mountain that dominates the skyline on the north side of Chamonix town. It’s quite imposing as the side facing the valley is a traditional near vertical wall at the side of a glacial U-shaped valley. The local citizens have quite cunningly made the ascent fairly easy by installing a gondola and then a cable car. The gondola drops off at a mid-station which is the top of the “easy” skiing in the Brévent zone. The cable car goes all the way to the top and provides access to a single black run which descends roughly back down to the head of the gondola. The cable car is little used tourists in the summer, probably because there aren’t any specific attractions at the top, but my personal opinion is that this location was the most breathtaking of all the breathtaking views we found during the week. You get a better sense of the scale of the Mont Blanc Massif from over here because you are seeing it almost flat rather than the “underneath” view you get from the town. If you walk around at the summit you also get some great views northwards over the mountains that house some of the other northern French ski resorts like Flaine, Morzine and Avoriaz.

The wheelchair accessible cache was easy to find.

From the top we took a wander around and down the north side (along the skiing black run) to find another geocache that was only about 250m away, but which took ages due to difficulty in interpreting the location, the absence of phone signal (for getting the spoiler photo) and the fact that we had to cross a patch of snow to get to it. The patch of snow did provide some entertainment though, and some much needed cooling.

Somehow I’d sort of misread the times for the last cable car down. I was convinced it said 7pm but as we walked onto the top station at about 6pm we were informed by the arriving attendant that this would be the last one. Good job Kas had expressed some “not sure” feelings and we’d decided not to walk on any further or come back later. Our general tardiness meant we had to walk straight from the cable car base station into the head of the gondola to avoid having to walk down that bit. I guess they’d keep it running at least until everyone off the cable car had got in, but you never know.

Back down in town we got cleaned up and made the very long and tiresome trip downstairs to the restaurant right outside the apartment door. Between us we had an assortment of high-carbohydrate foods, and afterwards retired back upstairs again for some beer and Olympics (in French). The end of another excellent day.

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Today didn’t quite go to plan, but it ended up being fairly good anyway.

Kas started with her traditional morning run. Not a very long one, but it was on the plan.

We got out of the house at around 10:30 and went around to Saint-Gervais-les-Bains in the hope of catching the Mont Blanc Tramway, however when we got there, and got parked up, we discovered that we would have to wait the best part of two hours, until just after 1pm, before we’d be able to get a place. Bleedin’ tourists. Why can’t they all just stay at home.

So we had a communal “bum to that !” and did a quick rethink.

We decided instead to go and try out the Télésiège des Bossons, which takes you up to a chalet and viewing point near the bottom of the Glacier de Bossons, which runs off the Mont Blanc Massif a little to the west of Chamonix town. The chairlift itself is an “old skool” skiing one where the chairs are fixed to the cable permanently, and as a result the overall experience is, shall we say, relaxing rather than speedy. However, on a sunny day in August there are worse things to do than to spend 15 minutes drifting serenely over the alpine meadows and woodlands.

When you get to the top it is a short walk to a couple of viewing platforms that look over the base of the glacier from west to east. I guess when they were built that the glacier was much further down the valley. Right until the early twentieth century, apparently, the glacier used to come right down into the valley. I won’t say it’s a shadow of its former self, because to be honest it still completely dominates the view from Chamonix looking west, especially in the summer when there’s no snow anywhere else around the base. The glacier still comes down well below the treeline, aided by the north-facing aspect of the slope it comes down, but the snout has now receded a few hundred metres back up from the valley floor, and the chairlift now takes you to a point probably a couple of hundred metres below the current snout. It is still close enough for a good view though.

I forgot to mention also that the Bossons area is home to the ski jump hill from the 1924 Winter Olympics, which looks sort of abandoned now, especially given that the public parking for the chairlift is sited at the base of the ski jump’s landing area (below the “K” point).

There is also an abandoned piste running to the east of the chairlift which was used for some events in the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships of 1962. Much of the piste now has small coniferous trees growing in it. It’s obvious where the piste went, because the trees are smaller than those surrounding it, but it couldn’t be used for skiing now.

We had a very pleasant lunch of chips (for the kids) and omelettes (for Kas and myself) at the cafe at the top of the chairlift. We also has some beer. Well, I did, because Kas was driving.

