The kindness of family, (animal) friends, and strangers (Recent Travels, Part II)

(Please scroll down to read Recent Travels, Part I if you haven't already)

We had a fun couple of days in Italy. The only full day we were there we spent hiking over hills and through vines out to San Gimignano (shown here), a very interesting little town full of medieval skyscrapers (15 still stand of the original 72 towers). The next day we got in my parents' rental car and headed north, stopping for the night in a little Alpine town just across the French border called Briançon. That night we ate dinner in a restaurant that actually served several wild plants in our food, which was neat. The next morning we walked around in the mountains a bit and found most of them; some we could identify but others remain a mystery. We then continued to drive north and made it back to Chris's family's place. It was nice to come back after about five weeks of being away, and especially exciting to see our garden! Chris says he wants to write about the garden, so I'll stick to the travel adventures and you will hear from him soon about how our plant friends have been faring all this time.

We spent a few days with both of our families together in once place for only the second time, funnily enough almost exactly two years since the first time, which was when we got married. It was neat to show my parents around the place where we have been living, and to feed them food right out of our garden.

After a few days we packed ourselves back into the rental car and headed north again, this time for Antwerp. Some people reading this may not know that we lived in Antwerp for a year when I was a kid. Going back was fun; it's interesting to see how my 7-year-old brain remembered things a little differently from how I found them this time. The trip was exhausting though, as we had lots of old friends to see and places to revisit, and it was very, very hot. But Antwerp is a really nice city (as far as cities go) and it was a lot of fun rediscovering parks I used to play in and plazas I remembered walking through.

After a few nights in Antwerp we drove up to Amsterdam to see some more old friends. Again, a lot of running around, but Amsterdam is also a really neat city, with all its canals lined with gorgeously rundown houseboats. Walking around the city was really nice, and we also took a day trip out to Den Haag and Utrecht. After two days in Amsterdam, my parents flew back home and Chris and I stayed on for a few more days. We moved from our city youth hostel to a campground about 15 minutes outside of the city, where we rented a tiny little cabin. The percentage of hippies increased dramatically. It was nice to get out of the city, and the countryside is really beautiful out there, even if it is very developed. We rented bikes, which were really more like tanks than bikes, but it worked out fine because there was not a hill in sight and we were never in a hurry to get anywhere. We didn't go back into the city much, but spent most of our time exploring the area. We found a really nice wild park on a peninsula sticking out into the Ijmeer, the southernmost of a series of connected lakes that eventually lead to the North Sea. And just outside this park a flock of sheep were grazing, and they were the friendliest sheep we'd ever met:

[Check out our photo album on the left, "Adventures in Italy, Belgium and Holland", for more encounters with animal friends!]

So, we eventually headed off once again, this time back to France and back to Chris's family's place. And surprisingly, we had the hardest time hitchhiking out of Amsterdam. For some reason very few people stopped, and those that did were only going to the next town. We finally decided to be proactive about it and I started asking people at a gas station just outside of town if they'd give us a ride. We managed to find a guy going all the way to Paris (who later told us that I'd freaked him out a bit, as I approached him just as he was hiding his newly procured weed stash in the back of his car). We'd been hoping to go more toward the south and avoid Paris, but since we'd had such bad luck so far, we decided to go along with it. Turns out he was making a brief stop in Lille as well, and for various reasons (including that his driving was becoming more and more erratic and aggressive, as he was late for his first day at a new job due to non-stop traffic jams we'd been encountering all afternoon) we elected to get out there. After a couple of short rides to get us to better hitching spots we finally got picked up by a really nice guy who, upon hearing that we were probably just going to find a forest to sleep in that night, invited us home with him. We'd been having good conversations in the car, sharing gardening tips and the like, so it seemed like a safe enough deal. We got to see another part of France, the area around Laon, which is really beautiful. We had a nice dinner with him, drank some regional wines, and got to see his garden. In the morning, he drove us around a bit more (all the while saying how he wished we could stay a whole day so he could take us on hikes and show us more of the area) and then eventually dropped us off at the nearest highway entrance.

There was very little traffic, but in not too much time we were picked up by an orthopedic surgeon with a passion for cheesy dance remixes. He was driving a moving van to his new home. Veeeerrrryyyyyy sloooooowllllyyyyyy. By the time he dropped us off we were way behind schedule and starting to get worried about making it back that night. It also turned out he'd dropped us off at the wrong place to get to the highway we wanted, but luckily we got a quick ride with a local woman to a better place. However, as we were standing at the entrance to the highway with our "Lyon" sign, another hitcher who'd just been dropped off coming the other way ran over to us and said that we wouldn't find a ride here; trust him, he hitched this route all the time. Instead, he said we should walk a couple of kms to the next service station, since everyone there would be going in the right direction at least. It felt like an unbearably long walk in the heat, which had been growing over the last few days, and once there we decided to not waste time with our sign and just ask people up-front if they'd take us. Seems to get us rides a lot faster, since more people say yes than would think to stop for us if they were driving past us.

Our next ride made up all the time we'd lost with the doctor. This guy cruised along at 180 km/h. That's 111 mph. Luckily though he wasn't going all the way to Lyon, so we spent less than an hour with him. Dropped off at yet another service station, we found a couple going past Lyon who agreed to take us. They were quiet, and we were exhausted, so we didn't do much talking, but they were super nice and actually went a bit out of their way to take us into the city, to the train station. We got there just in the nick of time to take the last evening train down to St Clair les Roches (the closest station, only about 15 minutes from the house), where we were picked up by Chris's dad.

And so now here we are, back again, relaxing a bit. We only have just over a month until our European adventure comes to a close. Crazy to think we've been here for six months already. And that so many new and unknown adventures await us!