The Unadventurous Traveller

The Unadventurous Traveller The Wild Side of Life We enjoyed our lives and carried on adapting to French living. Outside of school, work and doing up the various buildings, we enjoyed the vast open space that many houses in France afford people. I had a vegetable garden - my ‘Potager’ - which I really enjoyed tinkering about on, planting vegetables, sharing in the delights of growing produce with the children and Dale, and eating the delights there and then! Vegetable garden Fresh peas, beans, lettuce, radishes, carrots, potatoes, and  even aubergines etc! The kids would help me by digging up the potatoes or carrots and it was such a pleasurable activity for me, to wind down after work. It was also another way to get me into the sunshine and was a great thing to teach the kids where vegetables really come from and how hard it is to grow certain things we just take for granted. I loved being able to give away some surplus produce  to our neighbours, gite guests and of course pl...

The Unadventurous Traveller  Life ticked along pretty well in France, I worked, whilst Dale had plenty of projects to get along with. The children made many friends at school and had so much space to play, bounce (on the trampoline), hide (and seek) and keep chickens. Summer and all the fun and farming that brought gave way to autumn, with beautiful walks along the riverbank, in the woodlands, and discovering new seemingly ‘undiscovered’ treasures of places nearby. Autumn also meant we had to start thinking seriously about the approaching winter, which to me meant getting wood ready (Dale had been preparing for this since spring it was only me that started to think about it!). Our friend Francis, the farmer just up the road, had given to us a small coppice with about 15-20 mature ash trees back in the spring, if Dale could cut down the trees, we could have them. This was perfect as we wanted the wood and Dale had a chainsaw etc to do the work. So he set about cutting the trees down...