After lunch it was time to move on, so Kas headed off towards the chairlift and I asked if I could walk down a path under the chairlift to grab a couple of geocaches on the way down. One was a bit out of the way down quite a steep but passable path which took me to a point underneath the neighbouring Glacier de Taconnaz. This looped back to a path and then a road which passed through some extremely fine looking houses and on to the top of the ski jump. After this point, I thought I’d just be able to walk down the side of the ski jump to the car park, but sadly it was all roped off and I ended up taking a rather circuitous route to the east through a load of trees and down the road.

We drove back into Chamonix and parked up and then walked straight to the Aiguille du Midi cable car, as we’d decided we’d quite like a look from the mid-station at Plan d’Aiguille. The station was very busy again, which surprised me as I thought it would only really have been busy on weekends like when we went up before. So we queued up and got our tokens for the ride (we already had tickets but had to get an allocated number for the cable car ride. Then we grabbed some drinks and started sitting around for the half hour wait we’d got lined up.

Our half hour came and went and there seemed to be some general Gallic shrugging going on amongst the cable car attendants, after which a load of people started walking away. So I went up to check and they said that they weren’t going to let anyone else go to the top on the basis that a) the top was in cloud so there was nothing to see and b) if they let anyone else go up they wouldn’t be able to get them all back down again before closing time. So they wouldn’t let us go up.

“But I only want to go halfway up” I said. “Yes”, replied they, “but you still need to get down again, along with everyone else. There’s a thousand people up there you know.”

Their advice was to take our tokens back to the pay desk and see what they could do. What they could do turned out to be nothing, because we’d bought a three day pass, and it wasn’t their fault if we couldn’t access our chosen lift on our final day. No refunds, sorry, sod off.

We started wandering off in a grump and trying to decide if there was anywhere else we could go to get some value out of our tickets (there’s plenty, we wish we’d bought a fourth and possibly a fifth day) but at the last second we decided to go and ask again. The attendant who five minutes ago was saying “no” very vehemently seemed to be all sweetness and light again and politely told us we could actually go up, if we wanted, but it would be crap because the top was in cloud. “We don’t want to go to the top” I said. “We only want to go halfway.”

I peered around the side of the building. The top wasn’t in cloud at the time. So I asked for tokens for a cable car ride and she said they weren’t needed any more because there wasn’t a queue now. Errr, maybe that’s because the lift attendants just told everyone they couldn’t use the tickets they just bought, and everyone’s gone home in a grump ? Just saying.

But “what ho !”, it meant we could get straight onto the next cable car and get up to the mid-station, and there were only a couple of other people in the car with us.

Up at the Plan d’Aiguille, you get treated to a broad area of high alpine terrain with a big cable car station and a small cafe in the middle. Towards the south there is the imposing face of the Aiguille du Midi and the cable car going up to it. To the north there’s the valley and the look over to Le Brévent, where we’d been about 24 hours previously. And over to the west there was a thunderstorm. No, make that three or four of them. Izzy was a bit spooked (because obviously those thunderstorms are going to arrive here before we can leave, and there’ll be lightning, and we’ll all die ) but she calmed down for long enough for us to mooch about, enjoy the views, a bit of far-away lightning and the general coolness, and for me to find the geocache under the cable car station. Not literally under it, but quite close.

The thunderstorms and cloudiness changed the light patterns a little bit after a couple of days of bright sunshine, so I quite like a lot of the photos I took from here. The light looks different and so the colours in the photos look different too.

There was a bit of a queue getting back down and the weather was looking increasingly dodgy, so we crammed like sardines into the cable car back and rushed down. As with the journey up, there was a large number of people who were, shall we say, unlikely to be skiers, and who took great pleasure in screaming and whooping in delight every time the cable car went over a pylon and there was a bit of rocking around. Oh for falling off a log, you’re not at Disneyland !

