Closing Remarks

Well, we are home, and while I can't quite say it feels like we were never away, the old routines are very easily picked up.

One of the things that Justine and I really enjoy when we travel is checking out the supermarkets - I know it sounds mundane when you can have these famous and amazing sites and scenes around the corner, but it is in the supermarket that you really get a sense of the place you are in. Aside from trying to figure our what might be sour cream, or whether you are likely to be able to interpret cooking directions in a foreign language, just the differences in products available and the people buying them is quite insightful. Just finding them can be a challenge. Today we shopped at the local Coles, and it was all a little too easy and familiar. Good and bad I guess!

Justine has had a think about here favourite things on the trip, in no particular order they were: the people who spent time with us (hear hear!); Venice (agreed); and Aidan talking to the taxi driver in Vienna in Indonesian as it was the only non-English language he knew of and presumed that the taxi driver must be speaking it (clever and funny at the same time!).

Lauren can't really tell us what she most liked, but I think it would be a fair guess based on here enthusiasm for the topic, it may well have been the tunnels. There were many conversations that went like this: Tunnel! Bridge. Tunnel!! Bridge. Tunnel!!! Bridge. TUNNEL!!! and so on. Rivetting stuff - Denton would have loved it. Her other main interests were 'train', 'tram', 'big plane' and 'two dogs'. Seriously, she seems like she grew up a bit while we were away - her walking is much better and her vocab, sentence length and meaning have all improved out of sight over the 4 weeks. It would be interesting to know if that was due to travelling - but we are NOT doing a control experiement.

One thing that we hit on in Dubai was an answer to a question that Aidan frequently asks, which is about tallest buildings. He always wants to know what the tallest building is wherever we are, and then asks if it is the tallest in the world. I sometimes know the answer to the first question, but at least the answer to the second can be a fairly confident 'no'. However, in Dubai we did indeed see the tallest building in the world. It is seriously tall. It's still under construction, but I think the full height is there now - it just spindles up into a point in the sky that you can barely see. Many of the rest of the buildings there are hardly boring either...

And I think that is about all. Thanks for staying in touch, hope you enjoyed this. I know a few people were reading it, but I don't really know who - but thanks anyway, it makes taking the time to do this far more worthwhile.

If you are interested in seeing the final collection of photos from the trip, just e-mail me at davidbruce.act@bigpond.com and I'll let you know when and where you can see them (if you want a print of any, just let me know and that can also be arranged).

Cheers, Ciao, Au Revoir and whatever goodbye is in German - Weidersein I think, but it was so long ago!

Home sweet home

And almost the final chapter. We just got home - 12.15 on Jan 14th, almost exactly a month since we left.

There is a real sense of coming home, which is a nice feeling to have - even Lauren perked up in the taxi as she started to recognise where we were, and she and Aidan are now systematically going through all of their toys with great enthusiasm (more than they showed for any of the wonders of the world we showed them!).

I'll write some more in a day or so, and put up some recent photos that I have not had a chance to so far. Hope you've enjoyed these odd snippets of our time away. We certainly enjoyed bringing them to you!

[Oh yes, and of course it was the Butler who did it].

up in the air

It's something like 5am, and we're 11km up over the Great Australian Bight. John Lennon is on the in-flight system, and most things are well with the world (other than the way I originally spelled it!).

The flight has gone reasonably well after a shakey start. When we checked in they had lost the fact that our four seats + Mum should be together, so they had us all over the place – but in the end we got 4 seats together and Mum managed to get an aisle further back where we could swap around.

The kids have done really well up to this point – basically watching the TV for the first few hours, and then both getting a few hours sleep. They woke up about 4 ½ hours out of Sydney, and their meals have just arrived for breakfast. Might be a make or break moment. Justine is starting to get tired herself, which means that frayed tempers and short fuses could still be a feature of the last few hours.

By the time I get a chance to post this – we'll know!

And the winner is... us. The kids continued to do well for the rest of the trip, and even Justine isn't going too badly now that she has had a decent cup of tea back in the airport.

Mum had to leave us a little prematurely in Sydney, as she was flying Virgin from Sydney to Perth, while the rest of us were on Qantas to Canberra, and they run separate shuttles to their respective terminals, and you need a boarding pass to do anything. I asked her whaat the highlights had been for here before she left – and the one she picked was actually our last lunch in France. It was a beautiful day – warm enough to sit outside with shirt sleeves only, and in front of the villa looking out at it, the surrounding hillsides and up beyond the pool to a snowcovered mountain we ate a sumptuous feast of paella, risotto, gnocci, fresh bread, French wine and various other bits and pieces. it was spontaneous, picturesque, and gastronomically and mentally satisfying. An excellent choice, and I'm glad she reminded me of it.

Aidan's highlight was meeting Marie, who he played with for the last few days in France; and the natural history museum in Vienna.

Justine is still deciding, and hopefully she will have one by the time I can post this.

