Well we weren’t expecting this! Open the blinds in the morning, and the world’s gone white! Europe’s cold snap has reached us despite our little microclimate, but we’re not complaining — we get to have our winter-in-the-south-of-France cake and eat…snow…too…

It gives us fond memories of our previous winter, spent in a farm house in Wales.

It is pretty cold, though — we’ve got two heaters chugging away, and things keep freezing solid!

We have taken up residence in a little village situated on the side of the river Aude, in a pretty little valley in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The lay of the land is such that the village is in a warm microclimate — most days are almost spring-like and sunny. The little family-run camping area where we’re staying is right on the side of the river, and just beneath the walls of a 12th century abbey, which is quietly crumbling away above us.

We arrived a month ago, and I was startled to find out the family that run the site are English! In fact, the whole place seems to be a bit of a British enclave — many of our neighbours have been here a while (including one lady who’s lived here — with her four cats — for nine years). It’s a quite pleasant oddity to be able to converse with our neighbours and many shorter-term visitors, who are predominantly also English!

There’s a very convenient little shop just around the corner, where we get fresh baguettes every day, and campsite owner Christine even sells local wine cheaply. Could it get any better than that?

The village is a charming walled affair with narrow labyrinthine alleys, all interestingly askew and weathered buildings, randomly overhanging the alleys. It’s a joy just to wander around in.

The old abbey is a huge mass of crumbling stone walls, now home to flocks of pigeons.

Right next door to the abbey is the village church, with a large graveyard, and a bell-tower that chimes out the hours (and goes nuts every morning at 7am, something we’ve learned to ignore!).

The mountains surrounding the village are pretty too — there’re plenty of walks around. There’s a path that follows the river northwards to the nearest large town, Limoux, which is quite pretty — although a bit of a challenge on an old road bike, as I discovered when attempting the route on a supermarket run.

We tend to follow the main road to reach the supermarket in Limoux — the ride is a lovely 7km up the valley, with the turquoise Aude beside us (although the ride back with 30kg of groceries strapped to my back can be a little daunting!).

Anyway, suffice to say we’re rather well chuffed with our new home, and are beginning to worry that we’ll never be able to tear ourselves away!

The drive in is quite nice, meandering through fields of grass and finally winding along the rocky and pine-treed edge of a lagoon, with views over to towns on the other side, all gleaming white and orange.

The caravan park itself is ‘okay’, festooned with mobile homes, but grassy at the back, which is where we set up. I’m caught a little off-guard when asked to pay a month in advance, but given that that was our plan anyway, I pay up, and we settle in.

Pretty quickly, we start to realise it’s not quite the idyllic wintering spot we’d dreamed of — while the caravan park’s not too bad, the town itself is a bit underwhelming. It’s okay, I guess, but not the kind of spot we’d normally spend a great deal of time. What’s worse — and I’ve got no one and nothing to blame but myself — something about the mediterranean-ness and the slight ‘ick-factor’ of the town starts making me think of our relatively unpleasant three months in Tunisia! I try to keep it to myself, but can’t keep it in any longer and mention it to Katherine, who’s been getting the same impression as well. Oh, dear!

Anyway, we don’t feel particularly inspired to go out and explore (you can tell by our complete lack of photography!), and we keep our grocery-supplies trips to a minimum, so we spend pretty much the whole time working away in Nettle. I’m working on an exciting new project for iOS and I’m in laser-like-focus mode, so it’s fine.

Katherine’s Australian driving license is expiring, and she needs to renew the photo, which requires an official somebody to witness it, basically. A signature on the back of the photo, and one on the official form. A member of the local police force is sufficient, so armed with a hard-won printout of the form, plus a Google-translated copy, we march into the local police station and explain our situation to the woman in reception (in French, of course). Expecting a fairly straightforward in-and-out procedure, we’re surprised when the inevitable complications arise, and we’re informed…Well, we don’t really know, but it’s something complicated, and she has “no” face, which is really all the information we need to know it’s going to get ugly. Anyway, a ridiculously long and boring story follows of the typical trying-to-get-anything-bureaucratic-done-in-a-foreign-country   ilk, but it ended up being quite a lovely experience, when the woman at reception ended up sweeping us up under her wing, escorting us to the local municipal office thingy, and helping to explain our situation, then escorting us over to the national guard building. It was all to no effect — apparently this was all a little too unusual for the local powers that be, a fact that our benefactor acknowledged with a wry grin — but she was just lovely, so we didn’t really mind, in the end. We found ourselves — as usual — wishing our French was better so that we could actually interact more meaningfully.

We have a pleasant surprise when some new friends from the UK, Dave and Mel, get in touch with us and come to stay beside us in their motorhome for a few days. Dave’s a software developer, and Mel’s a sculptor, so we have a lot in common, and it’s fantastic to have some other people to socialise with — even more so than we’d expected, after being in a country with only the bare essentials of the language! We get on really well, and spend a fair amount of time hanging out and talking. I find myself quite jealous of what sounds like a really lovely village life that Dave and Mel have back in Exmoor, where everybody seems to know everybody else!

Mel’s involved with a local exhibition back home in Exmoor, and invites Katherine to come along and be involved in 2013 — it’s an exciting prospect to get some exhibition experience, so we resolve to be in the area then!

We find ourselves quite sad to see them go, when it’s time for them to move on to more Spanish lands just before Christmas!

