Our last two days in France were just as busy, with a visit to St Malo, just beyond Mont St Michel, on the Wednesday, and a morning on the beach on the way back to the ferry on Thursday.

We took the scenic coastal route to St Malo, and couldn’t resist stopping to pick up some massive bunches of the ubiquitous garlic from a seller amusingly named Elaine Bastard. It can’t be an easy living, selling garlic and possibly only garlic, but if that were me, I would appreciate its unique advantages: the time it gives for reading, the low-impact lifestyle of a small car and a small travel to work (and a small dog), and the endless view over the salty sand flats of the bay just yards away. And free garlic.

Twenty minutes further down the road we happened upon a small land-yachting outfit (”char-à-voile”), and as the wind was picking up, we thought – rather trepidly – we’d give it a go. Jamie and I, being the boldest, would bravely pilot a single-seater each, while Barlie would be in Mum’s care in the safety of a stable two-seater.

We got kitted up, paid the man, and set off in our chariots. The wind had seemed strong… but minutes later we were becalmed and going nowhere! So much for the adrenaline and nerves! The operators then changed the course to make better use of the wind’s (new) direction, and things started moving again. Soon Mum and Barlie were each in their own single-seaters, and we were all whizzing round the course at lightning speed, all caution to the wind and loving every minute!

About an hour after we were supposed to have finished, we finally gave up our gusty chariots, and went for a snack meal at a roadside cafe. The proprietress was less than pleased with our decision to share three dishes between the four of us, and loudly declared her annoyance to anyone that would listen. Really it’s mandatory as an English-speaker to schedule in one or two good ear-bashings, by way of allowing the noble French tradition of excellent customer service to continue.

Eventually we arrived in St Malo, as the afternoon was coming to a close. We walked through the town, had a delicious patisserie and a peek in the awe-inspiring cathedral, then sauntered around the ancient medieval city walls, and were treated to brilliant dappled sunshine through the Norman clouds.

The next morning we packed up camp, and headed to the nearby seaside resort town of Jullouville, where Mum had spent a week on holiday with her school, about twenty years ago. Much had changed, but the feel of a good seaside town always stays the same. Again we bought some patisseries, impressively neatly and rapidly (and frankly unnecessarily) wrapped in gift-paper.

The doughy-looking thing on the far right (picture below) (my brother on the right in the picture above is far from doughy) is a Far Breton, with no direct comparison in any confections available in Britain. It’s rather like a cross between a Yorkshire pudding and a crème caramel. With prunes at the bottom. It sounds odd, but was divine!

After an hour or so playing on the beach, collecting shells, finding hermit crabs, paddling in the warm water, and digging up sand-worms, we went for a surprisingly tasty and excellent value lunch, and narrowly avoided a massive downpour.

On the way back to the car we ducked into a tiny photography exhibition, got talking to the photographer – a lovely chap – and bought some of his prints. Three-for-two; bargain! We couldn’t delay the inevitable two-hour journey back to the ferry any longer, so set off and stopped only for supplies at a supermarket: a picnic for supper on the boat.

Camembert, St Agur, Apericubes, tomatoes, dried sausage, more crusty baguettes, more Normandy butter, and more red wine. Bliss.

Sunset over the water as we came back into Portsmouth.

This is our haul! Leftover food, the photographs, gifts for friends and family in America (lacking the privilege of such proximity to France), and of course garlic.

A really memorable – and filled wall-to-wall – four days. All factors played out very well: four-up in one capacious car for minimum travel cost in reasonable comfort; camping for fun and minimal accommodation cost; not too many hours spent on the road, while still being far enough away to feel that we really were away. We’ll do it all again… one day!

After getting back from the Lakes we had a weekend at my parents’, not doing an awful lot, but still somehow not having enough time to see everyone we wanted to. A few people joined us for the afternoon in the pub and a (rather lively) Vietnamese meal… of which there are luckily few pictures. There was also an idyllic, picture-perfect, couldn’t-have-wished-for-better (albeit hungover) Sunday lunch in the garden under the apple tree.

