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I’ve mentioned before that I like to buy relevant souvenirs when I go on vacation. Not just trinkety tshirts and hats and stuff, but real things to remember the trip by.

Here’s what I picked up in France:

Matching soccer jerseys for me and Z.

We visited the salt marshes in Guerande and picked up some fleur de sel and a salt grinder.

We brought home 2 bottles of wine from Marc Bredif, and 2 bottles of Chambord.

Another Do Not Disturb sign.

Jen and I have started to collect these. It started with our visit to Cuba last year, where the sign said “No Molestar”.. we laughed, No Molesting!.

When we visited Portland in the fall, they had a cool DND sign at the Four Points Sheraton, so we scooped it and a trend started.

At Hotel Des Grandes Ecoles in Paris, they had a funky Do Not Enter logo on their signs, and it quickly found it’s way into the pages of a book to bring home.

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So we’ve been back for a week now, and have had to time to sit back and look at how our overseas adventures with a 10 month old went. Some thought we were crazy packing 2 suitcases, 2 knapsacks, a stroller, a carseat and a baby on a plane, through subways and around western France. Yes, it was a challenge at times, but, you know what? It really wasn’t that bad.

Here’s what we did right, and what we did wrong:

Bring only enough food to cover your plane trip, you can pick up the rest at markets in Paris. Yes, its a little more expensive, but the selection and quality are light years ahead of home.

Get out of the city. Accomodations are cheaper in the smaller towns. Life is more relaxed, and it’s more like staying at a home than in a hotel. We could do laundry, dishes, cook meals and share common areas giving Z much more space to roam than if we were in a 150sq ft bunker somewhere in the 1st Arr.

Once you’re in the campagne, use the rest stops - the cleaning stations at the rest areas are fabulous. The gas stations are usually paired with easy restos to feed you, and the bathrooms are totally tricked out for babies. They have stuffed animals to play with, they have huge sinks, padded change tables, and, as Jen says, were obviously designed by a mother.

Dont be afraid to ask to have food heated. EVERYONE has a microwave and is more than willing to help. Brasseries in the middle of Paris will gladly pour you a $5 coffee and run to the back to heat up some turkey stew for your baby - but be warned, they have some pretty powerful machines over there. Less than 30s is PLENTY to heat up your baby’s snack.

If you’re spending any time in Paris, get ready to do some heavy lifting when you take the metro. There are a few escalators, a lot of stairs and no elevators. To get from the street down to the station, you’ll need to carry your stroller up many flights of stairs and through a few tricky gates. The station attendants are happy to open up big doors to get you into the station, but you’re on your own dealing with the stairs. Bring a collapsable stroller and a Baby Bjorn type of carrier. Keep the baby in the Bjorn through the stations, and use the stroller when you’re up on the streets.

If you can double date - do it. I wish we would have gone with another couple, and for our next big vacation, we will. It would have been nice to have been able to experience some french nightlife, but with his feeding, bath and bedtime starting at 530 … we ended up grabbing plats a emporter, or salads and baguette from the marche and spent all our evenings inside, early.

That said, the self catering became necessary and we saved HUNDREDS by not eating at restos every night. For less than 20 Euros, we could get 2 salads, baguette, cheese, some sliced chorizo, a BOTTLE of wine, some dessert and water. Eat in a bistro and you’re looking at that much for one plat, dessert, entree combo.

Take a cab home to the airport. We took the train into town when we landed.
hauled the stroller, car seat, 2 knapsacks, 2 luggages, purse and baby, up and down stairs, on and off metros and the like. When we got out of town, we took a cab to the train station. When we came home, we looked at each other, counted up all the money we’d saved by being in our room each night at 5, and we bucked up for a cab.

Yes, it was 50 Euros ($80) to get from the 5th to CDG, but it took 1/3 the time and had 5% of the stress. It was the absolute best 50 we spent all trip.

Off season travelling is sooooo much easier. March and April are PERFECT months for wandering France, or, I’m guessing, any part of Europe. The rates are cheaper and the service is better. Yes, it was a little chilly at night, and it rained a few days, but have a look at this lunch in Blois. We had the entire.plaza.to.ourselves. Try that in August. Same in Chambord. Not one single person spoiling our pictures of the Chateau - try doing that when the parking lot is full of tour busses in July.

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Wow. What a trip. A more detailed post mortem on what happened and advice for travelling with babies to come. First up, the photos:

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I’ve made all of Zacharie’s food since we switched him to solids. My dear friend Erin Davis gave us Annabel Karmel’s book as a baby gift and the ease of the recipes was simply inspiring.

Each weekend I boil up potatoes, apples, tomatoes, chives, leeks and more. I grind up chicken, and turkey, and puree away. I make pasta and sauce and oatmeal and freeze it in trays for the week ahead.

It’s a great system.

But I gotta tell you, if we lived in France, I don’t think I would be going through the trouble. I just can’t compete.

The baby food the french babies get to snack on is spectacular.

Carrots, turkey, lamb, salmon, spaghetti, squash, couscous, apricots, apples, pears. Sure, all similar staples to back home, but it’s when you open the food bowls you see the difference.

In Canada, the food looks processed, pureed, and boiled into non-descript fecal matter. In France, you could crack open one of the ready to feed serving bowls and swear you had heated up your own freezer meal for lunch.

Come on, we all lick our fingers when we feed our children, and after sampling the stuff Z got to snack on the past 2 weeks, I was tempted to dig in right alongside him. Pot Au Feu, Turkey Stew, Apples with biscuits and more.

