Summer Vacation Part 1

 1st Country: Spain

Spain and likely a lot of Europe take most of the month of August off of work for vacations, in fact many stores close down entirely for the month and most others shorten their hours.  Instead of living in a ghost town for an entire month we set off on a tour of Southwestern Europe.

*We first headed for Barcelona, Spain for our first night's stay.

Barcelona, Spain

Sagrada Familia 

This was quite an impressive building.  The Temple de la Sagrada Familia  is a large Catholic Church, designed by the catalan architect Antoni Gaudí.  It was started in 1882, and it is still under construction for 30-80  more years. As you walk around the building you can see the different aging of the building.  It is a masterpiece of Gaudí  and it is the most visited monument in Spain.

Park Güell by Antoni Gaudí

This park is said to be inspired by Hansel and Gretel, but instead of candy it had mosaic tile everywhere and it is huge. You can see much of Barcelona from here and the coast.

The Magic Water Fountains

It was hard to choose just one picture for this.  This was a half hour show with lights music and of course lots of water.

*After Barcelona we headed to our next stay Sophia Antipolis, France just above Nice, France.

 

2nd Country: France

 

Camarque Parc

We drove through this large natural wetland on the blue coast of France on our way to Nice.  We read that we should be able to see wild white horses, black bulls and pink flamingos.

 

We saw lots of wild white horses,

 

fortunately just a few wild black bulls,

and lots of pink flamingos. 

We also found the blue coast at the far end, but we didn't have easy access to our bathing suits. 

Nice, France

Nice is a nice beautiful, large coastal town between Cannes and Monaco

We saw many nice expensive cars and a few nice little ones as well. 



We found lots of nice beaches with lots of nice sand, but the snorkeling here was what was really nice!  We saw lots of colorful fish, Morgan and Brent saw small crabs and an octopus. 

This beach was best for snorkeling since the sand stopped not far into the water and the reef/rocks began.  The water was very shallow so it was also hard to swim without snorkeling through it.  We switched to a more swim friendly beach after a couple of hours here.   I also wanted to point out the flag design on Mason's rash guard.  In the US it seems that flag attire is mostly just worn in July, but here they are in style year around.  We see them in most stores and on people everywhere we go that are not from the US.  We love it!

Morgan, "King of the  nice big Rock".  He had a very challenging time getting to this rock trying not to hurt the reef or himself if you can imagine, but he did come back with a nasty cut from all the sharp rock he had to crawl across to get to it. 

We found nice warm and soft sand for napping.

*After several hours at the beach we made a last minute decision to drive north about an hour to a medieval city Entrevaux Basses-Alpes where some of my Bellon-Columbet ancestors come from.

The Drive 

The drive was quite amazing as it hugged the hillside going through tunnels, over bridges, under nets filled with rocks, following a river below cities in the "sky".

One of the nets used to catch rocks from falling on cars.

One of the cities in the "sky", not sure how they get up there or how long it would take them, but we know we would not like to live up there with kids. 

 Puget Theniers

 

We were driving past this town festival and saw that they had a trapeze set up right next to the road so we pulled over just in time for the show to start.   Notice Kaiya's sunburn from the beach, it was painful!!!

Entrevaux-Basses-Alpes

Entrevaux is a very old amazing city below a citadel surrounded on two sides with a river.  I have several great grandparents who are buried there and so we wanted to see if we could locate their graves. 

A frontal shot of the citadel and city from the graveyard. Unfortunately we were not able to find any related  gravestones.  We found the old graveyard and lots of very old graves but few with headstones and even fewer with readable headstones.

 The city was quite majestic, this is the bridge to enter the city.  Don't miss Brent and the kids on the bridge.

 

  

Inside the old city.

Free Puplic "Toilette"

On the way home our kids really needed to go to the bathroom and we were excited to find a free public toilet across the street from where we were getting dinner in a small town on the way home.  You rarely see public toilets and free ones are rare, but seeing just a hole in the ground was our first.  We were happy that we had a roll of toilet paper in the car since 3 kids had to go # 2 and the toilet paper was not included.