Then another crack-of-sparrowfart departure on the Monday morning, this time to Portsmouth to get the ferry to Cherbourg. No ordinary slow ferry, though, this one hurtled across the Channel at a blistering 40 knots and got us there in only three and a half hours!

So by lunchtime, we had driven for an hour and a half, and reached the peaceful pretty town of Bayeux.

A well-deserved beer was in order! This went nicely with assorted salads and an ‘American’ sandwich (with chips thrown in the middle, not a technique I’ve seen often since living in the US).

Then after a look round the excellent Bayeux Tapestry, nearly a millenium old (no pictures allowed; suffice to say it’s impressive and well worth a visit), we motored out to the coast to visit the American Military Cemetery about 10km north-west of Bayeux.

Moving.

Miraculously we then crammed in yet one more stop, at Arromanches to the site of the Mulberry harbour built in the twelve days following the D-Day landings in June 1944. There’s a museum there with scale models of the harbour, details of how it was built, and a period film showcasing the efforts of our jolly lads in the war effort. It’s truly astonishing how much was achieved in such short timescales.

The remaining caissons are visible in Satellite view:

View Larger Map

The ones on the beach are the spares that never got used:

Finally we made our way across to the west side of the base of the Cotentin peninsula (the finger with Cherbourg at the top), to our campsite. A LONG day! The campsite was comfortable and well-equipped: highly recommended. Perfectly situated for exploring the area too, near the not-too-touristy town of Granville.

This is breakfast the next morning, with baguettes and croissants freshly baked on site, still warm (I can still taste them now, there’s nothing that compares – especially with chunks of creamy-white Normandy butter and strawberry jam):

The day’s visit was to Mont St Michel, about 45 mins’ drive from the campsite. This used to be completely cut-off at high tide, and must have accordingly lost some of its charm when the permanent causeway was built at the end of the 19th century, though visitors are warned that the car park may still flood at certain high tides!

A single crowded narrow street curves round the south side of the island, up to the steep entrance stairs of the Abbey perched on the top.

All the occupants of those vehicles are on this rock as well?!

It’s impressive up close. Needless to say it’s had a long and interesting history, and was a prison for a large part of the nineteenth century.

Up next, two more days in France, and then there’s only a month of stuff back in the US to catch up on!

The rest of the Lakes trip was fairly action-packed:

A visit to GoApe, where you get to swing around in the trees (safely harnessed at all times), 50ft off the forest floor, clambering over bridges from tree to tree, whizzing down zip lines and making monkey noises.

Plenty more eating at the massive table in the house, with up to nineteen of us seated around it! More drinking too, and more optional monkey noises.

More ambling around the immediate countryside; this is the view from down near the lake, past the village nestling at the foot of the hills, up to the Old Man of Coniston behind:

We took a trip on a steam launch across the lake, to the house where the acclaimed writer and workers’ rights activist John Ruskin lived and worked. His story is interesting and inspiring, but not without its touch of sadness. He had a vast range of interests and knowledge, spanning from art to science and geology to ornithology.

More eating! This is the locally made Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding. …Words can’t describe how good this stuff is. Decadent doesn’t even begin to cover it, especially if it’s got a good dollop of clotted cream on it. We ended up bringing some back in our hand luggage, causing a few raised eyebrows and re-scans at the airport security!

The last day we were there we went sailing. Mum’s breezy proclamations of “There’s not much wind today, is it really worth going sailing?” were not exactly accurate; there was a stiff wind (see the flag blown horizontal) with sudden gusts and rain on the way.

We ventured out nonetheless, in three Wayfarers between seven of us; getting soaked by spray and rain, and blown to bits by the wind. One boat even managed to break their centreboard, leaving them effectively completely stranded (unable to go anywhere but downwind fast).

All too soon it was time to leave the Lakes. On the way out we stopped at Skelwith Bridge to admire the river in full raging flood, swollen from the heavy rain:

We’d had a blast that week! Next… our adventures in France.