Awards

Best Chocolate Croissant - Random bakery in Vienna

Best GPS Navigation - finding our way to the France accommodation in the dark down alley ways that were considerably narrower than the car, including going through several people's front rooms.

Best line - Aidan singing the one line he knew from a song 15 times, the pausing and saying that it was better with music

Best tantrum - Lauren in the square in Padova

Best purchase - still the portable DVD player

Most overrated coffee - Italy

Most people doing every job - Dubai

Least flavoursome local food - Frogs legs (France)
most flavoursome local food - Onion soup (France)

Homeward bound

Well, sitting here in the lobby of the hotel in Dubai waiting for the shuttle to the airport - so this post could be cut short at any moment!

Dubai was kind of interesting - after being in places where everything is old, to be in a place where everything is new was quite diferent.

shuttle's here - see you all at home!

Wish us luck

Dubai

We're here on our one-day Dubai stopover, wherever Dubai actually is. From what I have seen from most people, just about everyone knows approximately where Dubai is, but no-one knows with any real precision! Even after being here for 12 hours, I don't have ay really clear idea, as the maps show only the local area, not the regional level.

Dubai airport is pretty impressive - not quite on the gran scale of Canberra airport, but I guess they can handle the smaller volume of flights they have through.

The weather here is warmer than Europe, but still only in the high teens - it is the cold season here. The plan is to do a bit of an open top bus tour we think, and then have a swim in the rooftop pool. The main reason for staying here was to break up the two flights and to make the next leg (the 13 hour flight) more survivable, so we really aren't planning to do too much in our brief stay.

The hotel is nice, but we gt picked up at 7am tomorrow for the flight to Sydney, and then that will largely be that.

The final countdown

And so to our last few days before we head home. The weather in the middle of the week was pretty uninspiring – grey, cold and rainy. Not the end of the world, but it makes it harder to get around and see things, particularly with the kids who end up colder and wetter more quickly for some reason. We visited the Medieval walled town of Vence, and also Cannes under those conditions, and so probably didn't get as much out of them as we'd hoped.

On Thursday Espen, Ragnhild and Marie arrived, and we have had a couple of very enjoyable nights and days with them. It's been 7 years since we last saw them, though with the miracle of the internet we have been able to see pics of the kids growing up and it really was like having not seen them for a few weeks rather than years. Nice.

There has been a train strike here since we arrived, and it shows no sign of ending evidently. Twice we tried to see if we could get a train to Monaco, but had no luck and so we drove in the end. Again, the GPS paid its way! This time we got lucky with the weather – and for the morning we had gorgeous blue skies and calm conditions – it almost seemed warm! Monaco was like Venice in that it seemed vaguely familiar, and the line up of cars out the front of the casino was spectacular – the Ferraris were actually the ordinary looking ones! It got a bit windy at the end, but it was a really enjoyable visit (and technically another country we visited!).

Today we are having a quietish day – late start, coffee and chocolate croissants for breakfast. In a few minutes we'll head into Grasse to find a playground for the kids and a cafe for the adults (and if you are reading this, then the internet cafe will have been open too!). in the afternoon we'll head down to Cannes, where hopefully the conditions will still allow the kids to go on the beach for a bit.

Tomorrow we all head off – some back to Oslo and the rest of us on to Dubai for a 1 day stopover on our way home. At this time of the holiday you inevitably start thinking about whether you are ready to get home, and I think this time we are. It's been a thoroughly enjoyable trip, but we are also looking forward to getting home, seeing friends, having a choice of more than the same three shirts to wear – that sort of thing!

Hopefully there will be one or two more opportunities to post updates before we get home, but we are getting very close to the part where we reveal the identify of the culprit!

Provence

The last main part of our trip has been hard to get to, but well worthwhile now that we are here. The trip from Venice to Milan was challenging, and involved a few forced marches with our full luggage load, but that was nothing compared to the emotional travails of the Milan to Nice / Grasse leg.

The day began well with an extremely positive taxi experience getting back to Milan Centrale Stazione (no more walking!). The train took a while to find because we were given wrong information by several people, and the platform signage was still showing the details of the train that had left 2 hours ago. Without being particularly salubrious for a first class carriage, the trip itself was interesting and smooth for the first 4 hours of 5. However, as we approached an hour out of Nice an Italtrens person informed us in Italian that the train would go no further then Ventimiglia – the last stop in Italy – due to a rail strike in France. Luckily a very nice and patient young tri-lingual Frenchmqn who had put up with being the 6th man in our 6 man cabin for the past few hours both translated the initial information and then helped us work out the next steps – which consisted of everyone piling onto a local train to Nice 2 hours later. When we finally got to Nice and found the hire car place, it was closed on Sunday. Handy. We had to hire a different car for 24 hours and the go back to get the one we had booked the following day.

The GPS managed to finally get us to the villa, albeit rather indirectly – as the roads are so close and convoluted that it has difficulty at times working out which road you are on and occasionally gives apocryphal directions. But we got there to find our French hosts most hospitable indeed – the villa was well lit, warm, and they went out of their way to provide us with some provisions to survive the night.

