Clear Blue Skies Above Paris, France - 16-23 April

Hi all,

How lucky were we to have train reservations from Amsterdam to Paris last Friday! We could have flogged them for a packet at Amsterdam Central where the ticket office was in meltdown. As things turned out, the only 'eruption disruption' for us was the train being 1.5 hours late as they attached extra carriages and the daunting challenge of pulling two children and four suitcases through the mayhem at Gare du Nord on arrival - possibly the most panicky moment of the trip so far!

Once settled into our tiny two room apartment on the left bank, however, the only volcanic fallout for us has been bright clear skies above us, shorter queues and one extraordinary chance encounter in a Paris metro tunnel at peak hour.

Once again, Paris has well and truly lived up to the hype and we have had a fantastic time here. Even those obligatory tick list items - the Eiffel Tower, The Louvre etc which John and I may not have done again have been fresh and thrilling with the kids. We spent hours up that tower - hours - lift up and stairs down with Francis counting every step of the way. We spent a long time with the lovely lady Lisa at the Louvre but better (and bigger) by far was Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana on the opposite wall. The boys know every inch of that painting having spent much of the January holidays doing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of it and here it was in all its glory 'and not a single piece missing'!

We have wandered for miles through the city and passed a golden Saturday afternoon with at least half of Paris, walking on the grass, eating icecream and watching furiously competitive petanque in the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg. We have enjoyed astonishingly affordable meals in the little bistros of Rue de Mouffetard where the boys have both developed a liking for snails. They are both going well with their bonjours, bonsoirs, mercis and pardons and have each managed to go and buy bread by themselves at the boulangerie across the road. All good.

On Tuesday we went our separate ways - the men to les Invalides to check out Napoleon's tomb, and me to the Marais via Lafayette to fossick about in the shops. On my way home, trudging through miles of metro tunnels under the Place de la Republic during the evening rush, turned a corner and ran straight into my cousin Margaret, Peter and their son Michael trudging the other way. They were not even meant to be in Paris but had been grounded here on a two day stopover from London. In twenty years of living in Sydney, I have never run into them by accident and the Gibbses amongst you will be amazed to hear that Margi and I were momentarily struck dumb. We quickly recovered, however, squealed a bit and went upstairs for a beer. We did make plans to meet for dinner the next day but by that time, Malaysian Airways had them back on a plane.

Indeed, as we strolled the vast corridors and gardens of Versailles yesterday, the sky was criss-crossed with jetstreams. Europe is back on the move. And so are we tomorrow when we pick up our car and head north to the Somme for the Anzac Day dawn service at Villers Bretonneux, a town liberated by Australian troops in 1918. Perhaps it's those jets that are cloud seeding Europe's drizzly skies because we are expecting our first drops of rain on the 25th -suitably sombre, perhaps.

Today is small scale pleasures, after the rigours of Versailles - African hot chocolate at a Belle Epoque salon de the and the like...

This has been quite a post and the breakfast croissants have gone cold. For those of you who have skipped straight to the end, hello!

Cheers,

Alison, John, Lawrence and Francis