After day to adjust and unwind a bit, in Woking (including our first meeting with the hilarious Snoop tha Dogg at Neil and Diane’s), we set off for the Lakes early on Friday morning. On Saturday we relaxed, explored the village of Coniston, and rambled up a nearby hill to find the waterfalls. It rained steadily, so the rivers were in full flow.

Then on Sunday we ventured up the largest of the nearby hills, the Old Man of Coniston. This overlooks the town and the lake, and at 800m high is not the tallest in the Lakes, and certainly not in the UK, but is still a good afternoon’s jaunt, and takes a little effort to complete in good time.

The best bit is that the walk can start right outside the door of the house – no need to get in the car! (The consequent lack of global warming explains the miserable weather we had most of the week.) All ready to go:

Here’s our route, as best I can show it with scintillating Paint skills. The house is point 1.

Rolling meadows on the way up the road, to the start of the footpath (2):

More meadows and a drystone wall. These walls wind their way around most of the Lake District, and a lot of rural Britain, often firmly implanted on the most inhospitable of gradients, and battered by wind and rain, yet standing firm for centuries. Though the resources are often readily available in the environment, the labour cost nowadays works out as about £250 per metre, or $350 per yard.

I suspect there are more sheep in the Lake District than there are people. The land is neither flat nor lush enough for cattle grazing, but sheep are perfectly comfortable.

Things start to get steeper! This is the waste pile from an old slate mine we are approaching (3).

Our best guess was that it was last used in the early part of the twentieth century. There was a large saw and mill bed, together with its enormous motor frame, shattered and torn apart. That must have made quite a bang!

An old barn.

The tunnels disappear into the hillside. Some are connected all the way through, and blow out freezing damp air, cooled by the land mass of the hill. Refreshing on a hot day!

This is where they were taking the slabs of slate from; we could see the bore holes where explosive charges were inserted. They must have been after the larger pieces, for counter-tops, flooring flagstones or headstones, judging by the size of the lumps they had left behind, and the size of the saw!

More slate scree; luckily we’re not climbing up this way.

The view starts to get impressive (4), and the climb steeper still, though at this point we have departed from the main route in order to take a short-cut and catch up with the others.

Jenny bringing up the rear!

As we approach the summit, the tarn recedes below us and starts to look small.

At the summit! (5). There’s no triumphant group shot of us gathered at the top, as it was too windy to speak! Huddled in the meagre shelter of the cairn, we scarfed our lunches, felt very cold very soon, and moved off down the other side.

Battling into the wind on the west side of the summit (6). That rock face looks like a challenging climb!

Jamie is cold and huddled up in her cagoul! (Mac-in-a-sack; we purchased one each the day before, from a shop in Coniston. A valuable acquisition indeed, given the amount it rained over the week! The tag was ripped on the one I was considering; the shop owner’s husband suggested she take £5 off the £20 RRP… though she didn’t know I had heard him say that. “You can have it for £18 if you like!”)

The tarn looks small in the picture, but was deceptively large – it took a good ten minutes to walk along it. As with so many walks, the descent took so much longer than the ascent, especially as we were taking the long way round (7) back to the car park at the top of the road (2).

Soon we were back at the house, warming up with hot showers and mugs of tea. A good day’s expedition!

Not the first journey back to the UK, and probably not the last, but there won’t be many like this one was! We flew with Delta, via Minneapolis, on a ‘buddy pass’: a colleague of mine has a nephew working at Delta, and the buddy pass allows friends and family to get heavily discounted tickets… with one caveat: they are standby tickets, so you only fly when there is space on the plane. This *normally* works out OK, I was told…

All went smoothly from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, after a ridiculously early start (the first of five 4am starts over the course of the 18-day trip), and a four-hour stop-over at Minneapolis gave us the chance to explore the Mall Of America, The Largest Mall In America (And Nearly The Largest Mall In The World).

There are no less than four theme parks, with massive rides and hordes of screaming schoolpeople.

…and luckily a good restaurant or two too. Steak for me thanks!

