Our Days in the UK

After our long and lovely hike in the Alps, it was very relaxing to spend the next afternoon (after Eric's morning in the archives) at the beach. We went to Sanary-sur-Mer, which was one of the beaches Eric remembered from his summer living in Marseille when he was a teenager.  We could not have asked for a more picture-perfect day. It was sunny, warm, and almost empty. That is my very favorite thing about home education (aside from sculpting young minds and things like that...) We get to travel to beautiful places when no one else is there! Well, other people were there, but not as many as in August. This whole stretch of the Mediterranean coast reminded me so much of where I grew up. It's no wonder they call Santa Barbara the American Riviera! In the picture below, I am trying to shelter in the single patch of shade to avoid too much sun. The kids are down by the water in hats building a sand castle. After we all swam and played in the sand for a f...

We were sufficiently close to the Alps while we were in Provence that we went for a hike on one of the days Eric didn't have to go to the archives. He found an absolutely beautiful hike that was only about a 2.5 hour drive from our hotel. We thought we'd maybe get out, hike a bit, and then turn around when the kids got tired. But to surprise Eric they planned on hiking the entire 5+ mile loop, which included a huge altitude change. Rebecca is so determined that when she gets something in her head, she does it well, and she was an absolute trooper on the hike. We really didn't hear a single complaint from either kid the entire way up or down. And so, we got rewarded with really pretty views! Here we are starting out. You can sort of see the base of a waterfall in this picture. It was a beautiful waterfall, and we hiked up to its top along our ascent. Both kids did the entire hike in their Crocs, because that was all I had packed for our trip to Provence. They man...

We are not actually on our way to Marseille any longer. In fact, we've been back from our trip for a couple of weeks, and are now on our way to London tomorrow. But as you might have noticed, I haven't blogged for awhile, so I have a lot of catching up to do. In any case, in the middle of September we went to Marseille for a week so that Eric could do research at Les Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence. (And we managed to sneak in quite a bit of fun in between his trips to the archives.) Also, we're moving to a new place in the Costwolds, and it's been a little chaotic. But the good news is that I have a lot to blog about, so when we get back from London I should be able to start catching up.  In the meantime, here are some pictures from the airplane to France and from our hotel.  Here are the kids eating their chocolate on the flight. I always let them pick out a treat for the plane, and I'm pretty sure that's Becca's favorite pa...

I have seen so many recipes, especially in historical books here, about blackberry and apple recipes. I wondered why they were always paired together, because it doesn't seem like the most obvious textural or taste combination to me. Well, now I know. We have blackberries and apples ripening simultaneously all around us! We don't have any apple trees in our yard, but there are lots of apple and crab apple trees growing on common land in our village. Even better, some neighbors who have carefully cultivated trees have been leaving out big buckets full of free apples for people to share. We have processed so many apples over the past few weeks. I really want an apple orchard! But for now I'll content myself with the pounds and pounds of apples we pick and gather. Blackberry-apple pie filling... Rows of apples waiting to be peeled and chopped, with a surprise head in the foreground:  More apples. These are not from the same batch as the one above. We've had S...

But before I tell you about apples, let's take a quick look at this gem of a castle that we visited last weekend. See the big grey clouds in the sky? That's a sign for us that it's time to go exploring, because especially during the summer school holidays here, if you go anywhere when the sun is shining, you will be joined by throngs of people. I'm not sure what the population density of England is, but it has to be high.  We have learned to stay home in our own little yard when it's sunny holiday time and to go out and explore when it's cold and/or rainy and/or during school hours... Anyway, this castle is on the English side of the border with Wales. A friend from church recommended we check it out because it was one of her childhood favorites. We were glad we did. We ended up visiting during a Medieval Festival there, so we got to see a jester and some presentations about food. There was also a knight contest but we didn't stay for that. ...