When we got back we mooched about for a while in the apartment and eventually decided we’d stop in for dinner instead of going out, so Izzy and me scooted up to Super U before closing time to grab some “stuff” – we went for what seems to be our French holiday staple of potato wedges, salads plus whatever looked nice from the butcher’s counter. In this case, what looked nice were some half-spicy beef and lamb sausages and (because Ami probably wouldn’t eat the sausages) some chicken and chorizo kebabs. The guy on the butcher’s counter spoke enough English and I spoke enough French that we conversed reasonably well on the subject of him having sold all the pork sausages earlier, and that the beef and lamb ones were red but not that hot, so the kids would be OK with them. The kids actual feedback was either that they should be hotter or should not be hot at all, because as they stood, they were neither one thing nor the other. Having said that though, none of them survived the meal, so they can’t have been that bad.

When we’d finished all that, the kids were about ready for bed and I was about ready to get my PC out and play with some of my photos for the first time on the holiday, the photos you’ve been looking at on here. There was also some beer involved and, of course, the Olympics in French.

Open the photo gallery >>

Kas didn’t go for a run on this morning. I’m sure she wanted to, but we’d got other plans, and those plans involved not still being at the apartment at lunchtime, so we got up pleasantly early and headed off out.

“So what are these plans?” I hear you say, “What? What?”

OK then, I’ll tell you.

Chamonix is very close to Italy and it’s also very close to Switzerland, which means it’s one of those very rare places in the world where you can easily find geocaches in three different countries in the same day.

We were out of the house at 9:30 am on this epic quest (OK, not that epic. “Little jaunt” is probably better). It promised to be an interesting day whatever. Interesting also for me to see how noticeable it actually is when you cross between any of those countries. As all of them are members of the Schengen Area then theoretically the border crossings should be barely noticeable.

The first place we stopped was just up the hill before the entrance to the Mont Blanc Tunnel. There’s a big parking area there which allows access to some walks up the side of the mountains and particularly over to the eastern edge of the Bossons Glacier, right across from where we’d been the previous morning. If you’re out geocaching, then obviously the side of a glacier is a great place to go hunting for earthcaches. There were two here and they allowed us to tick off finds in France straight away. You can’t beat a good glacier. Not unless you have a very big stick and possibly some crampons.

To get to the two earthcaches in question we had to make a fairly short looking (300m and 500m or so, according to the GPS) walk along what ought to be a good path. What I didn’t notice was that it was about 200m of climbing as well as 300m and 500m on the flat. It was a bit steep in places. And beyond the first one it was also narrow and a bit precipitous, and because it was “only a short walk” none of us were wearing our walking boots. It was quite pretty though.

You’ll have to excuse the poor quality of photos from this section. When I switched my camera on the first time it said “Memory card not found”, so I thought I’d left it stuck in the side of my PC the previous night. As a result, my photos were taken on my phone, which doesn’t work too well in challenging light.

Of course, when I got back to the car and went straight to the camera bag to extract and insert the spare memory card I keep there, I opened the card slot and noticed there was a card in there. Hmmm ! I’d forgotten that sometimes the camera lies when you switch it back on after having removed and replaced the card. I also noticed that I’d been using the wrong camera case for several months. The one I had with me contained Ami’s spare SD card and didn’t contain my spare battery. Oh well ! At least I can use the proper camera for the rest of the day.

So, back at the car and back at the epic road trip, the next stage was to get through the Mont Blanc Tunnel, the entrance to which was a whole 100m up the road from where we parked. In fact, the place we parked was up the road behind the French customs post and accessing it involved driving past a group of well armed members of Les Rozzers Français.

We had to queue for the tunnel, which I initially assumed might be something to do with security checks for vehicles entering the tunnel, what with the somewhat tense security situation in France, however it turned out that the delay was caused by the amount of time it was taking to fleece the driver of each vehicle. €43.50 ? You’re ‘avin a laugh, surely. But they weren’t.

The tunnel itself is 11.6km long (that’s 7.25 miles if you work in old money) and is pretty much straight once you get inside. It’s only two lanes, so there’s oncoming traffic in the other lane too. It’s remarkably dull to drive through and it gets quite difficult to concentrate after a while because it all looks the same. They helpfully give you guidance on how much separation to leave between vehicles and that helped me a bit as I could focus on how far in front of me the lorry was or wasn’t. The real reason for the delay at the entrance is that they regulate the rate at which vehicles enter the tunnel so that they can avoid there ever being a queue inside it.