In what’s becoming a rather unfortunate pattern for us, we have yet another little health scare, when Katherine develops something that Dr. Internet thinks is a kidney infection, which can become quite serious if not treated properly. We ask the site owner if he knows of any doctors nearby who speak English, but he has no idea, and instead directs us to the hospital emergency department, where he’s pretty sure someone will speak English.

We drive Nettle there, find the tiny little waiting room that is the emergency department, and join a host of other locals sitting on the uncomfortable plastic seats, watching a French-dubbed version of the ubiquitous earthquake-disaster-telemovie “10.5″ and wondering what we’re supposed to do next, as there’s no-one at reception. Neither of us have had the misfortune of visiting an emergency room before (even in Australia), so we’re not really familiar with the procedures, which makes things even more interesting in a foreign language we don’t really speak. We decide we’ll give it 30 minutes or so before giving up and forming a Plan B.

20 minutes later, there’s movement at reception, and a helpful fellow emergency room-ee indicates that we should go and register. I’m pretty sure that, as foreigners, a passport or something might be a good thing to have, but Katherine’s left hers back at Nettle, and heads off to pick it up while I stand around waiting for reception.

Finally, I’m invited into the separate reception area, and prepare to offer Katherine’s name and details for the waiting list, but — uh-oh — no one speaks English. I’m not at all prepared to handle this in French, and stutter my way though an ‘unbuffered’ explanation that my wife has a kidney infection and is just grabbing her passport, aided somewhat eventually by a doctor who appears and speaks a couple of words in English. God knows how much of the original meaning was actually received at the other end, but they indicate that we should come back when she’s returned.

Anyway, eventually, we manage to get in, and Katherine’s questioned by the nurse — again, no one speaks any English, and we’re not at all familiar with all the new words being thrown at us. I’m there for the whole exercise in the hopes that with two of us there, at least one will catch enough meaning to be able to fill in the blanks for the other, but we both struggle. With much miming, and an awful lot of straining to pick up meaning, some of which is successful, some not, we have a confirmed diagnosis, and we stumble out, steam escaping out our ears from our overloaded language-centres, clutching a prescription for antibiotics and a firm advisement to drink a whole lot of water.

Christmas and the New Year come and go — we’ve decided to move on in early January once our month is up, and Katherine’s found some Christmassy stuff that goes well into January, which we decide to see then on our way out. Finally, it’s time to move on — I’ve found a ridiculously-promising looking alternative spot to the west, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and we’re excited to go see some new territory.

We head east first, across dry scrubland dotted with olive groves, bare vineyards and limestone crags, to Aix en Provence, where Katherine’s found a (post-) Christmas market which sounds appealing. To our dismay, our Lonely Planet guide is totally wrong, and the market finished at the end of December. Even the lights, which apparently transform the town into a fairytale-esque wonderland at night, have been switched off. We spend a disappointing evening wandering around the now relatively ordinary-looking town, and spend a night in a car park outside the centre.

We have more success the next day, when we decide to go have some croissants and coffee at a café in town, and have another wander around. Of course, they’ve run out of croissants, but our post-breakfast amble around town is rather pleasant, and we discover a pretty little food market in one of the town squares, where we stock up on some supplies.

We start our journey westwards, fighting the whole way on the first day against the Mistral wind, howling across the planes from the north and buffeting us relentlessly. The countryside becomes ever-prettier, the villages lovelier. We spend a windy night parked on startlingly red soil beside a lake east of Montpellier, after nearly bottoming out Nettle over a ditch on the way in.

Finally, we pass by the immense mass of the Château Comtal in Carcassone (we’ll be back for you, later!), and drive south into the foothills of the Pyrenees. It’s simply beautiful, and we exclaim in delight as we realise we’re in our new neighbourhood — pretty, towering mountains, a river valley with the lovely turquoise Aude river, tumbling in picturesque rapids over numerous rocky sections, and finally, our new village home, Alet-les-Bains, an achingly beautiful mediaeval affair, all half-timber houses, narrow winding streets of cobbles, and sycamore trees, with the towering crumbling remains of a 12th century abbey.

Our string of errands in Copenhagen is coming to an end, and we start thinking about what we’ll do next. We’re thinking it’d be nice to see a bit of Germany while we’re up this way, and I get as far as booking myself into an Apple developer event in Berlin, before Katherine’s emergency tooth extraction appointment ends up conflicting (d’oh!).

We think we should probably wander around Denmark a bit more and see some more stuff, but we’re both feeling like hunkering down for the winter instead. While things’re getting pretty chilly, and we’re aware that we’re really not equipped to deal with snow, the real reason is that we’re a bit over logistics and driving around. I feel perhaps a bit guilty, but quickly realise that it’d be silly doing the tourist thing if we were just doing it because we felt we should, and weren’t actually enjoying it! So, we make the decision to stick with our original plan — a winter in the south of France, where we have ready access to yummy food and wine, and it’s not quite so chilly.

The time for Katherine’s appointment arrives, and we drive back into Copenhagen and park in the centre. Katherine’s in and out extraordinarily quickly — just 20 minutes or so — and we walk back to Nettle via a pharmacy to grab some painkillers. Mission accomplished!

We spend a final night wildcamping by a park outside the city and, resolved to find a cosy spot in France with ready access to baguettes, brie and wine where we can get stuck into our respective projects, we begin the long drive south, across the huge bridge joining Zealand to the rest of Denmark, and down into Germany.