As we were waiting at the gate in Minneapolis that evening, it started to look unlikely that there would be space for us on the flight to London. We were preparing backup plans – Jamie’s second cousins live within an hour of the airport, so we were going to have a place to stay for the night – and contemplating the raft of uncertainties that would unfold. Would there be a flight we could get on in the morning? Would there even be space on the evening flight the next day? How could we spend more time at the Mall Of America without bankrupting ourselves? Would we be able to get to the family holiday in the Lakes in time, and be able to get the best bedroom in the house?

It was frankly upsetting. Even having steeled ourselves to the risks of flying standby in peak season, this started to seem rather unpalatable. Luckily enough, some other party didn’t show up, so there was plenty of space on the plane. In First Class, too! At the drop of a hat, our fortunes had changed, and we were on our way to Heathrow, on schedule and in luxury.

Coming up: more good stuff to eat! And it’s written down too!

Mmm, tasty starters: a salmon gravadlax, and a Thai chicken and coconut soup. (Check it out: real metal cutlery. Now that’s trust.)

Can’t remember the main course, but there was cheese for afters:

Sleepy-time! At last. The seats recline with fully adjustable back-rest and foot-rest, and even an adjustable lumbar support: in and out as well as up and down!

And the seats go ALL THE WAY BACK!

A few hours’ kip, then in a flash it’s breakfast time.

Then we’re back on home turf, and so naturally it’s curry time! (Thursday evening by this point.) A precedent has been set; this will be a holiday of eating. We gathered some family and friends, and headed to Vojons in St Johns, about one minute’s walk from my parents’ house.

Tomorrow is the start of the first Willis-Orellana Family Holiday! Our bags are packed, and we can just snatch a couple of hours’ sleep before our shuttle bus picks us up at 5am to take us to the airport.

It’s about the worst time to be leaving the garden, but we have friends house-sitting for us while we’re away, to water everything and eat the explosion of tomatoes that is about to manifest. We tried the very first ripe ones today, and they were extremely tasty!

This is a very mini-blog, as bed is calling.

UK people: see you very soon!

US people: see you when we get back!

Not counting the hours or anything, but it’s only six days until we set off for England for our two-and-a-half week summer holiday! Can’t wait for that first real pint of real ale.

In anticipation of the USA and England matches last weekend, Jamie and I went and kicked a ball around in Victory Park for as long as we had the stamina. (About forty minutes.)

It’s now nearly a week later, and my shinsplints have just about recovered. We must do that more often; it definitely feels beneficial, and you know you’re doing some good if you get out breath so quickly! I’ve had some lower back pain in the past few months, which was strangely relieved by this (and also, curiously, by digging in the garden).

So on Saturday morning we established ourselves at Lucky Baldwins pub in Old Town, well in advance of the USA match (kickoff 11:30 local time) and ordered breakfast and a beer. The match was best forgotten though, as was the dismal England match the next day. Better luck next time chaps…

Our crop of beans. This was all of them – about three servings, at a stretch! They were very tasty… but I suspect we need to fertilise them better to get a more worthwhile crop. It doesn’t work out too economically with such a pitiful volume: the plants were probably more than a pack of beans would have been!

Early morning sunlight streams into our spare bedroom.

Luckily these traffic jams don’t happen too often, but they really don’t make my commute any more pleasant. Bumper-to-bumper on the 118 freeway, still 30 miles from home… (at least I can have the roof down though).

…Where did I leave the cat-opener, anyway? More comedy signs at Rose Tree Cottage.

Yarr, me hearties! Arrrr! Ahoy there! It do have been a good long while since I did last be afloat! But this last yon weekend recently I did truly reinstate me sea legs! Yo ho ho and a bottle of whatever I can be laying me hands on!

Our old neighbours from the apartment (Darryl and Eletta) have a friend Richard (Eletta’s boss’s husband), with a BOAT. This makes him a very valuable person to know. He’s always working on it, and going out for half-day sailng trips, so when he requested another pair of hands, I jumped at the chance and went along for the day.

The boat is kept in a dry storage at the Channel Islands Harbour in Oxnard, a good two hours’ drive north and west from here, so Darryl and I had an early start, to drive up and meet Richard, and make the most of the day.