When you get to the other side and start driving through Italy, there’s quite literally not much to see. The Autostrada down from the tunnel is mainly composed of other tunnels. Maybe that’s where a lot of the €43.50 goes – on building good roads that allow you to get to the tunnel. After all, a tunnel that bypasses a load of slow winding roads over mountain passes is not much use if you have to drive up a load of slow winding roads to get to it.

Back at an earlier theme, the border was not noticeable at all.

Time was marching on and we’d decided to head down to Aosta to get lunch. On the way into town we filled up with fuel. I had a bit, but not enough to finish off the day, and as we had mountain passes to cross I wasn’t comfortable having to think about how much fuel I’d got. So we stopped at one station on the way into town, but they didn’t take credit cards, so we moved to an Agip station a few hundred metres down the road. They did take credit cards, but they also wanted to serve me, which is a concept I now find totally alien. I just started doing the business and the attendant cottoned on, shrugged her shoulders and went into the kiosk to wait for me to come in and pay. Diesel proved to be the only thing that was more expensive in Italy than in France.

Aosta was a pleasant little town in the centre. Around the outsides, it had the typical arrangement of sprawling suburbs of big individual houses, and then a narrow (ish) band of modern looking apartment blocks. We ended up doing a couple of laps around this area as on the first circuit I was unable to jump my way across three lanes of traffic to get into the car park we wanted. It didn’t help that we didn’t realize it was there, so I wasn’t in the right lane. Second time around we were better prepared.

A couple of hundred metres from where we parked we walked into a pedestrianized street full of restaurants and souvenir shops. Lunchtime then. As it was Italy, we felt obliged to eat pasta or pizza. We stopped at pretty much the first place we found, and it was great. And as the waitress said when we were paying, “it’s not so expensive as France.” She followed that up with “you should come on holiday to Italy next year. The food is better and the mountains are just as good.” From where we were sitting, it was difficult to argue. The main problem for us though, was that none of us really speak any Italian. I guess that could be fixed over the course of a year, but we can get to that later.

After lunch it was time to get back to the grand plan, and to find my first ever geocaches in Italy. There was one a couple of hundred metres away from the restaurant, so I went to grab that while the girls were grabbing an ice cream. We then walked a few hundred metres along the main street to where the Roman settlement of Augusta Prætoria Salassorum is. We did a couple more caches, but we didn’t pay the entrance fee for the Roman site because we were, after all, on a bit of a schedule and it was already about 2 pm in the afternoon, and we still had to get into and then out of Switzerland. We did pay a quick visit into the cathedral though, which was quite good, but arranged back-to-front in comparison to British cathedrals. Mainly, the two big towers were at the eastern end, although the main (and rather grand) entrance was still at the west end. It had the distinct advantage of being cool inside. We could have stayed there all day, except that we also had the options of a nice air-conditioned car and a high mountain pass or two if we wanted to be cooler.

So we left Aosta, but it was nice enough that I’d consider going to the area again, if I had a plan.

From Aosta we drove up to the Great St Bernard Pass on the Swiss border. There’s a couple of good reasons for going that way. It is the closest way to Switzerland from Aosta. It’s the third highest road pass in Switzerland. Finally, and most impressively, various bits of the original Italian Job were filmed here, including the opening sequence with the Lamborghini Miura.

It’s quite a slow but very scenic drive up. Two thirds of the way up you have to remember to not take the tunnel, but to take the road over the top instead. The point where the two roads separate is a long way from the top. The tunnel allows the crossing to stay open all year even though the road up the pass is shut for several months as soon as it starts snowing.

At the top of the pass there’s an earthcache on the Italian side. There was also a patch of snow that the girls found exciting.

As we went back to the car we were sort of wondering which country we were in. It turns out that the photos taken by the lake were taken in Switzerland and all the others were taken in Italy. We figured out where was what because we found a stone marker. So we had to stand and get a photo of us in two countries at once.

From here we drove into Switzerland (all of 10 yards from where we parked), and moved over to the monastery and the home of the big dogs with the barrels of brandy. It wasn’t the home of any cafes or ice creams though, so we didn’t stay long. We grabbed a cache slightly up the hill from the monastery and then started heading our way down the hill. After all, it was past 5 pm and we’d achieved our target of finding geocaches in three different countries.

