It's a hard life we lead here. We're just coming to the end of two weeks of vacation, in two parts. The first part we spent in a small village called Plouguerneau, in Finistere, in the North of Brittany. Our friends Stéphanie and Xavier, the parents of Simeon's best friend Mateo have a house there. We followed them there for the week-end (a 3h drive), they showed us around for two days, and then left to go back to work on Monday, leaving us behind with the house (complete with kayaks, bikes, soccer field, and anything you can dream of to amuse yourself out there) and Mateo.

We were pretty busy there. We hiked out to islands at low tide and then kayaked back, dogs and babies and all (I told Stephanie I was going to write about it on this blog and she told me that would be bragging... which it is). We hiked out to chapels and menhirs and sacred springs and dunes and more low tide islands, and at high tide we kayaked. All this, mind you, not just with our kids, but my brother and his family met us there (they rented a house at the end of a beautiful rocky point right where the wind starts howling and turns freezing when you're walking

or running up the coast). All the cousins got along beautifully, though as you can see on this picture there was some friction between the dogs (we're having a three legged race here). Simeon and Mateo got along quite well too. Mateo never rests, whereas Simeon pretty much can tolerate no more than one activity a day, so there was a lot of Mateo trying to drag Simeon out for another soccer game, or another card game, or to collect tadpoles, or to build a dam on a little creek, or a bike ride, and then falling back on Matthias when he couldn't get his first choice

(that was good for Matthias, getting some positive (if second rate) attention from an older boy). But Simeon and Mateo were inseparable and unbeatable when it came to soccer teams and card games. We had a few memorable card games involving everyone except Mimi (don't tell her, she was already asleep), where Simeon and Mateo behaved like rascals and beat all of us older folk silly.

This here is one of the sacred springs. They are quite abundant in that country. They were worshiped by the celts, and then christianized

with dedications to saints and chapels and the like, but apparently there were still devotions performed at them until the 50s. A while back, when I wrote a novel about ancient Ireland, I had included one of those sacred springs, and so I really wanted to see one. I spent a few hours unsuccessfully looking for one that was supposed to be near the chapel where we were playing three-legged races, then I brought out the big guns (Sean and Mimi, the great geographers of our family) but even they couldn't find it. So when my brother found this one after we'd already left, he was kind enough to take a whole bunch of pictures for me (unbeknownst to him, we had stopped there on our way out, but with no batteries left in our cameras).

For part II of the vacation, we came back to Nantes and got rid of a few children: Mateo went back to his family to go skiing in the Alps, and Magdalene went to spend a week with her best friend on Ile d'Yeu, an Island off the coast of Vendée to the south of us. She's not home yet, but she seems to be happy when we talk on the phone. On the other hand, Sean would never have agreed to take a week of vacation at home if there had not been special circumstances to warrant it (and if he hadn't, it wouldn't have counted as vacation for me!). His mother and stepfather met us in Finistere on the next to last day of our stay, and then met us in Nantes.

Wisdom (one of the cardinal virtues surrounding

the gisants of François II, duc of Brittany, and his

second wife-- as well as a lion and a grey hound)

So we've been tourists again here, both in the city (we've been back with newly appreciative eyes to the castle and the cathedral--as you can see from a new crop of pictures, in fact, I started to follow a tour of the cathedral, hoping I could find out what story was carved on the pillars at the entrance--a story about a woman and some camels, but when I asked the guy he said "well madame, I can't tell you all the details of everything in this cathedral, it would take much too much time" in typical french fashion: when

you don't know the answer, try to shame the asker. In fact, I was the one being stupid, because all I had to do was ask my own resident expert, the famous professor Sean, and he told me it was the story of Rebecca and the stolen house idols)

and in the surrounding areas: these three pictures are from the monastery of Fontevraud, where are buried Richard the Lionheart, as well as his parents Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (that's who the two gisants represent). Many years ago, long before sabbaticals seemed something possible in Sean's future, Sean designed a course for an application to teach in the semester abroad program Western participates in in Angers. The course was about Medieval celebrities, of which Robert D'Arbrissel (founder of the monastery) and Elianor d'Aquitaine were both examples. He had included in the course a description of a planned field trip to Fontevraud. So he got his field trip, only with his own children and parents as charges rather than a bunch of American college students.

