Frens and Greetje showing Roger the route they travelled on the map

Roger's friends from Holland have come to visit. He met Frens when he went on a young farmer's exchange to work on the Mittags' farm in Minnesota in 1980.
Frens and Greetje arrived after a very hot day, and Frens said the previous night that they spent in a hotel in Grenoble was the hottest he had ever been. When they checked in the receptionist had asked if they would like an air-conditioned room for 3 euros extra. Frens didn't think he would spend the extra money, but it was a decision he regretted.
Yesterday was just the opposite. It rained all day, and we were stuck inside the house.

I have lots of Blog posts to add from the last week, but they will have to wait until after the visitors have left. School has finished and the kids are on holidays so I should have plenty of time to Blog. (!!) Do I really believe that?

Summer

Summer officially started on June 21 (Saturday), but the summer weather started on Thursday. I hate the heat and tend to hibernate when the weather gets too hot outside. There is an air-conditioner on the main level in our house, which does a good job of cooling me down.
Sophie has taken to having a shower in her underwear and then putting her clothes back over the top (or not) as she says that makes her feel fresh.
There are shutters on the front windows which can keep the sun out in the morning; and in the evening if we open the windows downstairs and the windows up the top of the house we get a good airflow through the house, even there is no such thing as a breeze.
The big family car is air-conditioned, but not the little VW (I don't think I've ever had a car without air-conditioning before), so I will take the big one when it is very hot. Although the air-conditioning works well in the front of the car the kids complain about it being hot in the back. I told them that when I was little air-conditioning wasn't invented and I didn't complain! Next time we go on a long trip I will take a bottle of water and some flannels for them to keep cool with...

Wet Weather

The clothes line last Wednesday

The clothes line today...

No, I haven't done the same lot of washing twice. These things are STILL on the line, because they haven't been dry in five days. I hung them out on Wednesday when the weather was fine, but it didn't last long enough to get then dry. Since then it has been wet, damp, or humid, for the last week.

Detour

Usually when we have been driving we have gone where the road leads us - we have never been anywhere around here, so everywhere is new and interesting. But on the weekend we got our Tom Tom GPS system set up with a map of Western Europe (the Australian map we had didn't help us much around here...). So we planned a trip for today, while the girls were at school. We wanted to see what was on the other side of this mountain called Chartreuse. So we planned a route which avoided toll roads and took the scenic way around the mountain. Not exactly around, but a little bit over too, with a couple of passes being at about 1300 metres. It had snowed overnight so the scenery was very picturesque, with chalets and pine trees covered in snow, and clear mountain streams cascading down the mountainside.
Mountains are extremely exciting and picturesque, but I am not a mountain girl. I grew up on the farm at Pingrup where you can see for miles and miles - with not a hill in sight, let alone a mountain. I was hoping to get to see out over some sort of flatter countryside on the other side of the mountain. But it was not to be...
During the night some of the mountain had fallen onto the road. And the rockfall had closed the road. So we had to program an alternative route into the Tom Tom and we arrived in Grenoble rather sooner than we had thought.
But not before I had snapped a photo of the scene and of the workers, hanging from ropes, who had drilled holes into the rock to insert bars which would hold the hillside together. Like sticky tape I was told.

The First Day of Spring

What a surprise we got when we woke up and looked out the window this morning... It was snowing!!
It has changed the look of the village, and obliterated the mountains in the distance. And it has made our steps slippery - Sophie fell on her way to school this afternoon and had to change into a dry pair of pants before she left the house.
The snow was quite significant in the morning, but after lunch it started raining, which turns the snow slushy.
Everyone wants to go out and get the luge to go tobogganing but Odette and Hugh have both got bad coughs and runny noses. I don't want them to go out in the cold. Yesterday we went to the pharmacy and bought some medicine for them.
Stef has given us some directions for how to get to another small ski field on this side of the valley, where there should not be too many people and we could have some fun in the snow on the weekend.