The drive down to Martigny is less interesting than the drive up from Aosta. The scenery is still good but the road is less of a challenge.

Before entering Martigny we took the road up the Col de la Forclaz and, because we still needed to feed the kids a second ice cream, we promptly stopped at a cafe on the first hairpin bend and had a quick but expensive coffee and ice cream. There was a geocache nearby. It turned out to be just 70m along the ground but down a near-vertical looking path down through someone’s grapevines. I didn’t fancy it and we did have a couple of other caches on the radar, so we were happy without doing that particular one. The view was quite good, as indeed it was from the next geocache we stopped at.

Anyway, I kind of assumed that the high point of this pass would be the French / Swiss border, but it isn’t. The border is actually some way further on near to Vallorcine and it was the most obvious border of the day, given that there was a sign advising of the revised speed limit, and there was an abandoned looking French customs post.

From here you have to cross over the Col des Montets to get back into Chamonix, which we duly did.

As we’d eaten pretty well at lunchtime we restricted tea to snacks and beer. We also played some mad variants of Uno or Go Fish. And we switched on the telly to watch the Olympics in French.

Geocaches found during the course of the day were:

Open the photo gallery >>

Today was that traditional day in each holiday where we didn’t really do much. The weather was a bit iffy compared to previous days – a bit showery and grey – and we were all a bit pooped after a long day out yesterday.

Kas went out for a short run, then got home and went for a run with Ami, then got home and went for another run with Izzy. Meanwhile I sat in the apartment playing with photos and thinking about how to structure this set of blog posts. I lead such an exciting life.

By the time everyone was back home and cleaned up it was lunchtime. Or, it would have been if we’d had much in, but we didn’t. So we ate a few bits we’d got and then went out for a walk around town.

First of all we went to find the two remaining geocaches in town that I hadn’t yet found. They were easy, especially with four of us looking.

After this we walked up and down the main street looking for souvenirs and Ami bought herself a rather pretty panoramic photo of Mont Blanc.

We also kept passing this fantastic mural, which so far I’d not managed to photograph well, due to absence of daylight. Look at it very closely. The only parts that aren’t painted are the left hand pair of small windows. You can just make out the big glass doors at the bottom. That’s also a painted scene. In particular notice how the artist has painted the size and shape of the balconies to match exactly the real balconies on the front of the building, and how he or she also gives the impression of three dimensions by painting on the shadows.

I think the artist received a number of commissions here, because the outside wall of our apartment also had some similar work, in this case emphasizing that the cinema was inside.

As we were walking back towards our apartment we passed a little sandwich and burger stand on the main street which looked like it had a range of food options to suit us all, so we stopped for a bite. It was very good.

After this, it all went a bit freestyle. Ami had in her mind that she wanted to buy a jacket, but she couldn’t really articulate very well what kind of thing she was looking for, and because Chamonix is more of an outdoor sports kind of place it is fairly underpopulated when it comes to fashion stores. So we tried a bunch of places but Ami wasn’t really that interested. Most of the time I was doing my “bored shopping father” routine of standing outside, taking a few photos and looking at my watch. I’m a bad shopper.

Eventually Ami gave up trying and we walked back to the apartment and spent a chunk of the afternoon playing with our PCs. Later on in the evening Kas shot up to the supermarket with Izzy and grabbed a load of stuff to do pasta for tea, which I duly cooked with Kas’s assistance. And that was kind of all we did, apart from drinking more beer and watching the Olympics in French.

Geocaches found during the course of the day were:

• Chamonix 2
• Tour du Lyret

Open the photo gallery >>

Today started off very slowly for me and the kids but very busy for Kas, as ever. She had a long run to do and planned to run up to the mid-station of Le Brévent and then across to La Flégère before coming back again. She set off before breakfast and was aiming for about 4 hours worth. Apparently the run up Le Brévent was more of a walk, and on the way back down she managed to take a fall and go head first into a rock, resulting in a cut above her eye.

While Kas was out me and the girls began some of the process of getting packed up and cleaning the flat. One of the first things to do was to follow the instructions we were given for disposing of rubbish, such as they were. Izzy and me went for a walk to try to find the massive bins. There proved to be a set just up the road in the car park. So then we went back to the apartment to get the rubbish, knowing now that we hadn’t got far to walk with it. Blimey, I really know how to live some days.

