Thank you to Nid, for comments suggesting my library situation at school not a one off. Granny Mary took the girls to Thornhill library last Friday as they had an INSECT day off school (A thought the teachers spent the day checking for spiders' webs and shooing off little bugs in the classrooms - if only). Granny Mary endured the usual snotty service from librarians - she was returning books and the gruff one wouldn't let them take out any as they didn't have their cards - this is despite being able to look them up and having known them since they were two and zero. GM pleaded and they took home two books each. G M was very busy last Friday, as she did ironing, washing, a trip to Sainsburys and the launderette as well as the library, and gave the girls lunch, all before noon. The reason being that at noon, R was fetching me from work and we were off on our road trip! We got to the check in at Eurotunnel at 15:12, the last minute we technically could check in for our departure. Things were a bit delayed there anyway, and with the Tom Tom struggling to find the Hotel Balladins in Arras we endured a fractious evening before finally enjoying the comfortable bed and nice sized family room. A loved the shoe shine wipes and the shower gel! Generally, I could not fault Mr Tom Tom. He was calm throughout and didn't get too shirty when I spent another half an hour (on the way home) trying to get to IKEA in Strasbourg. We since found out that the owner of the TT has put IKEAS in as points of interest and it would have got us there just like that. For future reference, come off at Cronenburg. We were only going for lunch, not buying flat pack long distance.

For those of you wondering why I was touring the cities and towns of eastern France, we were en route to and from the lovely Engelberg in Switzerland, where we once again enjoyed a week of skiing. The snow was not as deep as last year, which helped as no drifts to lose A in, but plenty enough snow for fabulous skiing, and 5 days of blue skies, and snow on our last day, when we had had enough anyway! So the conditions were excellent, R and I felt we had a week of consolidation, and actually, when I came down the easy slope next to the chalet for the last time, I could see huge progress from the end of last year - I am swishing towards being able to do parallel turns. The girls did brilliantly, they are so confident and A is putting in some turns now so won't be hitting the land speed record this time around. She looks like a little Swiss child now, whizzing away and going up the button lift and the T bar on her own. We did one stretch of a red run, with me tailing the kids on their lesson, and it was horrendous, I ended up crawling back up the slope as a kind passer by had taken my skis up to a ledge for me to ski down the easier side, but I was slipping down the slope and had to use every muscle I had to stay up and get to the edge and crawl up. My heart rate must have been over 200bpm. The next day I had aches everywhere! Unfortunately no one learned from our mistake, and intending to take the long blue run, R and H ended up in the same situation in the afternoon too! We met a lovely family from Nottingham, and hung out with them a lot, with the girls all ringo-ing together after lunch every day while we ate chocolate and drank expensive drinks very slowly on the terrace of the Berg Hotel. Easy rule of cost in Switzerland - the higher up the mountain, the more it costs - fair enough really as someone has to lug it all up there for you to consume. R managed to work a trick on the hot chocolate machine for 4 days but was sprung by the lady on the till on day 5.

I loved just being in the mountains and seeing the views, and I love what we affectionately know as 'The Narnia run' - its so peaceful amongst the trees and you can go fast without worrying about other people. Because there are none, not because you have ignored them. The bottom half of it, you meet up with all the better skiers and boarders doing the descent from the top, and it gets a bit busy and there is a double hair pin bend which we affectionately know as 'Death Bend'. Not so fun, but the bottom bit back to the lifts, which is really steep is fab as you can swoop back to the base station and stop just in time before the orange fence.

The downside of Oak Hall is having to listen to a talking head drone on each evening, or hide in your room, and last year the guy was boring and I wasn't in the mood. This year, R took his guitar and played so the worship was a little more accessible than last year. The speaker was fab, he works for Cornhill and is called Stuart, and he was speaking on Luke 15, which has been very telling for me lately, and I have just read the book Prodigal God by Tim Keller, which he refered to a lot. I went to every meeting and listened to every talk. Get me!! I found the mix of people there this year to be interesting and fun, we sat with lots of different families over dinner and there wasn't a clique in sight - well, there was, but I made it my mission to infiltrate them and it worked. One night I was playing a game called Jungle Mania with them and some other people. Its a complicated version of Snap, and if you have good spatial awareness and quick reactions you will be good at it. I was playing it with a bunch of teenage boys so quit while I was ahead, which was fairly immediate. On another evening there was a table tennis competition, and I persuaded R to enter and paired him up with a chap called Colin, from Farnborough, known to me as a marathon runner and actuary. They got through the preliminary round and made easy work of the quarters and semis, and won in 2 sets in the final. It turns out that the very modest Colin had played table tennis to county level!

I hope I have painted a great picture of the trip. The girls had lots of fun in the kids club and at their lessons, and generally running around the chalet being excited. They were incredibly patient passengers in the car and A did not mention feeling sick until we were on the M25 on the way home, 10 minutes from my brother's! She used to be sick every time we went from here to Surrey, so to do such a huge road trip without sick is awesome. The thing that I despaired about was the French road system, we went on the toll roads and they are so expensive, and involved such long queues to pay for the priveledge of queueing! Grr. Also there is this ridiculous situation near Strasbourg, where the two lane motorway disappears and you have to travel along a normal one lane each way road and go round two roundabouts to get back on a motorway - and this is all the traffic on a major road network! A bit like Winchester before Twyford Down. And the motorways seem to go through cities - well, Strasbourg and Rheims, rather than past them, as tends to happen in England. Which means the road becomes really busy with people popping to IKEA, for example. Its not like the countryside is so beautiful you couldn't run a bypass through it, its all same old same old fields really. Sorry, France, sure there are some lovely bits but not the bit you see from the Autoroute de l'est.

Interestingly, I noticed today, in my life I have known a Sam West and a Sam East. If any of you know a Sam North or South, will you introduce us? I would like a whole set.

Back to France, and I am afraid H has picked up some of her grandfather's attitude to the country, complaining about the toilets ( some were a bit whiffy) and the fact that no one spoke English. She was horrified that someone might insist on her eating Frogs legs and snails. We worked hard on explaining that French people are allowed to speak French as she is allowed to speak English, but she will take some convincing. She loves the holidaying we have done in German speaking countries, and will have a go at a bit of German, but despite our positive efforts to model 'having a go' in french, she was not keen. Croissants might be the key to her heart, and 4 days in Disneyland Paris will give her an authentic experience of the culture.

The novel I read on holiday was set in Paris, a Rose Tremayne tome called 'the way I found her.' Gripping stuff and very clever, with lots of unanswered questions, and all told from the view point of a 14 year old English boy left to his own devices in Paris for a summer. I read her ' The Road Home' and feel sure that the next offering of hers that I find in the library will be just as good as those two have been. If I can persuade the librarian to let me at the books. Interestingly, for those of you following my threads on libraries, I just renewed my books on line with considerable ease. Much better than ringing them, now I have a pin number.