I spent some time over the previous days hunting through my various GPS databases for spots to stay, evenly spaced along our journey, so it’s just a matter of selecting the next one in Cartographer (the app I wrote pretty much for this exact purpose!) on my iPhone each day, and settling in for the drive with the audio book we’ve been listening to, Dragonfly In Amber. We spend a night beside a quiet lake in the Danish countryside, one in a little car park tucked into the woods outside a village in Germany, one by a river just on the edge of a larger German town, and one in a car park outside of the charming French/Belgian town of Bouton, near the French border.

We spend a little while wandering around Bouton while we’re there — there’s an impressive-looking fort towering over the village, which sits on the bend of a wide shallow river surrounded by post-autumnal sepia-coloured hills.

We’re heading to Provence, which seems to have the most kindly winters. Along the way we spend a week in Neuville-Day, at the pretty ‘camping a la ferme’ that we spent some time at earlier in the year — it’s fascinating to see how the place has changed with the season — the trees are almost bare, the ground covered with brown leaves. We watch the family of red squirrels we remember fondly from last time, busily burying acorns in the leaf litter around us in preparation for the winter.

Our next stop is beside a lake in the south of Champagne-Ardenne. We happen to have arrived right at the time the cranes are stopping here on part of their own winter migration path. All day, the huge birds fly overhead in long V’s, calling to each other. Their numbers are most impressive at dusk, when they form long lines that wander right across the sky.

We spend a relaxed week here, moving on around the same time the cranes do, driving down into Burgundy, beside bare vineyards that sprawl over the hillsides. Another stop for a few days just south of Dijon, and we drive on, quickly finding ourselves among orange, yellow and red hillsides, where the tendrils of winter have not yet reached, and clear, crystal blue rivers. There are occasional crumbling castles perched atop crags, and impressive-looking limestone escarpments in the distance — we must return and explore this area further sometime!

We pull off the main road, and follow a wandering road that trails up into the mountains, where we find our final wild camp, in a spectacular location looking out over a staggeringly pretty little mediaeval town surrounded by orange hills: Aubignas.

During the final leg of our southward journey, the scenery and architecture suddenly become completely Mediterranean, all orange roofs and whitewash, and olive trees, like entering an entirely different country. It’s hard to believe this is still France!

Our migration is complete — time to give Nettle a rest.

So, we’ve sprinted to Copenhagen, and to our relief and great pleasure, been accepted as honorary Denmarkians for a time — we’ve even been assigned a doctor! …Which is just as well, because, without delay, Katherine discovers another breast lump. We’re not too worried this time around, as the last time, it was just a harmless cyst, and we don’t expect any different this time around. But we’re not taking any chances, so we call up our new doctor and make an appointment for the next day.

We take our bikes and catch the train to the doctor’s office, in an apartment building. It’s pretty quiet, and Katherine’s in and out fairly quickly, finishing up with an appointment for a scan at the local clinic. It’s two weeks away (which is a rather pleasant contrast to the three months it took to get a similar appointment in the UK!), so we now have plenty of time to kill!

We ride from the doctor’s into the city’s latin quarter. Copenhagen feels like a rather quiet little town, until we get to the chewy centre and find it full of metropolitan goodness.

We pull out of the stream of bikes heading into the latin quarter once we discover a great little market square with lots of interesting food and other bits and pieces. Two big cast-iron bowls have smouldering coals in them, radiating a very pleasant heat into the chill air. A couple of people at a little stall are wrapping dough around sticks and sticking them in the coals for customers that come by.

We pick up some cupcakes and fudge, and grab a couple of pita sandwiches for lunch with a glass of wine, which we eat sitting out under a tent by the damper-on-stick stall. We help ourselves to a couple of apples from boxes placed around the area, before wandering down the meandering streets of the latin quarter, ducking into a couple of shops.

When we’ve had enough, we grab a coffee from a shop in one of the indoor parts of the market area we visited earlier. While we line up, somehow the line bifurcates and we find ourselves in danger of being superseded in the queue. We don’t really care, ourselves, but we look on in amusement and a little horror as a guy behind us speaks up (in Danish), indicating to our newfound queue-competitors that we were next in line, starting what appears to be a lengthy (but friendly) debate about queue etiquette. I can’t help but compare this polite and apologetic exchange with the queue etiquette in places like Tunisia — first-wrestle-to-the-front, first-served.

Finally, we jump on our bikes for the ride back home, feeling a bit like locals as we pedal down the very bike-friendly roads along with a bunch of Copenhagiens heading home.

Our friend Andrea, who we met along with his partner Silvia in Padova, Italy, has a friend here who has been kind enough to be our mail centre for the various Danish bureaucratics. We get in touch and arrange to meet Emanuele in the city the next day. Naturally, we find him instantly likeable, and we sit and talk over kebabs about living and working in Copenhagen. Emanuele came over from Italy to study here, and now works as a software developer with Nokia. He confirmed our initial good impressions of life in Denmark — the working environment is very relaxed and informal, employees are even trusted to work from home; very civilised.

We finish up in a cozy, co-op café around the corner. We claim a table upstairs, then Emanuele leaves all of his stuff on the table (phone, coat, etc.), indicating that we can follow suit — we’re in Denmark, a trust-based society! — and we go downstairs to order. We talk tech a little (Emanuele almost has me convinced to look into an Android version of Loopy), before we go our separate ways for the day.