By the time she was back it was nearly lunchtime, not that we had much food in the apartment. So we all got cleaned up and dressed whilst farting about deciding what to do.

What we eventually decided to do was to go up to a nature reserve on the Col des Montets. Well, the bit we went to was on the Col des Montets. Most of the reserve is actually “up the top” behind the back of La Flégère, but we didn’t have either the time or the energy to get up there, given that it was after 2 pm when we left the house. Kas was struggling along with a big wad of dressing stuck to her forehead that looked like she was an extra in a war movie.

I’d noticed there was a short looking walk between two car parks and we decided to go for that. It was actually not a shorter walk than it looked. It was what Americans might call an “interpretive trail” of the botanical variety. Every few metres there was a sign identifying what kind of plants we were looking at. The signs were in French, obviously, so we had some fun with the kids figuring out how to pronounce them, and figuring out what they were. Some we could get because we have some familiarity with the Latin names, but this was surprisingly few. For several others we could read the signs but were unable to figure out which plant the sign related to.

There was also one geocache (Reserve Naturelle des Aiguilles Rouges), which we duly found just before returning to our car, despite the fact that as we were sitting down on the rock it was hidden under a local family decided that this was the best place to stop and have a drink. Oh for falling off a log ! Can’t you see we’re behaving suspiciously here ? Leave us alone, will you.

Back at the car we were a bit unsure what to do next but thought we’d spotted a couple of little pull-offs by the roadside from which we might get a few good photos. At the first one we were able to get some good photos, which was good. When we got back into the car we were having a chat about whether Kas ought to get her head seen to at the hospital because she thought it was continuing to bleed a little bit under the dressing, so we opted for driving back to the apartment so we could have a look at it, and then make our decision from there. It didn’t look as bad as she thought once she’d cleaned it up, so she decided not to go to the hospital. She got told off for that when we got home.

So this left us with little to do in the evening other than pack up most of our stuff and then go out for dinner.

One of the things we did do was to pack up a load of bags with dirty clothes and grab some other items we wouldn’t need again until home (Kas’s running stuff, all the walking boots, and similar) and take them up to the car. This was part of my cunning plan to avoid the debacle we’d had when attempting to carry all the bags in one go between the four of us when we arrived. On that occasion we seemed to have about 8 small bags as well as the four large cases, and we just couldn’t move it all without one of us (mainly me) running shuttles with the big bags. Getting five or six unneeded bags (including two of the big ones) into the car on Friday night was definitely a top plan.

We chose to go to one of the restaurants just around the corner. Kas and me had been eyeing up a raclette all week and this was the night. It was good, all though personally I think we were given a few too many potatoes and not quite enough cruditées and charcuterie. We managed to get enough beer though.

And that was more or less that. I think we had to pack a bit more of the kids’ stuff when we got in. We’d still got a pack of 8 beers in the fridge in the apartmnet but I think we had one each and resolved to take the rest home with us. We didn’t have the capacity, and it was necessary that we were in a fit state to drive the following morning. There was a bit of Olympics in French as ever.

Open the photo gallery >>

Another double-bubble post to finish with, which saw us travel from Chamonix back home, via an evening stopover in Dijon.

Saturday Morning – Bye Bye to Chamonix

We had to be out of the apartment and handing the keys back before 10am. It was another quite grey day up above with the promise of it getting rainy later.

Because we’d packed a load of bags into the car on Friday evening we had somewhat fewer bags to hump out with us on Saturday morning. We packed them all up whilst sweeping and tidying and whilst trying to stop the girls from making more mess. And as we left we were actually able to carry everything between the four of us, including a couple more bags of rubbish which I carried up to the car park to dispose of.

And so around to the rental agency building, where we dropped the keys and booklets off. We paid for parking for a hour or so because we’d decided to grab breakfast on the way. There was a nice looking cafe right next door to the agency which was one of the “hipster” variety. OK, I’m stereotyping, but the menu was simple but good, involving a range of proper coffees in reasonable sizes, some pastries, and muesli plus a couple of cooked options. The staff were all young and informal and the seating was mainly cushions around over-sized window sills. The tables all consisted of whole sections of tree cut into flat sheets, with legs added. It was one of the best breakfasts we’d had, and I wish we’d found the cafe earlier in the week. It was relatively cheap (by Chamonix standards) too.