The boatyard chap pulls the boat (the Alice Maye) forward out of her space, so we can access her and do a couple of jobs before getting afloat. There’s no-one else around in the boatyard, despite it being a beautiful day. Lots of under-used boats – there are plenty for sale, too, at only $3000-4000… hmmm… tempting…

A quick trip to the chandlery (sweet shop / candy store) to scratch the retail-therapy itch, oh yeah and to buy some essentials like new rope too!

Mast down, to fit new ropes, replace some very knackered blocks (pulleys), and give a general health check:

Lovely shiny new ropes in place!

One other boat in the yard was not so lucky – her jib furling mechanism had come loose in a 40mph wind, and with the sail on the flap, the mast didn’t stand a chance.

A textural close-up of the Alice Maye’s mounting plate for the outboard engine. Crispy! Boats provide excellent subjects for experimental fun photography… if I did this more often, I might invest in some more appropriate equipment…

One other job was to repaint the boat’s name on the side of the hull.

A steady hand required!

She gets a quick clean down, to remove muddy footprints before setting sail.

Marina chap gets back on his little tractor to tow her to the lift.

Strapped up, she is airborne!

Carefully maneouvred into the water:

We are afloat! Starting the outboard involves taking it apart and filling it with starting fluid, but eventually it idles smoothly, and we are ready to go.

Out on the water, sails set, we can turn off the engine and let the wind do the work! This is when the magic of sailing is finally felt, as there is nothing but you and the wind, the boat and the waves.

There’s a perfect healthy breeze, so our progress is swift but not hair-raising.

Lunch is a rather large burger:

Darryl takes the helm, as skipper Richard relaxes. Not another boat in sight! Stark contrast to the south coast of Britain, where you can’t go half a mile without encountering ferries, yuppies or lost pedalos.

We didn’t go far from land. Just far enough to know that you could go further if you wanted. (And if you had the next day off work.)

Last weekend we decided to dig a second vegetable patch. We are running short of space in the first one!

We might as well make it big, so we allocated a 24ft x 5ft plot and staked it out. The northern side of the plot (on the left of the picture) will at some point have a nice fence running across the garden to divide it up between the tidy lawn side (eventually it will be a real lawn) and the mucky vegetable patch side.

Our existing ‘lawn’ looks like this before we start – crab grass and wood-chip mulch. We have to rake as much of this up off the surface as possible, before we can start digging out the roots of the weeds.

Jamie raking the mulch and weeds. Hot work in the sun!

Digging is hard work too – constantly bending down to pick out the roots and bash the earth off. These are the crab grass roots: each plant is a mess of roots, probably 5-10 large white roots per plant, each up to 2ft long. You have to dig these up completely; if you leave even a small bit in the ground, they will grow back!

Weeds mostly removed from most of the plot. There will be stragglers…

Some of the new border is now in place. It feels like we’re really starting to conquer the garden, now, with two veg patches and even a pathway between them!

Jamie cooling off in the hose – this felt so refreshing! We dried off in minutes.

Next door’s tiny noisy cat, adventuring on our porch.

Squirrels have been chewing on the main overhead power lines running into our house – apparently they like to sharpen their teeth on it. Four or so of the six strands of the main earth cable, providing the mechanical strength for it, were chewed away. It could have been catastrophic given a few more months or years.

We called the Pasadena City chaps in, to have a look (luckily this is their responsibility to maintain), and they declared it a Code One Red Emergency and repaired it straight away!

Nice shiny new cable glinting in the sunlight:

This is a low-flying bomber on Memorial Day, on the same day as the Spring Bank Holiday in the UK. There were also seven planes in formation, making several passes up and down the valley – most impressive.

Memorial Day Burger, that evening, at Jean and Marcos’ house.

We’ve splashed out on another new piece of furniture for the dining room, a cabinet/dresser type thing with cupboards and some wine storage space. A flat-pack job from CostPlus, with reasonable quality wood (mostly solid hardwood) and a nice dark ‘distressed’ finish.

