Our friends in France, Didier and Jacqui, live in a beautiful spot in the French countryside! We felt very welcome:
Everything was much more perfect looking than this in the bedroom when we first arrived, this is the lived-in and slept-in version. 😉 The view from our window of the garden was gorgeous!
In fact their whole house was absolutely gorgeous! 🙂
We went for a little excursion in the countryside with them.
It was so pretty around there, with lots of little villages!
We went to the top of this hill, an old German military site from the war.
There was lots of evidence of the war here, including these pock marks in the fields; there is one in the foreground on the right and then many craters in the distance; they look like bushes or something in this photo, but all those dark shadows are bomb craters from the bombs of the allies! Methinks they missed the target. 😉
The craters look like this closer up:
You can see them on the hill to the left of the village, the whole hill was covered with them.
Looking down at Calais, with the ferries to England coming and going, Jacqui told me that the “reservoir” of water in this picture is all the water pumped out of the chunnel. Daily. Gulp! We were going through the chunnel the next day! 😉
In the distance we could only just make out the white cliffs of Dover; England is very close, but it was quite a hazy day to see well into the distance, nevertheless the zoom on my camera did a pretty good job:
The cliffs on the French side are also quite impressive:
Then it was time to get photos of some humans. This is us with Didier, who we’ve known online for 15 years. He has been a huge help with our website and it was wonderful to finally meet in person!
And here is a shot with Jacqui, and yes, it was a bit windy up there!!!
We went into Calais and saw the ferries coming and going, Didier works for the P&O line.
The Calais lighthouse:
Then we went to see their very impressive town hall. A bit fancier than Kiwi ones. 😉
Jacqui explained to us the story about this sculpture, one of the most famous sculptures by Auguste Rodin, of the six burghers/dukes who were willing to sacrifice themselves to save their city.
It was beautiful inside too:
Then we wound our way back to Didier and Jacqui’s house, through narrow lanes in small villages:
Glad we weren’t driving!!! 🙂
We saw mounds of these sugar beets as it is their harvesting season. They’re used for making sugar here.
When we got back we really enjoyed looking at Didier’s sizeable library, this is only half of it:
And I enjoyed checking out the beautiful garden too:
Even the hen’s house was cute! 🙂
In the evening it was time for taking photos of Didier, Jacqui and Michelle as not only were we departing early the next morning, but Jacqui was leaving for Canada first thing to visit their first grandchild. We certainly had a wonderful time with this very special family!