Now, here's a typical Claudia story. On the large, not very detailed map of the area, it looked like there was a hiking trail between Fontevraud and our next destination: Chinon (Sean wanted to see that city in particular since he's done a lot of work on Joan of Arc, and that's where she found the Dauphin (heir to the king) and convinced him to let her lead an army against the English). So I begged and cajoled until Sean agreed to take care of everyone while I walked between the two towns. I had meant to stop at the tourist office to get a more detailed map, but of course, that was closed for lunch until 2:30, and I didn't want

to wait, and I had seen the signs for one hiking trail while visiting the monastery, so off I went, with no maps, hardly any water, and more to the point, the opposite of a sense of direction as part of my biological-psychological make-up. I didn't remember any names of any of the villages I should see along the way, nothing. So, of course, I got lost. I did reason my way through several meetings of trails, reasoning that included looking at where the sun was and spying a valley ahead that I concluded must be a river... In fact, I did find the Loire river (after about an hour walking due North instead of East), and then the split between the Loire and the Vienne (about 15

Km away from Chinon). So, a hike that was supposed to take two hours actually took 4, and everyone was a little annoyed with me when I got to the castle (there's only so much you can do in the ruin of a castle with three little kids and your parents, even if it is the castle where Joan recognized the Dauphin from his men after he had put his crown on someone else's head--in that high tower you can see here). And this below is the view they had as they waited for me. "Do you see her coming on that bridge? Look for the black and white contrast of Tipomme, no? No one that could even conceivably be

them?" In any case, because I'd gotten lost, I was coming on the other side of the river, so they couldn't have seen me coming... Even if I had been.

Yesterday, the last day of the vacation, I took Mimi to Paris to visit the surgeon that our surgeon in Seattle recommended for her foot-surveillance while we were in France (she's supposed to get checked every 6 months). Here she is, on the TGV, ready for her big trip. Boy, I had promised her any number of outings: the Jardin du Luxembourg (which has, of course, merry-go-rounds, pony rides, paying playgrounds, stands that sell crepes, sail boats for pushing around the little basin...) AND the Jardin des Plantes (which has all of the above as well as a small zoo). Well, we made it to the Luxembourg for a rushed 30 minutes where she tried mightily to have fun so she could satisfy my anxieties about the trip (although she refused the pony ride despite my desire to see her enjoy one). But then it was time to rush to the hospital so as not to be late for her appointment... What a joke. We got there about 15 minutes early and the receiving nurse, who was having a personal conversation full of, "yes, I kiss you too, and kiss the children for me, yes, mine are fine, in camp for the week, etc.," made us wait 20 minutes before she'd even look up at us to see what we wanted. After that, we waited for an hour and 15 minutes with no sign that anyone was being seen. I figured this must be the french lunch: our appointment was scheduled for 2, and the great doctor professor (did you know professor trumps doctor, and that I got nastily corrected for saying doctor as if it was a slight!) was having his second cup of coffee with dear friends and not worrying that it was now 3:15. And I was right, I think, since he rolled in around 3:30 looking quite self-satisfied. It's a funny dilemma, actually, because when I'm with my friends the doctors and they set everything aside so we can have tea together or dinner or the whole week-end, I think it's just the best, that people who are so busy can manage to really make time for friends. But when I'm waiting for the great doctor, oh, I'm sorry, professor, I do not regret for one second that Mimi's foot was fixed in the US and not here. Anyway, the great doctor professor barely looked at her, the exam was conducted entirely by the physical therapist who (as is usual with the para-medical professions) gave her a much more thorough exam than the great professor doctor she sees in Seattle, and said her treatment was very much misguided and told us to change everything (while the great professor vaguely nodded, as if bored). Anyway, and then we had to have x-rays (for a disorder that has nothing to do with bones, but of course I was too chicken to point that out), and then we had to wait in line again to see the great man who sent us on our way like a great lord benevolently sends away his subjects. Ok, but the best is still to come: the woman who first checked us into the hospital, not the one with her personal conversation, the one who was going to make sure we paid, had ordered me to come back to pay after the visit. Well, we get to the place with less than an hour before we have to catch our train back to Nantes (sorry Mimi, no zoo), and there is no one there. We wait, we clear our throats and cough, we call out "anyone there?", and then we hear faint voices in the distance, so we move that way. Here is our cashier lady chatting away with her buddy about who's in love with whom, Gray's Anatomy and ER style, and when she sees us she makes her severest face and says, in an icy tone, 'what are you doing here?' "Well, we're just trying to pay. We know you're not used to it, but we don't have insurance, you told us specifically that you don't bill and that we needed to pay before leaving" "Oh, well, we have your address, I'm busy now, so we'll bill you." Between her work ethic and her changing the law as her moods change and the nurse's phone conversation, it's a wonder anything gets done there. There you go, you can tell there's another republican speech about people not paying for their own health care (that's to cover the completely unnecessary x-ray) and people having too much job security (that's to punish those two irresponsible and gossipy women) coming. It must be my father-in-law's influence!

