Awake and Dreaming

Morning calls but we are oblivious to the rising of the sun until small bellies crawl towards their plates.

Before long droplets of sweat bead consistently around our brows as the temperature moves closer to the almost unbearable mid day. In the relative cool of the early morning legs pump cylindrically as we hurtle down gravel pathways.
 I watch as her hair blows in the wind and his eyes shine as the speed requires extra pull on the handlebars.

Wheels give way under sliding gravel and we stop to recover. I am in awe of these bodies. All of them, growing browner, stronger and freer as our souls have space to explore and ponder.

Ripe fields of wheat which loosely waved short days ago, now succumb to the motorised scythe and we watch day after day as the landscape is cut in glorious patterns of yellow. Soon the neigbouring fields of green will erupt with sunflowers and we wait somewhat impatiently for the display.
Deer tread gently on the edges of the woods at dusk we're told. This raucous crowd is yet to see one but is that any wonder given the speed these children of ours move at. The quiet comes only when young heads are tucked in books. If not electronic there would be oceans of them, slowly drowning the free space about us. Instead it is their imaginations afloat, full of fancy, mystery and delight as sleuths uncover the truth and animals have voice. What a gift it is to love the written word. That mere marks on a page could weave a world in their minds brings me great joy.

There are other worlds here that unfold. Worlds where this daughter of mine experiments with reigning surpreme. She has nutured, taking over where mother nature fell short.
Her gentle hands have cradled these gangly bodies of too big wings and beaks surrounded by down and tiny pin feathers. With such tender care and love invested in the starving trio, the river of tears was long and wide when the nearby feline stole her prize.
All I could do was hold her and it hurt this mama's heart too. With divine display, just one day later three new baby beaks appeared, high in the rock wall of our courtyard, this time still tended by their mother bird, allowing us the joy again without the weight of attempting the care.

This is the ebb and flow of life in this quiet place. We are lead beside the figurative pools of still water and we are finding restoration. It is well.

After dropping Emma off at Gatwick where she was leaving to holiday in Croatia and Rome with friends we drove closer to the heart of London.

It was possibly the worst time to be without a nanny given that we now had books full of tradeshow leads to follow up but we had five to six days to fill in London for the sake of our Schengen visa time limits before we went back to Spain and her tickets had already been booked. Rounding a corner near to our next apartment we saw caution tape authoratively stuck across a doorway and questioned our online booking skills. Still, where we were staying was the street behind the crime scene and as it was late in the afternoon we decided to check it out and arrange new accomodation the next day if we felt the area was too dicey. I forgot however that I had to drop the rental car up the road and given that I hadn't set myself up with an oyster card yet for the buses and it was getting on towards dinner time, I walked the 20 minutes down Old Kent Road back to our London house. Turns out it really wasn't too bad a little neighbourhood and we spent the next week there happily in close proximity to the bus routes and Tescos.

While Mr Evans caught up on some more urgent tasks I took the kids for the day to Horniman Museum and Gardens.
We travelled via the big red double deckers which was an adventure in itself and traipsed about the beautiful property, stopping to admire llamas in the petting zoo, where you couldn't actually pet anything. It was lovely to go at the kids pace and I put the piles of work out of my mind, until the evening time that is, and we explored various parts of London over the week.

It was time to farewell Paris and shoot over the channel to London. We picked up our rental car after a fair amount of phaffing about at the airport getting mobile phones sorted, rewired our brains to switch sides of the road again and hit the M1 towards Nottingham. Nottingham was all about our friends Sam and Amy and it was such a treat to see familiar kiwi faces. They are the kind of friends that you can pick up with after a year of separation and it feels like yesterday.
We had pub dinners and lunches.

Valencia. I don't have so much to say about you.

Beautiful, yes. Enjoyable... not so much.
It was so underwhelming I don't think I even have a single picture of note.

An hour south of our castle we took up residence in a hotel room. With its tight spaces and unimaginative surroundings it's redeeming feature was the proximity to the trade fair Mr Evans and I attended. Three days of loitering at the fair, working and waiting as connections and deals unfolded. We were here on a reconnaissance mission and it was marginally enlightening. The european style shone through and we felt a sense of impending fit for our product on this side of the world.

As the children and Emma grew steadily madder with confinement they branched out and visited the city's aquarium.
We explored small pockets of the nearby city on Saturday and the day which followed was of course Sunday. We forgot that in our part of Valencia, supermarkets don't open on Sunday.
The cafe down the road was closed, as was the restaurant at our hotel, for a private first communion function and so we lounged by the pool making a meal of the few apples, crackers and one pot of hummus we had left. Oh and a pack of biscuits, we had a packet of biscuits for dinner.

We were ready to leave, and Paris was calling our name.
This part of the trip was a bit of fancy really, in honour of my sweet girl, who from the time she was but two years old has been intrigued by the Eiffel Tower.
We arrived on the day when the city authorities began to cut the padlocks from the famous and heavily weighted love lock bridge. An interesting co-incidence given the discussions that were unfolding with Mr Evan and I, but that is another story which I will share more fully another day. The teaser says, it was one of those stories which felt like the crunch bit, smack in the middle of the tale, where both the hero and heroine fear nothing will bring about a remedy to their woes, but as in all good narratives, love emerges victorious.
But.. this shall wait. Back to Paris.

We checked into our new home, through a maze of odd stairwells and proceeded to pay through the nose for a meal at the nearby restaurant aptly named 'God save the Kitchen' before we took to our beds.

Despite her enthusiasm for the famed city, E was reluctant to head out of the hotel the next morning and again we saw the polarising effects of bringing into the world one introvert and one extrovert of the other sex. With a compromise reached, we rested the introverts weary mind for the morning and then we all took to the streets.

Tubes gave way to walkways and we found the enticing Rue Cler market street with all it's delicious delicatessens. gelato, coffee and croissants. Hunger overtook the desire to take photos and so you will have to see in your mind glorious piles of fresh bread stacked on shelves, lines of salami and various cured meats hanging from the hooks above the counter tops, cabinets stacked high with cakes and gateau, street side stalls full of flowers and wooden receptacles of fresh fruit. Try and avoid imaging however the snooty face of a parisian bakery attendant as she ridiculed my attempts at french. She, my friends, is a part of the trip that is barely worth recalling.

Tummies full, it was off to Tour de Eiffel.
There was the obligatory stop in the park below for photos.
We then crossed the road and marvelled at the looming structure. With a two hour line for the elevator we decided to take the stairs. All 704 of them each way, and it was brilliant!.

Neither Emma or I are particularly fond of heights and so made our way up with a firm grip on the handrail, doing our best to ignore the earth disappearing before us and the wind whipping through the open framework. Some hours later as we made our way home for the night it was with a great sense of accomplishment. The last time I went up the Eiffel tower was before I had children and the video of me ascending the last portion in the elevator is so punctuated with expletives that I've never been able to show my little ones. This time, barely a murmur out of place passed through my lips.

Day two involved a hop on hop off bus tour for the young ones to see more of the city while Mr Evans and I took a day to work and discuss our unfolding fairytale.


With Paris ticked off the list, the next stop was the motherland, England.