Assembled, it really completes the room – and makes it look a little less like we’ve just moved in.

First pickings from the courgette plant – we have had several more since – they are tasty!

Dad came to visit for a few all-too-short days, this last weekend. He was able to squeeze it in before a work trip to Chicago, not exactly ‘on his way’, but worth doing while on the same land mass at least.

We had a very good weekend, eating and drinking far too much, with a big Sunday lunch: sixteen of us around the table – a real testament to the space in our dining room, and to the sheer volume of cutlery, crockery, serving plates, chairs etc we have accumulated so far! Pictures to follow…

There was also an excellent meal at Noir (one of our favourite restaurants), breakfast on the porch, a barbeque at Ken and Celeste’s, a brief visit to Santa Monica and the beach, a walk around Griffith Observatory overlooking the city of Los Angeles, plenty of driving around with the top down, and an Ethiopian meal. Quite a busy weekend. Again it was great to be able to share some of the more local experiences.

We’ve done very little to the house lately, instead just inching forward in the garden with tending our veggies, tidying up, weeding, clearing, chopping back and organising. We face a constant battle to tame our garden, over the years to come. The biggest challenge is fitting all the cleared rubbish into the garden waste bin each week! (Still, we’re happy to have it collected weekly, as opposed to fortnightly as in much of the UK. Also the bin is pretty large!)

Plants tend to multiply – once people know you’re growing your own veg, they start giving you more! So far we’ve been donated one courgette plant from Celeste, one tomato plant, and one ‘giant banana’ squash plant from our old neighbour Will.

The first courgette plant, and the pumpkin plant, starting to explode… these will start fighting for space in about a week!

Other veg – tomatoes, parsley, beans, lettuces, carrots, peppers, chillies. The little pot is an earwig trap, filled with beer, vegetable oil, soy sauce and sugar. So far there are ten or fifteen casualties. (Another of the local fauna bent on blighting our happy existence.)

Chillis! I suspect we will be inundated with these; there will be too many to eat fresh, so I plan to make chilli pickle with them (like Patak’s).

Tom-ay-dohs. We have two normal-sized tomato plants, one cherry tomato, and whatever Will gave us!

First strawberry. It was delicious; we shared it.

Our neighbour Jeanette has had a lot of the dead tree cleared away from her side of the garden by our garage, possibly inspired by my cutting back the same mess from our side. (Filled the bin.) Consequently there is ten times the amount of light coming through, which will be good for the veggies, and probably also good for the weeds that want to sprout up from the nice bare patch of earth there.

I can now stand in the corner by the garage there, and get a novel view of the house (showing the pine tree in urgent and expensive need of trimming):

There is also vegetation to cut back on my head. I just haven’t had the time for a haircut!

We started, and soon thereafter finished, Jamie’s egg from the Easter Mummy. Really nice… mmm.. tastes like England…

Ken and I went for a random late-night mission to get tacos from one of the many taco trucks in Pasadena. They’re a lot like the kebab vans in England, just with more meat and less salmonella. I hope. These look somewhat repellant, but are in fact delicious.

Development has finally started in the vacant plot near Jamie’s parents’ house. There are two or three model homes built already, so Jamie and I went for a nosy peek. They’re “very nice”, but they really aren’t “Tiramisu”. They look great, with good layout, airy living spaces, high ceilings, vast kitchen pantries and bedroom closets. The quality of the fixtures and fittings, though, is only adequate. The developers could have spent an additional few grand – a fraction of the cost of the house – and fitted higher quality handles, windows, counter tops etc. This would have matched the potential and appeal of the properties.

The view from the master bedrooms is stunning. It was a bright, clear, green spring day, and the mountains really looked their best. We reckon these houses (three- to four-bedrooms, two- to three- bathrooms, 2600 square feet inside area) could be getting on for a million dollars each. The view is a not insignificant part of that…

Back to our own, more ‘characterful’ abode, and encouraged by the glamour of the possibilities we had observed, I plasterboarded the right hand side of the stairs to the basement. More rats at bay!