When planning the trip, each family member picked a destination where they wanted to go. And then it was up to us parents, to make it work. Mike picked the Yukon. I chose a Live-aboard boat, and Izzie selected Legoland. Now, it was Julie’s pick (or at least it was supposed to be). She had picked Disneyland. During the circumnavigation, the closest Disney park on our route was Paris Disneyland. So, it was added to the itinerary. When we actually got down to planning this leg, we realized that getting from Siena to Paris and then to Barcelona (our next planned stop) would be difficult. Without much backtracking and/or flying, we would spend 30 hours on a train to make this happen. Rail passes do not work as well as we once remembered because the “reservation fees” are much more common now, and going to Paris involved many of them. We could have flown for less than the booking fees! But at this point, we’ve flown 16 times in 6 months and feel quite guilty about our carbon footprint, so we really wanted to take advantage of the train pass. Instead, we got Julie excited about some theme parks in Spain and convinced her that we could skip Disney. She was satisfied, but we did not feel the best about it.
We looked at a map and decided to spend three days in Aix-en-Provence instead. Why Aix? I’m not really sure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and neither Mike nor I had been there. I’ve always loved France, but three days was not long enough to give the girls a good flavour of the country. We stayed in an Airbnb, and Julie got her own room with a television (something we’d negotiated when cancelling Disneyland). She is no longer keen on sharing a space with Izzie anymore. They still get along very well, but they both crave time apart these days.
So what did we do in Aix-en-Provence? We walked around the old town, went to the farmer’s market, had a picnic and took a mini train tour. We spent almost a whole day booking our transportation out of Aix-en-Provence. We were headed to Barcelona but had forgotten about the May 1 holiday, and every train was booked from Thursday to Saturday. We ended up booking a train to Montpellier and then a bus across the border into Spain. It worked out in the end, but it took a lot of back and forth and stressed us out a little bit.
The kids were excited to eat French food, or more specifically, croissants. Isabella declared them good but was even more impressed by the baguettes. Julie spent her allowance on a dried salami, which she was thrilled with and ate for days. One day, we went to a perfume shop, and the girls smelled scents for at least an hour before selecting a soap for their grandmother.
All our days in Aix-en-Provence were not our favourite days and it reminded us to stick to the plan and stay somewhere for at least a week so we can truly fall in love with it.
So ignoring our own advice, up next is a three day weekend blitz of Barcelona!
Where we stayed:
- Apartment in Aix en Provence: Not memorable
By the numbers:
- Number of Trains we took to get here: 7 I think – and according to my husband, at least half of them were miserable
- Amount a chunk of Nougat cost us at the market: 30 Euros – it was one of those times when you just fail miserably
- Arguments we got into with locals: 2 – one with the tiny tourist train operator, one with the flix bus operator
- Steak frites eaten: 0 – Izzie ordered boeuf hachee once but it turned out to be hamburger meat
- Coffees Mike drank: 1/2 – he humoured me and sat down in a French cafe and sipped one of those tiny coffees (he could only finish half)
Family Travel Countdown 