Let's see... January was the month of Galettes, February the month of crepes, so what would be more natural than that March should be the month of some other interesting and typically french custom, like, well, Easter? Mimi's teacher asked me the other day whether Easter is something we celebrate in the US, and whether Mimi's ever had easter eggs. I guess someone who's never had galette des rois might never have heard of Easter (although poor Mimi who is basically addicted to candy, found lent (with no chocolates and candy) pretty long, and was asking every day whether it was easter yet). As it turns out, though, Easter here uses pretty much the same imagery as in the US, eggs, chickens, rabbits... also bells (the story is that for easter, all the bells of all the churches fly to Rome, and on their way back, they drop eggs into people's yards. Funny enough, because Mimi has been insisting that the easter candy she found at her place on the dining room table on Easter morning had been left there by the easter bunny, and when we asked her where she had heard of such a thing (he doesn't seem to exist here), she said she figured out he existed when she saw père noël at her school before christmas... I guess she reasoned that if santa claus exists when we had told her he doesn't, then what's to prevent the easter bunny existing when we were too happy to take responsibility for all the treats he left behind. She does have a special thing for bunnies, too, because of papou). On the other hand, Easter seems to be a much smaller deal here than it is in the States: the only signs of it are all the $80+ eggs in bakery windows. But on the whole, there's not a huge build-up like there is for Christmas. And then, though Monday is a holiday too, both Sunday and Monday shops are open, and churches are pretty much as empty as they always are. Yes, Matthias, I'm sorry I had us leave a half and hour early to go to church to be sure to get seats. There were seats aplenty throughout.

In the long time since I last wrote, we have done many things: this here is the 'alignements de Carnac', fields and fields of menhirs and dolmens just sitting there with no supervision so that bad little boys like Matthias can climb all over them and make it so that stones that have stood there for 5000 years slowly becoming more and more exotic and incomprehensible, will crumble to dust tomorrow. We visited all these prehistoric sites with Simeon's best friend Matteo's family (who is lending us their house in Northern Brittany for a week during the spring break--we seem to be becoming moochers, people who get

lent other people's houses). Apparently, prehistoric people in the golfe du Morbihan (about an hour north of us) had already figured out how to dry salt out of the sea, and so got rich by trading it. As a consequence, they had money to spare and leisure time to spend it, and they built monuments (whose meaning is lost to us) that lasted. All along the coast to the north of here there are tumuluses (burial mounds), dolmens (one large stone resting on two others) and menhirs (large oblong standing stones). One of the dolmens we explored had carvings slightly reminiscent of Mayan motifs (something that looked like a sun with a face inside it). The architectural remains (all the stones) are pretty amazing, but the carving really hit me more forcefully with the feeling that there had indeed been minds, people with complex rationality and meaningfulness building these things out of a fairly intense feeling. We've been reading the kids the Philip Pullman trilogy (The Golden Compass) and if he were writing about it, he'd say the carving had more dust surrounding it than the rest of the stuff. One of the problems with the lack of supervision of these sites is that with the lack of supervision goes a lack of guidance--no explanatory signs anywhere. So I am reduced to talking about my children's science fiction literature to express my views on these monuments. Pathetic.

In any case, the one with the most dust on her is me after turning 40. I think it's the first time I think of myself as an adult. Before, I could always think, 'oh, I'm young still, that's why I'm screwing up so badly.' But now I'm forced to think, 'wait a minute, I'm an adult now, I'm 40, I can't keep on doing this.' We'll have to see how long this change of attitude lasts, but I have been more patient with my children and more circumspect about what I say all around (ahem, except for right here, this will be my one childish thing that I have not set aside now that I am a grownup). Sean was at a conference in Barcelona the week before my birthday and only came home in the late afternoon, so the hike I had asked for was delayed to the next week-end (Easter week-end). We went to Tiffauges, the castle of Gilles de Rais (a contemporary and companion of Joan of Arc, but also a man who was tried and executed in a celebrity trial in Nantes on charges of massacring and eating children) and took a beautiful walk along the Sevre river (the same one that runs into the Loire in Nantes. It's definitely my favorite of the rivers here, from Nantes to Clisson (where we went very early on in our stay) to Tiffauges: it's beautiful everywhere).