And so to the autoroutes. While we were sitting having breakfast it started raining. It was very heavy rain, not namby-pamby drizzle, but proper stair-rods. We continued to be in and out of really heavy rain nearly until we got to Dijon. It didn’t really slow us down much though, but that was mainly because the “slowing down” was caused by an incident on the motorway around the south side of Geneva which caused a bit of a jam.

Once clear of this we started climbing over the hills towards Bourg-en-Bresse, which went fairly smoothly. From here we started heading northish along the A39. We planned (OK, I’d planned) stops at a number of service stations on the way to allow us to find one single geocache in each of the French departments we were passing through. On the cards for today we had Saône-et-Loire, Jura and Côte-d’Or. The final one was easy though, as it’s the department that Dijon is in. That means we have two stops to make, but very conveniently there are service stations in each along the A39. They were only about 70km apart, but what the wotsits ? We’ve got geocaches to do.

The first stop, which was by now conveniently time for lunch too, was at the excellently named Aire de Service du Poulet de Bresse (or, Service Station of the Bresse Chicken). Apparently, Bresse chickens are one of those appellation contrôlée jobs. The approach to the service station includes a roundabout with a massive chicken sculpture in the middle. Being a Saturday afternoon in the school holidays, it was busy and we struggled to find anywhere to park. Lunch was pretty good and we managed to beat a bit of a rush into the queue. I scooted off around the outside of the building in a rain shower to grab the geocache.

The second stop was at the Aire du Jura. We didn’t want to stop and it was busy again, so Kas dropped me off at a relevant point and then tried to find a parking space. She dropped me off at one end of the site and I had to walk past the entrance to the service station buildings and over into some woods on the other side of some weird exposition building that seemed to be a cube decorated entirely with circles. It was about 500m from where Kas dropped me off before I got to the cache site. It was well into the woods but easy to find and well placed with a good hint. Better get back to the car though. This proved quite tricky, as Kas had only just finished going round in circles in the car park and I didn’t have any phone signal, so I couldn’t phone Kas and ask where she was. I found her after a thankfully short time.

So from here we drove the remaining kilometres into Dijon and had very little trouble finding our hotel. It was quite hard work getting into it, though. This was partly because we couldn’t figure out where to stop or where to park and partly because once we did get the keys and access to the car park we then had to circle the block to get back to it, and it was rather a tight entrance. On the bright side though, we only had a handful of bags to carry upstairs.

Where They Make the Mustard

Kas wanted a bit of a snooze and the girls needed to burn off a bit of energy. By now the weather was improving a bit too, with the clouds starting to break up, so I took the girls for a walk (or run, skip, dance, flit, whatever, in the kids’ case). We did a handful of geocaches as we walked around to.

Dijon has a lovely old city centre with some fine old buildings, and it benefits from being pedestrianised. We walked down a shopping street on our way to the Place de la République. Once there, we discovered the dancing fountains. The girls were still bubbling over with energy and I was in no mood to tell them off about running around, so I kind of let them get on with it. The Place de la République has recently been pedestrianised and they’ve replaced all the tarmac with some smoothly shaped local stone (the subject of an earthcache here), and the square was very clean, so I was very happy to allow the girls to just get on with getting wet. Anyway, the weather was now getting quite warm and sunny, having made a complete mockery of our decision to take jumpers with us.

While I was sitting on a stone bench watching the kids getting soaked I met several sets of geocachers, who were mooching around looking for the geocache stuck underneath it. One group helped me find it. Another turned up and I pointed them to the correct end of the bench. As we were leaving I noticed another group who looked really like they were geocachers, and once we stood up and walked away I waited around for them to reveal themselves. Geocachers they indeed were.

From here we walked up to the Place Darcy and Jardin Darcy, where we did another geocache and then noticed the time. It was time to get back to the hotel and wake Kas up.

Kas was sort of awake when we got back, so it was a relatively quick matter to get ready, although the girls had to put on the clothes they’d planned for the following day because the ones they were wearing were soaking.

