Madhouse diaries : A Look Back at 2017

2017 is drawing to a close so it's time for the traditional look back over the past twelve months to remember what the Madhouse Family got up to.

January saw us going on several geocaching adventures - we started the year with our finds total in the 190s and finished at 226, which is not a huge amount but there are very few local ones still to find. I did create 17 caches of our own though, so it's been fun seeing everyone find those, even if it does take a lot of work repairing and replacing caches when they get trashed or stolen. 

February saw National Bagel Day which gave us a great excuse for some foodie fun and we set our first ever travelbugs free - the first one has travelled 6,402km and gone through Switzerland, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Alsace and the second has clocked up 8,728km and passed through Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany before heading Stateside and continuing its journey in Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois. 

In March, I headed to Stavanger in Norway on a work trip and spent lots of time visiting partner schools, seeing how teachers there teach critical literacy and working on a common project for our school. (I'll be heading back there for another week straight after the Christmas holidays.) We managed to fit in a few adventures there, courtesy of our Norwegian hosts, including climbing a (small) mountain called Dalsnuten then having a barbecue in the snow (!) and discovering the history of the Bunad, the traditional Norwegian dress, in a local museum.

In April, we visited our local zoo with the Madhouse grandparents and got up very close to the bears (with just a pane of glass between us !). I shared some more of our Norwegian discoveries -  Hå Gamle Prestegard (an old vicarage and lighthouse) and the World War II bunkers and tunnels. Back home, we took advantage of an unseasonably warm day to go paddling in the sea and found a fabulous geocache full of plastic Kinder egg containers stuffed with treasures !

 May saw the creation of a fabulous unicorn-themed jewellery box using Gel-A-Peel and I took a trip down memory lane, recreating a retro-style school dinner fudge tart.

June brought an inflatable fun and gamers day, a vintage vehicle rally and the festival of the sea to town. We also managed to pack in a school day-trip to London, a walk along the beach which uncovered one of the wrecks of the Operation Dynamo boats that sunk during the evacuation of Dunkirk and a walk along the white cliffs and beach of the Cap Blanc Nez near Calais.

In July, we popped down to see the in-laws in Brittany and visited some local villages, Hanvec and Le Faou, took part in a Little Ships Urban Orienteering challenge around Dunkirk and had some family fun at the Sailing Tour de France village.

In August, we took the Tsum Tsums Channel-hopping with us, went to the Airbourne air show in Eastbourne, explored Meneham, the Breton village in the rocks and had an unforgettable experience with a wild dolphin in the harbour of Brest. We also had a fortnight in Fethiye in Turkey but I still haven't got round to blogging about it !

In September we visited an olde-worlde town called Locronan in Brittany (well, we actually visited in August but I didn't get around to blogging about it until September !) and created a giant geocache in Dunkirk to drop off some of our over-sized travelbugs.

In October, we had lots of Halloween fun, making gruesome witch's finger biscuits, visiting a spooked-up zoo and I blogged about our ride on the Téléphérique (cable car) in Brest which, amazingly, is part of the bus network !

November was a busy month at work but we started getting into the Christmas spirit, making Christmas tree cupcakes.

And December has been a festive whirlwind, with a trip to Bruges Christmas market where we saw the Sterrenstoet nativity parade, the magical Parade de Noël in Dunkirk, the Christmas decorations in Dunkirk  and lots more festive fun, including a free skating rink that the kids have been making the most of during the run up to Christmas !

Phew, I'm exhausted just looking back at the blogposts ! I wonder what new adventures this new year will bring - I already know we have a fortnight in Bulgaria planned in the summer and a week in Norway in January for work, but I'm sure there will be lots of fun closer to home too.

What were your 2017 highlights?

Brittany diaries : Riding the Téléphérique de Brest cable car

When we visited the in-laws in Brest this summer, one of the things at the top of our to-do list was a trip on the new cable car. It opened in November 2016 but by the time of our Christmas 2016 trip, it had already been closed for a prolonged period after a series of serious technical problems, including one of the cable cars setting off unexpectedly with a workman on the roof, almost crushing him in the cables, and the doors opening 50m above the ground with a workman inside during a maintenance check. Strong winds also resulted in it being shut early on the day of its inauguration, which didn't bode well.

The cable car is in the Recouvrance area of Brest. To give you a quick geography lesson, Brest is cut in two by a big river called the Penfeld, which is where the big military port is located. On the left bank is the town centre, on the right bank is Recouvrance, historically the district of sailors and arsenal workers, now an economically-challenged area - there are a few shops and businesses but access is restricted to two bridges so nobody bothers going across from the town centre.

The French Navy sold off one of its big disused buildings, the Atelier des Capucins, to the town of Brest for redevelopment and the creation of a new neighbourhood, baptised Capucins. It was originally used as mechanical workshops for the Navy until activity levels dropped (due to modern technology and much of the workload being moved to another big military port, Toulon). As well as the cable car station, this new complex will house a big library (already open), a multi-screen cinema, 600 flats and a shopping centre and it's designed to make the right bank just as commercially attractive as the left bank.

It still seems very industrial inside but I don't know if that's done on purpose or if it is still being developed. It's the perfect setting for inspecting the machinery of the cable cars though.

Even before you're up in the air, you get some good views of the area - here's Recouvrance bridge and some of the naval installations and vessels in the port, as well as the Château de Brest on the left (which houses a museum about the Navy) and a sadly overlooked building, the Tour Tanguy (just next to the right pillar of the bridge in the photo), a little medieval tower that was probably built to regulate (or block) passage between the two banks of the river.

Once inside the cable car, you feel like you're in the London Underground (or Parisian métro). The cable car is run by Brest public transport, which also operates buses and trams, and they have kept the same interior design as in the trams. There are a few seats but it's pretty packed and most people stand up to look out of the windows.