Emanuele kindly invites us around for dinner a couple of nights later, and we head over to his place, where he’s busily cooking pizzas (to our great excitement), which turn out to be very tasty. We meet a friend of his who has joined us, who turns out to be a social worker with the Red Cross, helping unaccompanied young asylum seekers to settle in Denmark, a little like what Katherine used to do before leaving Australia, which gives us plenty to talk about.

Apparently many of the refugees they see have gotten to Denmark after travelling across Europe looking for a home, having already been accepted as refugees elsewhere, like Greece, but finding that they’re unable to get a job or adequate social security there. Upon finally arriving in Denmark, apparently there’s nothing to do but to send them back to the country they originally received refugee status in.

We recently made the acquaintance of Kent and Heather, a couple from the US who spend a few months of each year cruising the French canal system on their boat. We’d passed a few emails back and forth about the prospect of crossing paths, and as it turns out, we’re going to be able to make it work!

They’re passing by Fontainebleau and southwards from there, so after a little more conferring, we depart Paris’s suburbs and make for a little medieval village called Ferrières-en-Gâtinais.

We set ourselves up in the municipal campsite, located just outside the delightful little town of winding narrow cobbled streets, and the following day — which just happens to be my birthday (how fitting!) — Kent and Heather arrive on their bikes. We’re going to spend the day with them, cruising up the canal at their usual leisurely pace of ~5 km/h, a wonderfully appealing prospect.

After we grab a couple of vital provisions for the day (a wheel of mystery camembert-esque cheese, some apricot jam, a bottle of wine and a couple of baguettes), Kent leads the way to the spot on the bank of the nearby canal where they tied up the evening before, and our hosts welcome us warmly aboard their pretty little boat, Après Ski, adorned colourfully with flowers.

Even more Tardis-like than Nettle, we’re impressed at the amount of space inside Après Ski — a living room/kitchen, a master and spare bedroom, and no less than two bathrooms, one sporting an actual bath! Very roomy.

We talk leisure batteries and plumbing for a moment (always a popular topic for we nomadic types), as Heather whips up a salad, then they break out the champagne, which in a moment of flagrant know-it-all-ness Kent explains is only called ‘champagne’ as it was the region of Champagne that finally embraced the sparkling substance, after the monk that invented it — it’s always a monk, you see — had roamed France trying to find sponsorship. We set up on a picnic table by the bank to have some lunch, and we’re charmed by Kent and Heather’s easy, friendly manner. They’re lovely!

We have a 1PM appointment to enter the lock system, and we settle ourselves up on the bridge at the back of the boat while Kent untethers us from the bank and skilfully guides us through the open gates of the lock. We watch with interest as the lock keeper manually winds handles that close each of the the gates behind us, then walks around and opens the gates on the other side, gently letting water bubble and froth its way into the lock as Kent and Heather hold the lines that keep the boat steady in the resulting eddies. Kent converses with the lock keeper, and we feel a little envious of the ease with which he seems to comprehend what she’s saying!

Once the level in the lock is the same as that of the canal we’re headed for, the lock keeper opens the gates all the way and we rumble out, as she jumps into her van and drives onwards to meet us at the next lock.

The four of us sit up the back as we cruise along slowly, enjoying the gentle pace as the bank drifts slowly by, talking and munching on baguette and camembert. Every now and then we’ll enter another lock, and repeat the process of opening the gates (which I start assisting with, at Kent’s suggestion), then holding Après Ski steady while the water’s let in, and waving farewell to the lock keeper as we proceed onwards.

It’s still a little early for proper autumn colours, but the surface of the canal is dotted here and there with some early fallen leaves, and the trees to either side of the canal are a gold green, just on the cusp. It’s quiet, aside from the soft whirr of the engine, a big contrast with our increasingly sporadic road trips in noisy Nettle!

We talk about our respective non-travel activities — A Tasty Pixel, and we find out that Kent and Heather met when they were both working at NASA! Heather worked on a ruggedised laser system destined for use in Antarctica, and Kent still works as a testing software developer, doing things like verifying the correct function of range-finding terrain mapping systems.

When I explain my “almost-finished” PhD, they laugh and exclaim “You’re an ABD!” — All But Dissertation, an eminently well-suited term that resulted in some hilarity, and apparently not an uncommon phenomenon among the staff at NASA! Hah!

We pass through an industrial area (as we make a few humorous disparaging comments comparing it to frequently-industrial Belgium), and gape at a beautifully restored container vessel transformed into a house-boat, rich, deep browns of oxidised hull, matched by beautifully stained woodwork on the deck. We pass a number of other impressive-looking residential vessels, as Kent describes the marina in the centre of Paris, and how there are people who live in such mansions-on-water, right in the middle of the city. Not a bad way to live, we imagine.

Just outside the centre of the town of Montargis, our canal journey comes to a close with one last lock, a 20-foot-or-so whopper, lifting us up high above the canal we’d just left, as a bunch of onlookers watch curiously — Kent and Heather tell us that they’re becoming increasingly used to having an audience every time they pass through a lock, like they’re a tourist attraction themselves! (Having gawped a little myself at an operating lock, I don’t doubt it).

Kent very skilfully parallel-parks us in between two much larger boats tied up at the marina, converses briefly with, presumably, the harbourmaster who drives by, and very helpfully finds out for us where we can find a bus to take us back to Nettle.

The four of us ride down to the bus, but we discover that there’s no room for our bikes (despite the confident assurances of the driver Kent had checked with earlier) — we decide to try our luck at the train station, and bid our new friends farewell after determining their plans for the next week, with hopes of another meet-up.