The Bledina baby meals are also broken down more consistently by age with a more gradual and visible texture added to the meals as the babies get older. 4, 6, 8, 12, 15, 18 mos+ all get their own individual meal plan.

Going to France we overstuffed the bag with diapers to use on the trip, coming home, we overstuffed with baby food.

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We finally got to the wine part of the trip today. Well, we’ve actually been cracking bottles regularly in our room each night, but today we actually got to do a proper degustation in Vouvray, just east of Tours.

Moncontour was the first we hit. Ick. The tasting room was, at first, closed. The woman spoke little english and did even less in french to show off her wines or take us through a proper tasting. She basically asked for us to point to something on the list, she’d crack it and leave it to us to decide if it was any good. It was okay. We bought a couple bottles, out of guilt for having wasted her time.

5 seconds down the road I found the winery that Rick Steves recommended to visit, Marc Bredif. What a difference in approach. A formal, beautiful tasting room with bilingual guides who asked a few questions about our tastes and then took us on a fabulous journey through dry bubble to aged chenin blanc wrapping up with a super sweet nectar. We bought 2 bottles here, wishing we hadnt bought the 2 before.

They even let us wander their caves underneath the winery where I shot this video telling more of the story:

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Jen has a fun travel game you can play on your next visit to Europe. Just as we used to play punch buggy with VW Beetles back when we were kids, Jen likes to play the same version, except you punch when you spot the trademark Burberry plaid.

Springtime in Paris and the scarves and hats and coats are everywhere.

Grab a pal and see who can spot the Burberry in this fun photo on Des Champs Elysees. If you can spot it before your friend, smack ‘em on the arm!

This game would be equally fun to play in Vancouver walking down Robson St. However you may need to substitute fake LV and CC for the smackings.

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End of March.

Weather is a little unpredictable, sure. But the crowds aren’t. They’re no.where.

Today it was sunny, showering, cloudy and about 13 degrees. This is a cafe across the square from the chateau in Blois. It’s written up in many guidebooks.

This was us at lunch today.

Same thing happened at Chambord. I should not have been able to take 15 photos like this with nobody cluttering my view of the chateau. This picture was taken at 4 in the afternoon. Personne is in it. Couldnt do that in August.

Come to France in the spring - c’est magnifique!

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We’re in France - why wait til Wednesday?

Actually, Wednesday is the day we do some serious tastings here in the Loire, so expect a longer post then. In the meantime just a quick little video we shot tonight mixing some Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne and Chambord Liqueur Royale.

We visited the Chambord Chateau today, and on the way back to Le Moulin Du Port (our B&B), we passsed the Chambord property - pretty cool.

Once again, our pairings are TOTALLY off, but what are you going to do when you’re in France with a 10mo old and curfew is each night at 7p, and the restos don’t open til 8? Well, you do a quick video with some champagne and Chambord for y’all and then settle in for a few episodes of Dexter on the MacBook.

BTW, tomorrow, we walk the 4k along the banks of the Cher to Chenonceau, a chateau with no moat, because it was built on the river.

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There is a Starbucks inside the walls of the Forbidden City. Nothing is sacred. So I shouldnt be surprised, in the least, to the make the gauntlet hike to the top of Mont St Michel and be bombarded with ticky tacky tourist trap shops all the way.

Mont St Michel is a medieval masterpiece, and if you didnt know that, you’d just have to visit one of the dozen shops offering to sell you armor, swords and chess pieces of the day. Heck, they’ll even sell you a Knights of the Round Table rotating centrepiece, or action figures from Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings.

According to Rick Steves, we shouldnt be too disappointed by the tackiness of the Grande Rue. He warns in his book, France 2008, the Mont is “home to a single, grotesquely touristy street.”

In other words, it’s just like Gastown. A beautiful, classic, heritage site taken over by the fine purveyors of tee shirts, tea towels and anything with an “I was there” marking.

Okay, that’s fine and dandy but E3,70 for a can of Coke? That’s about C$6. That’s about ridiculous.

Jen and I survived the run, and made it to the abby at the top. 10 minutes late. Sure, it’s open til 6, but the last group is let in at 5. We saw a back door from the gift shop with people trailing in from the tour, so we thought we’d do it in reverse. We made it about halfway through, when a woman made some comment to Jen.

She doesnt speak french, I heard her make english comments to someone else along the lines of “go ahead, I’m coming back.” I thought it was a tour, Jen thought it was something else. So we continued along for another few minutes until we reached a locked door. Uh-oh.

The church is closing, that woman was sweeping out the dregs, and we just passed her. We hustled a couple of dark, stone chambers ahead and found .. another locked door.

We were trapped. In a stone abby, that just 2 centuries ago was used as a prison. Sure, Michael, it may not be Sona or Fox River, but let’s see you get out of this one. With a baby. And no food. And no phone.

Thankfully we didnt need to scream, the woman was just a few steps ahead and heard us fiddling with the locked door. She opened it, scolded us, and we hustled our way back to the beret shops, where we belonged.

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Yes, we’re in France, but we’re in the North, not the south where the wine is (yet). Here, the trees are filled with apples, and the Belgians are just a barrels throw north. So Normandie is not about wine, it’s about cider. Lots of it. Cider and apple brandy, called Calvados, which also happens to be the name of the department (county).

But back to Beer Thursday. With the abundance of apples, and the friendliness of the Belgian beermakers nearby, you knew someone, somewhere would get chocolate apple juice in someone else’s peanut butter beer.

Oh, and I dont know why my head got cut off .. it was fine in the original footage.

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