Here's the castle, blurry in the background of my crying child. This is about one minute into the walk. Still to come were the famous March giboulées (in April, no less), where the sky is perfectly blue, and then, suddenly, before the easter bunny can take even the tiniest hop, it's hailing on you. The cheerful part of it is that the sun never stops shining and the birds never stop singing, and the cows never seem to notice. But Mimi notices and cries and demands to be carried, and when no one will do it, she throws her papou into the mud and sits down her own bottom into the same mud. Okay, so though it was beautiful, historic, brilliant green with the

spring, all in all lovely, it was a bit whiny too.

Here, Matthias is leaping off the terraced gardens of the castle that come down to a tributary of the Sevre, the Crume which was dammed up near the castle in the middle ages (the dam was Sean's favorite part of the structure) and then bridged over by a 6th century bridge (that's what the guide book said, but Sean, whose American spirit of rebellion is being aroused fiercer than ever by the French tendency to grumble and complain about authority, but eventually comply and believe like sheep, wondered how one could ever tell with such a small bridge, oh, and he has doubts about Gilles de Rais's guilt and any number of other things I swallow without blinking). Sorry I'm talking about all these beautiful things without including photos, but this one was too much my favorite to replace it with photos of bridges and dams without a Matthias.

One of the reasons there are not many pictures of Simeon and Magdalene here is that Simeon's been sick and opted out of these outings, and Magdalene has been too happy to stay home 'to take care of him' (but really to miss the hikes). On Sunday, Sean finally got to actualize one of his dreams since we've been here which has been to go gaze upon the house where we might have lived, out in the country, if his wife hadn't been so pig-headed and insisted on living some place where she could walk to the store, the opera, the movie theatre, the schools, the park, etc. No, no, this here is not the house. Actually I didn't go see the house because Sean dropped me off by this chateau so I could go running on a path by the Erdre... the continuation of the path that I usually catch right by the house, but much to the North. The Chateau is beautiful, as are all the others that line the banks of that river. It seemed not to be inhabited, but nor was it falling into ruins. I don't know who it belongs to or what it's used for. But Magdalene and I wished we lived there, that we could come out on our terrace in the morning and look out on our green lawns and our horses grazing below. Then we asked Tipomme why she wasn't a horse.

On that same Easter run/visit to Sean's dream-house that I deprived him of (Matthias, upon seeing the house in the middle of cow pastures, complained that if we had lived there he wouldn't be addicted to TV and other electronics as he is in town, because he could play in the countryside, which is so much healthier! On the other hand, the run there, on that part of the Erdre, is too short for me, I can do much longer ones from downtown), Matthias gallantly picked a bouquet of flowers for Magdalene (actually, he picked it for himself and then was persuaded by his big sister to gallantly give them to her).

Then on Easter Monday, which is a holiday here, we went up to visit our friends Muriel and Emmanuel (the doctors) at La Turballe. Here is Sean posing for the picture, but the second before I bugged him to take it he was in deep conversation with Emmanuel about something or other (the neurons that line the intestinal tract, or wind surfing, or the beauties of this area our Maine (they're spending a year in Boston next year) or Washington (they've promised to visit us there), or fixing the roof on their shed, any of a number of things those two men are interested in in common). And here below is

Matthias being mauled on the beach by his friend Anna (their middle daughter) while they played house in some kind of old bunker thing from the second world war that had been disturbed by the recent storms that battered that area.

Speaking of WW2, Magdalene has been complaining bitterly about the anti-American sentiment coming out in her history class now that they are studying the post war reconstruction of Europe. She reports that according to her teacher, the US and the USSR have their good and bad points, in approximately equal amounts, except that since the US makes it

out that they're the champions of freedom and the USSR the champions of oppression, while the US are in reality witch-hunting communists and ruthlessly seeking after world domination, the US is hypocritical in addition to all its other faults, which might make it worse overall. The Marshall plan? A nefarious tool of American domination and hegemony. No doubt the American-led invasion of German-occupied France is a piece of the same policy, a policy designed to wrest power away from their only real competitors, France, when it was down, something they could never have achieved if they had faced them in a fair fight. Every day, when she comes home from school, she proves that the rebellious American spirit is strong in her too, not just in her father. Don't mess with her or her country!