We’ve just missed the only train for the next few hours, but a glance at the map shows us that we’re not really that far from Ferrières-en-Gâtinais, and we decide to ride back the way we had come during the day’s adventure, along the canal.

The ride is lovely, the path running right alongside the canal until it peters out and we find ourselves riding along the grassy verge, before it becomes paved again. Dusk settles around us as the colour seeps out of the world, and we’re focused on the ground in front of our wheels with just enough light to see where we’re going. Finally, we find the road we’d come down this morning, and turn back, arriving at Nettle after an hour and a half’s ride — half the time we took to go the other way on the boat!! — weary but content.

A brilliant birthday — thanks for having us, Kent and Heather!

For our final day in Paris, we jump on our bikes again, ready to follow a self-guided bike tour we found in our Lonely Planet guide. Straight out of the train station, the nut holding my brake cable breaks off (sigh!), so we set out rather gingerly ’till we find a bike shop and replace the offending part.

We pass the Notre Dame, and decide to swing by for a lap around the outside, admiring the huge detail on the archways over the front entrance, and the torture device-esque building itself. Pointy.

We stop for lunch at an exciting-sounding sandwich shop on the left bank, Cosi. I’m feeling pleased at how successful the exchange in French with the girl behind the counter was — I understood everything! — until she asks where we were from, in English, with a Kiwi accent. It turns out, she’s from New Zealand (the shop is run by Kiwis), living in Paris for a couple of years! It’s lovely to hear a Kiwi accent again, and we chat for a while (the sandwiches were delicious!).

Katherine pops her head in to a clothes shop for a while, then we continue on our way.

While Katherine visits a bookshop where she’d spotted a children’s book illustrated by an artist she follows, I stand outside and listen to a string orchestra playing on the street, the Orchestre Metropolitain de Paris, first with mild interest, then with rapt attention as I realise…these guys are really good! Unfortunately, their performance ends after just a few minutes, but I buy their CD.

We ride on, down to the Eiffel Tower and then back along the other bank, as the buildings begin to glow orange in the fading light.

Our next foray into town is eminently unsuccessful: We head into town and finally find ourselves some much-missed fish and chips at an English pub called The Bombardier. Our ambitions to see some more of Paris by bike are thwarted completely — first by an embarrassing spontaneous onset of dizziness resulting in my nearly passing out (not my manliest moment!), then when I was totally recovered and ready to go, by a totally flat tyre, resulting in a very long walk home, pushing the bikes all the way. It’s probably for the best though — it’s Sunday morning, and the city reeks of Saturday night’s revelrous public urination, an omnipresent assault on the nostrils. Ah, France.

We try again a couple of days later, much more successfully, this time headed to the Louvre. We pick a Wednesday, when the museum is open until late, and take our time getting there, stopping for a very satisfying lunch of noodles at a Japanese restaurant nearby, and dropping into the impressively shiny Louvre Apple store (where — oooh — they do credit card processing with iPhone 4s mounted to a barcode scanner + credit card reader accessory, and customers sign with a finger on the iPhone display!).

We bring along a Louvre audio tour by Rick Steves, but discover that the Louvre’s layout has changed since the audio tour was produced, and nothing’s where it’s supposed to be. Luckily, we think to try starting a few chapters ahead, and find it more-or-less correct from that point onwards. It’s great to be talked through what we’re looking at in an accessible way, instead of either gaping at the displays in total ignorance of their significance, or being academic’d at by a stiff scholarly audio tour.

We particularly enjoy Kite Jesus:

Wheeeee! Higher, St. Francis, higher!

And we put my mother’s assertion that Katherine resembles the Mona Lisa to the test:

Give us your best 'enigmatic' look.

The palace itself is as impressive as the art within, and it feels even more cavernous as evening sets in and the crowds dwindle to just a few others beside ourselves. We walk down deserted, creaky hallways and feel distinctly like intruders.

Katherine received a tip that the Marais district was a good spot for good coffee, and interesting shops, so for our next Parisian jaunt, it’s there we go. We get off the train at the Gare de Lyon station, this time, rather than emerging into the middle of a shopping centre, and find ourselves an exit a little more easily. There’s a dedicated path for bikes, and the riding’s much more relaxed.

We make our way along little narrow lanes, and leave our bikes on a main street, alongside a thousand others (who’d have thought it’d be tricky to find a park for a bike!).

Katherine’s heard tell in our Lonely Planet guide of a place that do fish and chips (it’s been a while!), but when we arrive, we’re disappointed to hear she’s been led astray. A waiter tells us there’s an English pub on the other side of town that have fish and chips, though, so we take a note and wander on.

We stop for lunch at a bustling felafel restaurant, all appalling bright-green plastic decor (usually a good sign that the food’s going to be great), and a wall-sized picture of what we could only assume was Tel Aviv; I’m presented with a felafel pita, stuffed full of crunchy, tasty felafel balls, tart humous and tabouli, served with hot green and red harissa on the side, and just about the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten (he writes, trying not to drool on the keyboard).

After a bit more street-pounding, we jump back on our bikes (loving the easily and enjoyable mobility they provide!) and head towards a big art supplies shop Katherine had found. She spies an enticing little jewellery shop, everything handmade by the owners, and ends up buying a necklace. I nurse an espresso sitting at a table on the street outside a nearby pub/café, watching the world go by and reading a book while Katherine raids the art supplies store.