Dinner proved a bit of a challenge – mainly because it was one of those evenings where we had some conflicts of opinion on what to eat. Izzy had it in her head that she fancied a burger. A few places did them, but Ami didn’t fancy that and Izzy wouldn’t entertain the idea of anything else. We gawped at a whole series of restaurants down the shopping centre. We even sat down at one restaurant in the Place de la République before deciding to move on because the menu didn’t look right and the service seemed very slow. We eventually settled on about the second place we’d looked – a small pub with a limited selection. They did have burgers, and we all had one (Ami went for a chicken one, so not really a burger at all). The food was fantastic. Kas and me decided to drink wine rather than beer for the first time on the holiday.

Geocaches found during the course of the day were:

• AutoStop A39 – Aire du Jura
• L’aire du Poulet de Bresse
• PALAIS des DUCS de BOURGOGNE
• Le carillon muet
• Place de la Liberation-Les Pierres de Comblanchien
• Place Darcy

Miles and Miles of Tarmac

Sunday morning greeted us with overcast conditions and an early start. How early ? It was still dark when the alarm went off. We wanted out before 7am as we’d estimated we had at least 5 hours of actual driving to do to get to Calais, which meant we’d need at least two stops.

We got out of Dijon pretty quickly and headed up the motorway towards Troyes. At Troyes the Autoroute des Anglais begins. Before we got there though we had a scheduled stop at some services to find a cache in the Aube department. It was trickier than planned because a few of them didn’t have geocaches, and the one that did have both a restaurant and a geocache was a location where the cache appeared to be several hundred metres off down a side road. So we plumped for stopping twice, once at a “no services” stop (Aire du Champignol) to grab the geocache (a quick find) and then again at one that had a restaurant to get some breakfast (Aire du Plessis).

From there we decided to experiment with having Ami ride up front while Kas had a little snooze in the back. So Ami rode up front with me all the way from Troyes past Reims and up to the Aire d’Urvilliers, which took us two hours and was the home of our final geocache. It’s in the Aisne department. We made this a quick stop of twenty minutes only, involving a leg stretch, a wee break and some drinks.

Ami stayed in the front with Kas driving but we vowed to swap around before driving into the ferry port at Calais so Kev was up front for the handing over of documentation. We swapped drivers about 30km short of Calais as we passed through the final toll station. There’s always a pull out just after a French motorway toll booth.

Geocaches found on the drive through France were:

• Autoroute des Anglais
• Autostop – A5 Aire de Champignol

As you enter Calais from the A26 you are greeted by a load of double thickness security fences down the side of the road, and unlike when we arrived this time I noticed why. On the east side of the road you get a reasonably good view of the shameful site of the migrant camp. It is massive. I saw a report on the news this week about motorways being blocked by people smugglers in the night and how it’s all getting a bit wild out there. Drivers are currently advised not to attempt to access the port from the autoroutes between midnight and 6 am.

We obviously arrived in the middle of the day – 13:40 to be precise, and in plenty of time for our 3:30 sailing – so we didn’t see any issues with people on the roads, but the sight of the camp is quite distressing in itself.

As we arrived at the various passport controls we saw a sign identifying that there was a 13:55 sailing that was running on time. I thought it unlikely we’d make that, but the nice woman at the check-in advised that yes, there was space on that boat and we had time to get on it, and she was very happy to put us on that boat without extra cost.

The ferry journey home was a bit more choppy than the one out. Not bad, but choppy. This was mainly caused by the wind, and when we ventured out on deck it was quite entertaining, because the decks were wet, the boat was rocking about a bit, and the wind was howling. Getting up and down the stairs was a challenge.

We ate some pretty mediocre supposedly English food on the ferry so were hoping we could get back home without stopping, other than to change drivers from Kas to me as soon as we could. This was simply because we parked on the ferry next to a metal guard rail that sufficiently close that the driver’s door wouldn’t open fully, and whilst Kas could get in and out though the gap, I couldn’t. So Kas drove 10-15 minutes through Dover and then we stopped in the layby access to Samphire Hoe to swap over. Ami jumped in the front again too.

The drive home was slowed by a queue going into the Dartford Tunnel and then another behind an accident on the M25 but we still made it home before 6pm, calculating that it had taken us almost exactly 12 hours of travelling since we’d left Dijon.