Little Corner of Ania

Very well. Been asked about our vacation. Started out swell, with excited kids talking about France for weeks ahead of the vacation. I think they love France after our Fall vacation in Paris last year. This time we decided to do a road trip in the Southern France – arriving in Nice, spending our nights in Cannes (Mandelieu-la-Napoule), Moustiers Sainte Marie, Avignon and Montpellier, before returning to Nice for our return trip (Note to self: Next time: Just look for returntickets from the last city you’re spending time in, here being Montpellier. You can return rental cars anywhere, so no real point in having to return to the airport you came from, sort of).

Kastrup Airport. A nice airport with its own area for kids. Wish there were more of the comfy chairs in the silent zone though, they were occupied the whole time :/

Every airport should have its own Starbucks (ya hear me, Flesland??). Even if the nice people misspell your name.

Putting together and bringing your own kid-aid is vital for the sanity of the vacation. At least with our kids. We had this 4-in-a-row game (wins the prize of being most popular this trip – and it cost like, 2 euros, haha), three kind of card-games, some paper & pen. We later supplied this kit w/a wooden balance game – cheap and good fun for 2 euros only!

Another important part of the vacation is making sure the places we stayed at had access to a pool. Only one of the places we stayed at did not have a pool, but it’s ok, we only stayed there two days. Still. Pool = double win. This girl learned to swim for real at the first pool – by the end of the stay she was able to swim two lengths on her own w/o having to support herself at the edge. Yay!

Personally, I *love* eating at smaller establishments. You know, the local ones focusing on like offering three or four meals…the fewer meals on the menu, the more you can be sure they actually care about the meals they offer sort of. And the meal of the day? Often awesome. And cheaper than the menu. Nice. However…yes, places w/English menus or English-speaking waiters were preferred (sorry, I know this is a touchy issue w/french people). Also the ones w/kids menu, although the oldest preferred grown-up menus in the end. I mean…it’s nice knowing what you’ll get to eat in advance..especially when someone in the party is very allergic to certain sort of food…

Hm. I could write a lot about the food and stuff. We don’t eat out much here in Norway. So I’m like – if we’re gonna eat out a lot (like during the vacation), I wanna make sure the place we’re ending up at actually will give us good food & experience for the money (lesson learned from our trip to Paris last year). Most of the top suggestions from TripAdvisor proved to be good ones. And well, shy away from the popular locations (ie town centres) – they have the advantage that they’re located at a place w/lots of people anyways – and serve lots of people at a time = not putting much thought in the food. At least not when it comes to our kind of food budget. We learned this the hard way, ugh :/ More on that later.

Oh, and about the food. Love, love the French breakfast! To get up in the morning, take a swim in the pool first then walk to the patisserie & the butchers and the cheese shop to buy todays breakfast….croissants…french bread…tapenades….lots and lots of different cheese….YUM! (ok, I guess this is more, our adapted idea of French breakfast..nevertheless..I envy the selection of fresh bread & varied kind of cheese & meat available like, at every streetcorner in France…)

Spending a whole day at a waterland & aquarium is pretty exhausting for some.

While others are energized enough to still miss school :)

I found these amusing + useful. I wish we had something like this in Norway (don’t know of this here anyways). Free dogpoo-bags.

This is the first place we stopped at to eat, and we returned here once before leaving Cannes. Le Capri in Mandelieu-la-Napoule. Very friendly staff, cozy and amazing food. Really, really, amazing. It looks sort of cheesy from the outside, but don’t let the facade fool you.

A nice thing were all these parks which offered activities for the kids like this.

Not sure what you call this…uhm… hike-climbing-activity-trail-fun? Eh. Sort of. You just slip the kid a helmet & “tie” them to the start of the trail w/the security thingie. Then let them go ahead.

Nevertheless, the kids enjoyed especially these part of the hikes.

Both of them.

Then we continued to the rest of the park. Did a labyrinth. Let the kids play in the waterpark. And purchased waterballoons.

FUN! Need I say more?

Haa!

:)

Ps. I approve of parks who offer hammocks for the adults.

Did some minigolfing before leaving the Cannes-area and headed for the mountains.