The villa is fabulous. Beautifully set on a hillside looking over a valley filled with similar types of character-ful homes and towards the Medieval city of Grasse, it is three stories of all the Provencal style we could want, inside and out. The terraced gardens have two pools, as well as olive trees, and a couple of stone and wooden outbuildings. All of the rooms are large, spacious, comfortable and have windows opening as doors to the main view. Clearly it is set up mainly for summer, but it is warm and comfortable now – and with the rainy weather of the last few days, a great place to hole up.

Driving around here is interesting, to say the least. The roads are so complex and intricate and just plain weird that any modern town planner would be shot just for thinking of it! I've come to the liberating conclusion that driving around here is much the same as building in Venice – you do whatever you want in front and don't pay the slightest attention to what is happening anywhere else. This may not prove a viable long-term approach, but it is working for the moment.
Tomorrow we meet up with our last companions – my friends Espen and Ragnhild (and their daughter Marie) who are flying down from Oslo for the weekend. It will be great to see them again, the last time I saw them was in 2001 in Norway, and we are looking forward to sharing some better wine than when we were post-grad students together in Brisbane.

Aidan and Lauren are travelling pretty well. They have their ups and downs, and a lot of it is not thqt interesting for them, but they have done well. Lauren has been pretty tempestous, and we are probably not looking forward to the last flights home, but all things considered they have been good and hopefully they have got something out of being dragged aroud the world!

text for Ciao Veneto

The text for the Ciao Veneto post is in black text for some reason - there seems to be something in the text that it doesn't like because it won't let me even repost it for some odd computer only sense making reason.

Anyway - to read it, just click and drag over where it looks like there should be text and you will be able to read it!

Milano

We traveled by train today to Milan, where we have just one night on our way to Nice. The train itself was great, it was the getting to and from that were more challenging.

The morning involved a range of complex set pieces including Fay and Aidan getting a train to Venice, the rest of us taking the hire car to the mainland part of Venice (Mestre) - where we were supposed to get a train into Santa Lucia to get the train to Milan. However, dropping off the hire car involved some hefty luggage moving dodging traffic and trains from the depot to the train station (apparently 1.5km is close enough!). Fay and Aidan then got the train back out to Mestre to meet us, as Milan train stopped there - but we then had to run from one end of the train to the other as the first class carriages were at the front, instead of at the back where they were on eveery other train!

After that, the journey went well.












I think most people would have taken us for locals.



Where we stayed in Milan is about a 30 ｗalk from the station. We know this for a fact. Tomorrow we will take a taxi back. This is the view from our room - at least we didn't have far to go for dinner!

I don't know what the internet access will be like where we stay in France, so I will update this as soon as I can. For the moment, I sign off with one piece of high art, and one of low art. You can interpret as you prefer...

Ciao Veneto

And so our stay in the Veneto region of Italy comes to an end with the coldest day in the last three years. Apparently it didn't get above 0 degrees today in the town where we are staying, and it was foggy with low visibility all day. However, we did a drive up to Vicenza, about 45 mins drive away, and it was fabulously clear and blue there (but foggy within 10 mins when we headed home).

We've had a bit of everything for our stay. Initially a grey overcast day for our first day, then three glorious blue days in Padova and Venice – then snow on New Year's Eve and the cold, foggy day today.

Our accommodation was not bad, probably a 7 out of 10. The villa itself was nice – plenty of rooms and once we figured out how to control the heating both relatively warm and not too expensive to keep that way (as heating is extra). The log fire was smoky, but still much much better than not having one! The setting wasn't as rural and scenic as we hoped – though that sort of rural, hilly landscape was only a few minutes drive away the other side of Monselice (the nearest town and rail station).

Padova is about 20 mins by train, and Venice about an hour. Padova and Vicenza, like Monselice on a smaller scale, are quite typical from my experiences of historic European cities. There are spectacular buildings and squares etc – and each city seems to have its own particular claim to fame – a famous architect, the home of some famous person, or whatever. The individual buildings tend to merge into one amorphous impression of age and grandeur of vision – the angled, diffused light within gives all of them a cathedral feel, and the scale is often hard to imagine.

Venice was a bit different. Unexpectedly, it was really interesting and impressive – and even more unexpectedly one of the main reasons was its sense of genuineness. It certain ly plays up to its imagery (and it relies on people being prepared to pay ridiculous amounts for mundane things on the basis that 'it doesn't really matter how much it costs given where we are'). That said, the image is very clearly based on a reality that really is right there to see. The whole place is a totally disorganised mish-mash of design, textures, materials and shapes. It gives the impression that every planning decision was made totally in the moment with virtually no thought for any consequence, and so every decision is a simple and direct solution to the immediate need – and nothing more. I loved the colours, variety, novelty of it all. To get more than a very superficial impression of the place though, I think you need to spend at least a month there to get to know it – and so that is my new plan, though I know now how or when such a month might be possible. Not for a while at least – it is not a place for small children!