Flashback: In which we spend a day in the Jura

Note: Since we had spent almost a month in Europe before I was able to begin this blog, I'm going to flash back from time to time to fill in some of what we did during that time. Entries will be non chronological.

When we arranged for our apartment in Paris, we discovered that the woman we are renting it from would be living in the apartment until the 12th of July. This was mildly problematic because (a) Blaise had a meeting in France the last week of June, and so it made sense for all of us to come then and (b) Blaise's contract here began July 1. This meant that we had to figure out what we were going to do during the time between our arrival in France, and the 13th of July, when we could occupy the apartment. Blaise found a campground in Northern Italy where we could rent a bungalow for a couple of weeks (more on that later) after his conference, and so we were left with figuring out the details of the trip to and from Italy. Because of timing issues we knew that we had 3 days between the end of Blaise's conference and our reservation at the campground. (We had been unable to get in any earlier.)

We arrived in the Jura at Au Douillet Gourmet around 8:00 p.m. on June 27. Once we had unloaded our car, we headed around to the front of the house, where we joined the owners (though not their children) and the other guests of the inn (really a gite, a French country inn in someone's home) for a dinner of fondue made from cheese produced from the milk made on their farm. (Sapphire and Cherry really liked the fondue. Ezio was quite happy to just eat bread.) Some of the guests spoke some English, but our hosts did not, so we were forced to speak French, or sit in silence and listen to everyone else talking. Mostly, they were accommodating of our woefully inadequate French, and we learned a few useful words, like mouche, which means fly, and of which there were many.

After breakfast the next day (baguettes with butter, again from their cows' milk, and jam, mostly homemade) we headed to the Cascades des Herrisons. Everyone there seemed quite adamant that this was the thing to do in the area, so we stopped at the next town for picnic supplies and then headed out. We parked and then walked up the path to the falls, which were pretty, then hiked up along the side of the falls to an overlook at the top. Cherry decided halfway up to throw a temper tantrum, so she and I waited and joined the others later. We walked back to the car for a picnic lunch, and then stopped alongside the stream for a while so that the kids could splash in the water. Not surprisingly, Cherry ended up falling in, and so, wet and tired, we headed back to the room.

Cherry (and the other kids) changed into dry clothes, and then we met Christelle (one of the owners) out in front. We followed her to their farm, about a kilometer away. We all got to see their goats and sheep, and watch them milk the cows (with a big milking machine of course). We also got to see a calf that had been born only the day before. He (or she) sucked on Sapphire's fingers, which she thought was both cool and weird. We also saw lots of rabbits, which the kids thought were cute. I'm fairly sure they didn't realize that they were being raised for meat. (Maybe the rabbit I made last week came from that farm. . ..)

Since we were the only guests at the inn our second night, we ate with their entire family on the back porch. Their youngest daughter was only a year older than Sapphire, so they played together a bit. We learned that one of their cats was named Chaussettes (Socks), which Sapphire thought was really funny, since it's a fairly common American cat name.