Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

A "Stay-at-Home" Day
The combination of having caught Vanessa's bug and her unplanned for "dip" in the Mediterranean yesterday got the worst of Erika. She was sick a couple of times during the night and by morning looked pallid and weak. This was definitely going to be a "stay-at-home" day. But when "home" is a chateau with a working farm, there's plenty to see and do.

After a breakfast of chocolate croissants and honey pops for me and the kids, we set off to explore the immediate grounds. We explored all of the immediate grounds surrounding the chateau. We stopped and paused to check out the numerous goldfish in the ponds, a giant cactus, plus all of the nooks and crannies in the old stonework (A warn the kids off from a small wooden door saying "that's where the troll lives"). We check out the orange bush that has grown wild, producing bitter oranges that makes for wonderful marmalade. We made a game of throwing the windfall into the scrub down the hillside pass the electric fence designed to keep wildlife at bay. With luck we managed to toss some food over to the free-ranging boars that live in the area.

The exploration of the immediate gardens ate up a good amount of time, as we kept a look out for late-season strawberries, warily watched the bumblebees buzzing through the lavender and in general checking everything out in the garden. Along the way Vanessa had picked samples from various flowers which she presented to her mother when we got back.

Now I figured it was time to do something a bit more adventurous, and so I ushered the girls up one of the hills intending to make our way to one of the main vineyards. It was much like a typical hike in the woods up north. Vanessa found some enormous pinecones the size of softballs that came from tall conifers whose foliage appears all at the top like some improbable hat. We found a bunch of them and the girls all had fun tossing them down the hillside onto the long driveway 5 meters below. We eventually found the path that led us to the vineyard, where we met up with Jennifer and Gord who were pruning the grape vines. From what I could see Gord worked fast – snip, snip, tug, snap – and Jennifer worked on the row adjacent to him, occasionally pointing out things he had missed and asking questions on how to handle particular vines. The ground was a rich, yellow soil, claylike in consistency and muddy from all of the recent rain. From this vineyard perched on the side of the peninsula's hill, you could just make out the far snow-capped peaks of the Alps just beyond, the small hamlets dotted about St. Tropez and part of the Mediterranean. I ended up taking a series of shots and later assembled it into the following panorama:

If you look closely in the middle, you can just make out Gord and Jennifer.

The girls were getting restless so we ended up heading on another trail, just wide enough for a small farm vehicle to make its way though, as evidenced by the couple of abandoned tires we found along the way. I was hoping that this would be the path that would lead us to the top of the hillside and take us to the destination of the stairs we found adjacent to the long path that winds its way down to the Mediterranean, but instead we came across another farmhouse and its compound, and another path which may have led to the village of Ramatuelle. The kids were getting tired and grumpy by this point, and we soon retraced our steps and headed back to the chateau for lunch.

After lunchtime Erika was feeling better, enough to get herself out of bed. Much of the rest of the day was spent trying to entertain the girls, and in the evening I took them both on another tour through one of the other vineyards, with both girls wanting to climb up the impossibly gnarled olive trees that dotted its fringes. We started heading back around sunset, and were guided back to the chateau by the light of the full moon high in the sky.

Vanessa asked her Grandfather whether or not she could sleep in the tower that night as a special treat. He dubbed it the Princess tower and said that only princesses could sleep up there, and asked her for credentials. A few minutes later she handed over a drawing of herself as a princess in a tower, and this passport in hand he gave his permission to let her sleep upstairs. Vanessa was thrilled.

The tower afforded a clear view of most of the Peninsula we were situated on, and the sweeping beams of the lighthouse on the other end of the bay flashed every few seconds against the windowpanes. With Vanessa tucked in I finished off the final chapter of Charley and The Great Glass Elevator, and then told her a made-up story about a princess who lived up in a tower who had adventures and successfully fended off a terrible sea witch who lived in the dark waters below. I left her to drift off to sleep, dreaming of princesses and the friendly mermaids who were always around to help lend a fin.

Tomorrow morning we would start the long process of heading back home.