The cable cars have a unique "leapfrog" technology (or "leap-sheep" - saute-mouton - as they say in French !), so rather than passing each other side by side in the middle, one goes over the top of the other on a higher cable. This means it takes up less space.

There are (or were, but more about that in a moment) two cable cars, named Charlotte and Lewin, in honour of two children who hung about for ages on the day of the inauguration to try to be the first ever passengers. Literally a couple of weeks after our visit this summer (at the end of July and start of August), Charlotte was undergoing maintenance work off the cables, toppled over and is now a write-off, so there is now only one cable car operating. It's quite unbelievable just how many things have gone wrong in such a short space of time !

For the first few seconds, if taking off from the Capucins station, you don't see a lot because the tinted glass gets very dark. This is apparently another unique feature - liquid crystals that go opaque to stop you getting a view of anything potentially top secret in the military port area. I suppose you can't be too careful these days.

You still see a lot though and we spotted which naval ships were in port and the little bridges only open to the naval and arsenal workers.

You can see the work underway in the dry docks too.

You have the choice of the view from the windows ...

... or, if you have a good head for heights, the porthole in the floor.

The great thing about taking a ride on the cable car is that it's a really cheap activity. It's part of the public transport system so you buy a regular ticket and for one hour, you can ride the buses, trams and cable car to your heart's content. We took the cable car across then jumped on a tram for a couple of stops to get into the main shopping area, had a look in a few shops, wandered back down to the port and rode the cable car back, all for the price of a bus ticket !

The kids had fun running through the fountains in front of the town hall trying not to get wet (the spouts of water stop then start again at different levels, so if you watch long enough and work out the routine, you can run across while there's no water - if you time it wrong by even a few seconds, you get soaked though, so there are guaranteed squeals and giggles !). This is the area that is used for Brest Christmas market, that I told you about last year.

Despite the excitement of riding on a cable car, our day was about to get even more memorable - heading into the commercial port area of Brest on the way home, we had an amazing and totally unexpected encounter with a wild dolphin, literally close enough to touch.

Brittany diaries : The charming town of Locronan

Despite the hordes of summer tourists visiting Locronan (near Quimper in Finistère), it is like stepping back in time. Ambling down cobbled streets, you soon come across La Places des Charettes (Cart Square) and can almost imagine that some farm labourers have just popped into the nearby inn for a tankard of ale, leaving their carts outside.

The town is classified as one of the prettiest in France and it is very well maintained - every single one of the houses is kept in character.

It caters to tourists, with ice creams and crêpes on offer, but you'll only find small independent shops and businesses. There are no big chains here, which is what makes it seem so authentic.

You do get the odd car driving through the village for deliveries, but all tourists have to park in one of the car parks on the outskirts of the town, which cost €4 however long you stay. For this price, you get a sticker to put on the windscreen which means you can come back as often as you like throughout the year.

There are lots of shops selling Breton cakes and biscuits, including the one on the left called Au Loup-Garou Gourmand - the Greedy Werewolf ! Most of these shops have little saucers out with pieces for you to try, much to the Madhouse kids' delight.

There are lots of little alleyways leading off from the main square that you can amble down to explore.

Life kind of slows down here, so you're happy strolling along at a leisurely pace, rather than racing around trying to get from A to B as quickly as possible, as is usually the case.

It's a small town - a village really, as only 800 people live here (goodness knows how many tourists pass through though !) - so it's all very rural, with fields and gardens all around.

Juliette was very impressed with the hydrangeas (or hortensias, as they are in French), especially when I told her that the colour depended on the acidity of the soil. Nice little chemistry lesson there !

Wandering down a fairly steep pathway, we chanced upon a quaint little chapel. Just in front is the old "lavoir", where the women of the village used to assemble to do their laundry and undoubtedly have a gossip.

We popped inside to have a look at the stained glass windows, before going round the back to see the "calvaire" (one of the many ornate stone crosses dotted around the countryside and in the towns and villages of Brittany).

We climbed back up the hill, looking out for little things of interest to keep the kids going.

Back in the main square, we went to have a look at the gothic church. (A trick of the light in this photo makes it look like the man on the left has just been teleported in, or has maybe been blessed with a divine ray of light !)

Like the rest of the town, it's very pretty, so I wasn't surprised to learn that it has been used as a backdrop in several films, including Roman Polanski's 1979 film Tess.

The Madhouse kids aren't big on architecture or monuments, but even they liked spotting the gargoyles and this heart design.

Everything is so peaceful and quaint, it really is like stepping back in time so I did a doubletake when I saw a little knight strolling down the side of the church !

After lots of wandering around exploring, little tummies started grumbling, so we decided to opt for the classic Breton snack : crêpes.

They are cooked to order on the traditional crêpières, so there was quite a big queue, but it was fun to watch them being cooked while we waited. I love the squeezy bottle of homemade salted caramel sauce with a triple nozzle !

Bon appétit !

Another typical French/Breton snack that we picked up was a bag of Madeleinettes (mini madeleines), free with a flyer picked up on the counter in a treasure hunter's shop that we'd wandered into. Bonus ! We also bought some very reasonably priced old fashioned lollipops and handmade soaps from other shops as souvenirs.

I was pleased to be able to grab a quick geocache before we left too. (There were a couple more but everyone wanted to go home - boo !)

We grabbed a minute to immortalise our time in Locronan (and those salted caramel crêpes) in the obligatory Madhouse Family selfie, then headed for home.

This sign that we spotted on the way back to the car summed up the day rather nicely. Le plus bel endroit du monde est ici - the most beautiful place in the world is here !