The River Seine flows right past the house. The name comes from a Gaul word meaning goddess of the River. The source of the Seine is near Dijon and then it flows past Paris and out to sea near Le Havre.

I like the idea that the water flows past Paris and on to us. It is very wide near us and very peaceful in the mornings. It can get busy though with some big ships passing by on their way to Rouen.

Along our section, are many kilometers of ‘chemin de halage’. These are the towpaths, when horses used to pull or tow the barges up the river. It makes for a very nice walk.

Today we got a personal tour of the College where the kids will be going. School starts on Friday. In France, College is a middle school, in French sixieme to troisième. This equates to about year 6 to year 9. Louis will be in cinquième and Lavinia in troisième. The school is quite modern, built in 2015 and has an amazing gym with its own rock climbing wall. It is also quite focussed on sustainability with lunch clubs in aquaculture, greenhouse and some goats kept at school! We had the full tour of the canteen too which is where the kids eat a proper lunch with three courses. The options for lunch are either eat at school or leave and have lunch at home. You are not allowed to bring lunch. The school sounds pretty great and we felt welcomed. It will be a big change for Louis as it’s essentially a high school in our system with different teachers for each subject.

You might be wondering about the name. Most french schools are named after a famous person. Gustave Flaubert was a famous writer (Madame Bovary) from Rouen which is only 30 min away. Also famous for being the last home of Joan of Arc.

We walked through town after we got our shopping and visited the patisserie 😁!

Duclair is very traditional and has some lovely old half timbered houses and a lovely church. The main square of town is really quite nice. It was market day but we missed it due to our school visit.

We have to take the ferry to Duclair. Mostly this is fine but it has been out of service a lot lately. Also we wanted to take it at lunch hour but instead we had to wait until the ferryman had his lunch. Lunch is sacred.

After a rather epic but not quite Iliad-esque journey, we arrived at our home in Normandie. It was a great feeling to slip into bed after rediscovering the house after three years!

We had to explore every corner of the house and garden. The house is looking good. The foray into AirBnB doesn’t seem to have left too much of a mark. Louis is funny, he said, “I didn’t know our house was so fancy”. He doesn’t seem to remember everything or all the renovations we had done! He was only 8 when we left.

A family of owls decided to move into the last room we have not yet renovated and have left quite a mess. Add that to the list of jobs

The garden is very dry. All the news about the biggest drought in Europe in 500years is true. The fields and gardens are looking almost Australian summer brown. One thing I always liked was how green Normandie is in summer. On our last trip we had prepared a lovely garden in front of the house but it’s all gone now.

The lovely old apple tree is looking very unhappy. It looks dead, no leaves but there are some apples. Is it disease or lack of water? Louis did remember climbing up the tree when we lived here.

We went to the shops to get new SIM cards and groceries. Rediscovering our French favorites was fun! Lavinia got right into speaking French so we didn’t stand out!

We came home to do some gardening and enjoy the warm weather. Louis was very happy to have some saucisson with his aperitif!

Booking return flights to Europe at the moment with all the airline drama seemed a bit of a risk! Aligning leave, school and reasonable ticket prices was a bit of a challenge. The very cheap prices they were around at the start of 2022 evaporated fairly quickly. I was lucky to get some direct flights at a reasonable price but the hitch was an 11 hour stopover in Doha 😩.

Thanks to Harry Styles Lavinia got through take-off and landing with no vomits! Yay.

Louis snuck in a few scary movies and we all got some sleep.

Lavinia, Louis and I are heading to France. I have two months of long service leave and they are going to attend a term of French school. We are going to live in our farmhouse in Normandie and we are pretty excited!