Mum on tour

Feeling like I had eaten enough to last me two months and slept enough to last me minus 2 days, loaded to the hilt with soft toys, and other paraphernalia required for a 30+ hour journey with 3 small children, we got off the plane in the small airport of Brest, France. The airport was small and the customs officials looked like they had never had to deal with a mass of foreigners arriving with an even larger mass of luggage. Or if they had, they were preferring to forget it. The weather was grey, the landscape bleak and the words of the lonely planet guide rang in my head.... Rainy Brest - which was followed shortly by the sentence – best bypassed and keep heading north…

After switching to an Air France flight in Singapore, lost and then found luggage, wrongly booked rooms and a short stopover in Paris, something had gradually been dawning on me. I turned to a fellow Australian who I had just met and asked her 'but do you speak any French?' Somehow in all the whirlwind of preparation, it had only just occurred to me that I would need to speak French. I didn't even own a French-English dictionary! What was more enlightening was her response, 'oh no of course not, I don't know any' without seeming to care. Who would need French anyway, we spoke English, what more could anyone need...

Within less than 24 hours it became plain to us all that at least some French would be needed. Despite being met by a bilingual guide at the airport, we were left to fend for ourselves. I struggled to buy a birthday cake for my daughter's 6th birthday that day, how on earth did I say – no cream as the hotel has no fridge? Such a seemingly simple request was impossible and why did the hotel have no fridge anyway?
Later, as we prepared to retire for the night, one of our party came racing in saying they'd seen signs saying that our cars were to be towed away were they not moved away by 10pm that night. Now we had seen those signs earlier and not had a clue what they meant, but dutifully went and moved the car. How lucky were we when we got up the next morning and found a festival where the car had once been. Lucky compared to another member of the party who had not discovered this joyous news and whose car had been replaced by a stall selling fluffy pink rabbits with no hint as to where the offending car might have been removed to or what one might do to try and discover its whereabouts.