Finally, we drop by a delightful little café called Le Loir dans la Théiére (“The Dormouse in the Teapot”), decorated with vintage toys and with Alice in Wonderland scenes painted on the walls, and order a big piece of tasty apple crumble — the other thing we’d been missing, apart from the fish and chips! — and some coffee.

Another week of project-work goes by, and we decide it’s time for another jaunt into Paris. We jump on our bikes and take the train in, getting out at Les Halles, which turns out to have been not so advisable with bikes: we’re in the middle of a shopping centre, with no clear path to the exit, and stairs everywhere! A significant amount of wandering and cramming into tiny elevators later, we finally discover a way out, and emerge with relief.

Riding down past the Louvre and along the river, we make a beeline for Sainte-Chapelle, a spectacular Gothic stained-glassapalooza. It just closed for lunch, minutes ago (bloody French lunchtimes!), so we have some time to kill.

We grab a couple of spectacular burgers at a New York-style diner, and Katherine’s got a few shops marked out in The Cartographer (plug), so we head towards one of them, a shop dedicated to music boxes, old and new, stopping every now and then to check the map and make sure we’re still going the right way (and wishing I had a sat-nav holder on my bike!). We find the spot, and the shop itself is very disappointing (full of cruddy, cheap looking nonsense, sadly), but it’s right beside the Jardin du Palais Royal, we discover, a lovely expansive courtyard filled with flowers and people enjoying the sunshine. We wander for a while…

…and then, somehow, it’s past the lunchtime closing, and we make our way back to the church.

Our Lonely Planet guide (between the hyperbole) gives us a useful tip — we can skip the queue by getting double-tickets for Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie, a lesser-known neighbouring attraction. We do so, and as it turns out, the Conciergerie was worth a look anyway — we enter into a large subterranean-feeling hall, the Hall of the Guards, with vaulted ceiling and pillars receding to the back wall:

Although we descended more than six feet from street level to the floor of the hall, apparently this was once the level of the street!

The rest is mildly interesting, a bunch of cells and incarcerated dummies and the much-hyped cell of Marie Antoinette. We wander out and back around, skipping the line to Sainte-Chapelle and going around the side, tickets in hand, enter the church, then go up the tiny winding stars to the upper chapel.

It’s just as visually stunning as we’d hoped — acres of luminous stained-glass windows, every square centimetre rich with detail, reaching to the spectacular vaulted ceiling far overhead.

We wonder to ourselves at the ridiculous level of detail, thousands of tiny little scenes, each blending into noise.

Muscling through the crowds (and this is off-season!), we find some seats to park on for a while and try to comprehend the scope of the place. To our delight, the clouds part and the sun streams through the stained glass, filling the chapel with multi-hued light. Spectacular.

After a time, we cast one final, hungry look around, and amble back out, get back on our bikes, and ride off along the south (sorry, “left”) bank, in search of coffee.

On the way we stop at a chocolatier Katherine had marked out, with an immense, larger-than-life chocolate gorilla in the window. We consider getting something until we spot the mind-boggling prices, and slip out the door as discreetly as possible, wide-eyed. We end up drawn to a little side alley, lined with cafés and restaurants, and pick one teeming with fashionable young things. We order a couple of coffees and the best tiramisu ever, before wandering the streets for a while as the receding sun casts a golden light over the upper stories of the omnipresent white six-story blocks.

Oddly, we find that a week’s gone by by the time we think to head out and see some of this beautiful city we’re in — we’ve both got so much on, it can be hard to make time for the travel stuff, sometimes. Anyway, the time has come, and we decide to try riding our bikes in.

The ride looks quite good on the map, following the Marne river in for a lot of the way, and going by the Bois de Vincennes and the Parc Floral, which we remember fondly from the last time we were in Paris.

We set out and aren’t disappointed; the ride’s lovely, and follows some very nice little riverside streets with beautifully landscaped garden beds.

An hour or so’s ride finds us riding up to the entrance to the Parc Floral, a spectacular collection of artful flower gardens we discovered with delight last time. We’ve inadvertently turned up on one of the two days it costs money to get in, so we line up, but are rescued by a very kind woman who slips us her free entrance voucher on her way out.

We wander around the gardens, charmed by the use of colour and texture, and inspired from time to time for our own dream of a cottage garden. The day is sunny and warm, bumblebees amble amongst the flowers, as do we, enjoying thoughts of a future home alive with colourful flowers and tasty vegetables.

With bellies rumbling, we jump back on our bikes and ride through the woods and onwards alongside the park towards the city. I’m following a dotted line on the map that I take for a bike path, until the actual path vanishes — turns out, it’s an arrondissement boundary. I feel a bit silly. We end up taking a very roundabout route, through some rather gross industrial areas, but eventually arrive, exhausted, at the little cheese-oriented restaurant we’d been aiming for, and are presented with massive platters of various types of exciting-looking cheeses, sweet chutney, prosciutto, salami, salad, and wine, tailored to the types of cheese on our plates. Magnifique!

We clamber back onto our bikes an hour or so later, and pedal off back home, a long, weary 2 hours, during which I’m nearly wiped out by a guy who opens his car door right as I ride by! I tow Katherine by the hand the last kilometre or so, as she fights off sobs of exhaustion and the daylight fades, and we collapse gratefully onto the couch back home.

