Climbing in the trees & Saint-Germain-en-Laye

I am having my first vacation from my new job since the French schools have two weeks off. Even though I changed my job, I still get to benefit from "les vacances". Last week my employers needed me to be with the 3-year-old for Monday and Tuesday (while the little sister was in the nursery as always) after which they had other plans for him. Also this week is free for me, except that I promised to go and pick the 1-year-old on one evening and put her to bed so that the father could go out.

Since H is still working as normal, I am spending days mostly by myself, having more time to bake, practice Vietnamese and so. But for the weekend we had common plans. H had asked to get Friday free from work so that we could travel to Southern France for a few days to see Marseilles, Bordeaux or some other nice city. We got this idea because H had bought vacation vouchers which we could use to buy train tickets (that we wouldn't otherwise buy now since there will be some other travelling within the next months and those tickets have already taken quite some money). But for some reason we couldn't book train tickets online with the vouchers and in the office the price was double. So... We changed the plans and decided to stay in Ile-de-France and go see and try things here. I don't know where exactly H got the idea to go to a tree-climbing park where there are robs and such from tree to tree and one has to follow the courses several meters above the ground. I was in right away! I have wanted to try that for some years already but never went for it before now.

So instead of taking long-distance trains on Friday morning, we just took rerB and rerA trains plus a bus to head to AccroCamp South-West from Paris. After a short guidance video and a test course, we were allowed to go through the 7 courses and a Quick jump as we liked. Every time we entered a course, we just needed to attach our "safety robe puller" into a cable that guided us through each course which all ended with a zip line sliding back to the ground. And after the easier and more difficult / scarier courses, we also did the Quick Jump. It's kind of like a bungee jump but you can hold onto the robe that slows you down after hardly any free fall. I'm proud of H who also did that on top of everything else. After all, I'm the one of us who seeks for this kind of excitement in life more.

View from the ground

View from the air

Even though Friday was quite some exercise, we still had energy to head out on Saturday, as well. Since the Southern France was left for the future, we wanted to visit a town closer to Paris. There is a town called Saint-Germain-en-Laye that is located next to the river Seine about 10km to the West from Paris. In the morning before going there we went to the outdoor market nearby our home to buy cheap fruits and delicious meet, this time meaning ribs. After having some Vietnamese noodles, we took trains to the destination of the day. We walked around the long park of its castle, visited the archaeological museum inside the castle and had some ice-cream because it was warm, +20 degrees. (Otherwise the temperature has recently been between 10-15 degrees during the afternoons, while nights and mornings are below +10.)

The landscape towards Paris. The big buildings are located
a bit outside Paris. You can see Eiffel Tower far on the right.

The entrance to the archaeological museum.

This is thousands of years old. I cannot imagine what
a pressure those horns give for the rather small head.

Sunday was otherwise a relaxed day except that I was very excited to go to a dance workshop my friend had invited me to. Excluding the three Lindy-hop lessons I have gone to with H, it has been years since I was taking dance classes. The genre for this workshop was street jazz / hip hop, so I expected to have fun, some challenge and sweat. And that's what I got, even more than I thought beforehand! The two-hour workshop made so good both for my body and for my mind that I would have liked to join that teachers weekly lessons but unfortunately their timing is impossible because of my work. But I'm looking forward to the next Sunday workshop in November.

Now I can concentrate more on baking. Let's see what else
I will come up with after these breads...