The trip beginnings...

The week before our vacation Jason had to fly to the US at the last minute. This definitely added another complexity to the trip preparation. Jason arrived back in Prague on Friday afternoon and we left for France on Saturday morning. We had decided to pack light for this trip mainly because we were tired of trucking a ton of stuff with us but also because we wanted to have as much as we could in carry-on in case our luggage was lost again. We also had a leg of our trip on Ryan Air which has a lower weight limit so having two large bags wouldn't work. So, before our trip I went out and bought two rolly carry on bags. We packed everything (or what we thought was everything) that we needed and went to bed early on Friday night because we were both tired from our hectic week and we had to leave for the airport at 4:30am.

We woke up early and got the kids up and dressed, walked Watson and then headed downstairs to catch our cab to the airport. We got the airport and checked in without any problems. We boarded our flight and the girls were excited. They really enjoy take off and landing in airplanes. Our flight was uneventful and we landed in France and went to retrieve our rental car. This took a little longer than ideal since we had to figure out how to install the car seats that we were renting. I had thought that the rental company would help or have some knowledge of the seats they were renting but I was wrong so we had to figure it our on our own. We finally figured it out and headed to Amboise.

As we drove to Amboise we were happy to have the TOM TOM to guide our path. It is so much easier to follow the GPS rather than looking at maps (although I did have printed directions as well just in case something happened to the TOM TOM). After a couple trips around the block in Amboise we found our rental. We were sure what to expect upon arrival b/c we booked the rental through a french company and therefore most correspondence was in French. The last document I received was nice because it was written in English until the end. It said, "Further information to collect the keys: Au meuble". So I looked up "au meuble" and came up with furniture or furnished. So we figured ok, the keys must be at the house. As we were driving through the town on the way to the house we saw a sign that said "Meuble" which made us laugh since it was clearly not a place that we would be picking up keys. The house was on a pretty busy road so Jason stopped and I hopped out to look around to see if there was a way to enter. There was not. There was a phone number though so when Jason came back around the block I had him pull in the driveway of the hotel near our rental and I called the number. Luckily the woman spoke a little English and could make sense of my horrible garbled French as I said the street name. She told me 5 minutes, or at least that is all I understood, I said thanks and waited. Sure enough, she showed up within 5 minutes and let me in the house and showed me where everything was. She left and I went to the parking lot and got Jason and the girls. We had rented a mid size car for this trip and that was a downer at this point. It took multi-point turns and mirrors in to get the car into the driveway of the house. After a couple days we got more use to this and it got easier but a smaller car would have been nice.

The house we rented was cute. I don't think there was a straight wall in the entire house. It was clearly an old house. I think probably the funniest thing was the bathroom that was half way up the stairs. I had never seen a bathroom that is essentially between two floors. It did have a nice shower though. The house had three bedrooms, a living room, dining room and kitchen. It was small but after living in an apartment it was fine for us.