We both notice that when people speak to us without our being prepared in advance, it’s like our language centres just shut down, and we find ourselves staring blankly, paralysed, unable even to speak English! I need a good minute or two to assemble sentences in my head, and if I try to speak before then, it comes out garbled or stuttered, like streaming audio that hasn’t buffered properly. I think I need to carry around a little ‘loading’ pinwheel that I can spin at people while I’m conjugating and assembling…

On the way we stop off to do some shopping (and eat baguettes and brie afterwards!). After we’ve eaten, we watch as a woman pulls in beside us, locks her car, and strides off to the supermarket — as her car rolls forward, handbrake off. I leap out and stop it rolling, and Katherine chases off after the car’s owner. Some bystanders find something to put under the wheels of the car so I can stop holding it, as Katherine returns alone, reporting that when she told the woman she’d left the handbrake off and that her car was rolling across the car park, she had replied “c’est possible.” (it’s possible), and continued, untroubled, on her way!

Cheeeeeeeeeeese!

We shake our heads at the weirdness of other people, and head onwards. We stay overnight at another “camping a la ferme” site in the middle of a tiny village, and pick up a bottle of very home-made cider from their little on-site shop, full of bits (and tasting a little of soil!). The countryside steadily becomes more suburban as we head closer to Paris, and soon enough we’re surrounded by dense suburbia and traffic.

We’re a bit dismayed to find the suburb in which the campsite lies is a rather dismal suburban wasteland. Luckily, as we we pull into the campsite in Neuilly-sur-Marne, we find it located on a leafy island on the startlingly green Marne river. It’s not quite central Paris, but it’s green.

We go through some very serious bureaucratics at reception, and are shown to our site, green and leafy, but — despite my spending hours up on the roof with laptop and antenna — devoid of any useful wifi signals — uh-oh! After a bit of back-and-forth with the local SFR telco shop, trying to get ourselves a 3G connection at astronomical cost, I’m disappointed to find the SIM card I’d bought, the only viable option for us, didn’t work in my iPhone — apparently it’s iPad-only. With it looking like we were going to be cut off from the outside world (not an option for me, while running an online business!), we were saved at the 11th hour by an act of astonishing kindness — the guy in the SFR store called his mother at home, retrieved his ADSL account information, and gave me his username and password to use his free, unlimited SFR wifi hotspot access!

We find ourselves suffixing sentences with “in Paris!”. It makes everything more exciting (in Paris).

We leave the farm and drive southwards towards our fallback site in Champagne-Ardenne, somewhere we can stay for a few weeks, figure out an itinerary and get some work done.

We arrive at the camp site in Neuville-Day and meet the owner, who shows us in. I wander around the site, laptop in one hand and wireless antenna in the other, feeling a bit silly as I hunt out wifi signals. I’m rewarded by a blip in the bottom corner of the site, and there we park Nettle and settle in with our new-found Internets.

We end up staying here for a whole month, filling our days with Loopy HD development and painting. We get fresh baguettes every morning, delivered straight to the campsite — there’s really nothing like the fresh, crisp bread, that melts in your mouth, and we go through heaps of the stuff, eaten with big chunks of soft brie.

We stock up every now and then at the little supermarket in the next town — we cycle the 5km there, past cornfields, then along the canal bordered by fields and woodland, and studded every few hundred metres with locks. On the way there are lock keeper’s cottages, one with a beautiful cottage garden festooned with flowers that fills us with dreams of our own future cottage. We ride back slowly, a hiking pack full of groceries on my back.

Our interactions with people in our broken French frustrate us a bit — while we can generally be understood, we both have a very hard time understanding anything said to us. Most of the meaning I can intuit, but when it’s anything but the simplest of interactions, I can’t even determine the word boundaries! We resolve to get back to our French lessons.

Katherine’s just finished getting patched up at the dentist — the dentist was a very competent guy in his forties, incongruously dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, running the whole place by himself, answering the phone and calling people in from the waiting room. The waiting room had humorous old drawings depicting a variety of dental nightmares scattered around the walls:

Before we (he called me in too, as well as Katherine!) were called in, we could hear giggling children behind the door — something couldn’t have been right, there! He didn’t use gloves or anaesthesia, which was unusual, but Katherine said there was no pain, and he got the filling right the first time, something which took the last dentists several goes to get right.

He expressed surprise at the system in Australia, where we don’t have widespread public dental health-care — apparently here in Belgium, everyone pays a little each month, and this covers almost the entire cost of all visits to the dentist.

We’ve found a “Camping a la ferme” site — what we hope will be a replacement for the wonderful Certificated Locations in the UK — called “Il était un foie”, just over the French border, and that’s where we’re headed.

We breathe a sigh of relief as we leave the highly industrial part of Belgium, and find ourselves amidst trees and mountains again, following a little winding road called “Rue de France”. The silos and factories have given way to fields of corn, punctuated by red-roofed barns, which remind us strongly of the idea we have of the midwest America we’ve seen on TV.

It’s looking decidedly French by the time we cross the border, and I’ve already had my first taste of speaking French getting fuel along the way — it’s nice to be able to give the local tongue a go, rather than just blundering around speaking English.

We pass through lovely little French villages, festooned with flower boxes, and the countryside (sorry, the paysage) reminds me strongly of England.

We turn off the main road, following a narrow lane that leads into the proto-village that is our destination, Artaise-le-Vivier, just a couple of farm buildings and a little pointy-roofed church.

Our French is really put to the test (which, of course, it fails pitifully) when we’re greeted by a lovely older woman who gets us settled in the little paved area amidst the barns and house. We can’t find any WiFi spots, and it’s clear that it’s not going to work for us as a home for the few weeks we plan to stick around, so we decide to move on the next day.

Before that, though, we meet Séverine and Fabien, who own the farm. They’re lovely, and their young son takes us around the corner into the milking room, and we stand around awkwardly until Fabien appears and fills up a bottle of fresh milk for us from the gleaming stainless-steel tank.

Fabien gives us a tour, kindly speaking English for us — they make foie gras, a kind of pâté made from (followup Wikipedia-ing:) the liver of a duck or goose that’s been fattened by force-feeding them corn. Yep. I was revolted too, when I read that.

Needless to say, we both have pretty big misgivings about it once we realised what was going on. Actually, at this point, we didn’t know anything about the force-feeding — that would’ve tipped the balance had we known. At the time, though, we’re both too polite to actually show our distaste.

The heatlamp-warmed pens of chicks isn’t too bad…

…But when we see the darkened, stinking room full of trapped ducks, we just want to get out of there, and drive off back into the clean countryside, maybe after letting them out.

Already I feel bad about not making my ill feelings clear, but it’s too late, and I’m too chicken to make a fuss. It does make me feel glad to be vegetarian, though.

Update: One of our friends pointed us to this totally brilliant and inspiring article about a foie gras producer who treats his geese well; “My life’s work is the give the geese what they want”. Very, very cool.

We jump on our bikes and go explore the countryside nearby — there’s another village, a single street of tumbledown houses, butting up against each other. Some are festooned with flowers, and despite the run-down buildings, it’s quite charming.

They put Mary in a cage, so she doesn't get out at night and, you know, devour the children and stuff.

But our fortunate streak has come to an end as we venture into Europe — a dark-ages-esque void of sub-par mobile providers.

Of course, we have quite particular needs: Our quota requirements are massive, as it’s our primary Internet connection, and we do a lot of stuff with it, including watching TV when we can. Anything below 5 or 6Gb a month just isn’t doable, so when the best Europe can offer is €30 for a few Gb a month, we start looking for other options.

Okay, what idiot mounted this upside-down?

Thanks to a friend, Adam of Europe by Camper, we discovered one of the most useful travel gadgets ever, since the iPhone: A high-gain, directional WiFi antenna!

This magical gizmo contains an antenna and a WiFi unit, and plugs via USB into our laptops. Plug it in, swivel it around to find a signal, and it’ll connect to WiFi networks up to a kilometer away (apparently even distances like 20km if you have line-of-sight and a nice clear day!).

No more sidling suspiciously up to houses with a laptop!

Especially when used in conjunction with an account with a community-based network (like FON, which customers of BT in the UK are automatically part of, giving you nearly unlimited free Internet access), this is a brilliant way to get online. In Europe, where there appears to be less FON spots than we’d anticipated, there are open networks everywhere — so far, we’ve had no trouble finding a connection wherever we’ve stayed. Of course, we try not to use hapless random people’s Internet access when we have an option, but it’s a useful fallback.

We bought ours, the NET-WL-USB-CPE2512bg, for £40 from Faculty-X, the same place Adam got his, and we’ve had no major issues.

UPDATE: Actually, the driver for the RTL8187L, which is the chipset in the NET-WL-USB-CPE2512bg device, is amazingly not supported by Realtek any more — they’ve end-of-life’d the RTL8187L, despite the fact that new products are still being sold with this chipset inside. A rather impressive display of screw-you, customer from Realtek.

For a while, I had a Linux virtual machine running the device, but it was a hassle.

I recently bought an ALFA AWUS036NHR, which has a 2 watt radio onboard (versus the 500mW inside the RTL8187L device), improved signal reception, and is based on the newer RTL8188RU chipset, which Realtek actually support (this week, anyway.). I was hoping to go with a different chipset that wasn’t from Realtek, as I’m not at all impressed by their crappy software quality and their awful customer service track record, but it turns out the alternative, Ralink-based devices seem to have a reputation for poor signal reception. This ain’t a buyer’s market, folks, particularly for us Mac users – the choice seems to be between two imperfect options.

Anyway, the AWUS036NHR, which seems to be one of the best long-range WiFi radios currently available, gives markedly improved signal strength. Conveniently, it even fits inside the enclosure of the old NET-WL-USB-CPE2512bg, so I have it hooked up to my original 12dB panel directional antenna (although the long USB cable that came with the CPE2512bg seems to impair the functionality of the AWUS036NHR — it seems to need more power than the RTL8187L chipset, and doesn’t get it with the long cable. I’m now using a shorter cable). Even better, I no longer have to use a Linux VM, or boot in 32-bit mode and continually reboot every time the old driver crashes.

I used to use a tremendous, free Mac utility called KisMAC, which has a brilliant “tune in” mode that plays sounds when it discovers networks, then once one is selected, makes sounds that correspond to the signal strength. It’s just like tuning in a radio. Unfortunately, the newer RTL8188RU chipset doesn’t work in KisMAC, so that option’s no longer on the table. It will make for awkward tune-ins in the future, but I’m happy making the sacrifice.

A side note — something that makes life easier with the antenna assembly, shown in the photo, is a Gorillapod tripod screwed into the unit. This lets me put the antenna anywhere, or hang it from anything. As I write, it’s wrapped around our side mirrors outside, where the signal is best!