More guest bloggin' from Erica Ellis! (accompanied by unnecessary interjections from Mark)

Introductory note from Mark: Yep, Bob and Erica and West are still here, drinking wine and eating cheeses (or, in West's case, drinking breastmilk and eating mashed prunes) with us here in France; and Erica is proving to be an indefatigable guest-blogger. But this time I'm not just sitting back and let her spin her fanciful factual tales. I'll be interjecting occasionally, in outraged blue. But first, here's Erica...

The Island of Pork Roll

We have just returned today from a brief vacation – a break from both the gruelling sabbatical that Mark and Quincy are enduring and our little sojourn abroad. We all felt the need to escape the hustle and bustle of Cotignac and retreat to the peaceful environs of St. Tropez and surrounds. OK I’ll stop with the tongue in cheek (who am I? Mark???).

Whaddayamean "tongue in cheek"? This is a blog, dammit, a blog, and I take it dead seriously. Jeezum peezum, we provide Erica with space on our blog (precious precious space; the internet doesn't grow on trees, you know) and she uses this hallowed forum to fling insults at me and my blogging style? I'm outraged! And she does it without even once mentioning footnotes or J.D. Salinger or my parody-able penchant for reflecting back on my childhood experiences overseas? I'm speechless.

But seriously, we decided that we would all head to the beach while Bob and I were here. Quincy located a lovely little seaside "campground," about 1-hour’s drive away. Not only did this place promise easy beach access but also the famed island of Porquerolles (promptly dubbed profiterole, or pork roll for short) was just a short ferry ride away.

The only twist in our plan was that our friend Carol was also coming on this trip, which put us one person over what the excellent Renault Scenic wagon could carry. So we embarked on an ambitious plan involving a one-way car rental and return train ride back to Geneva for Carol, leaving us with the requisite 7 people for the return trip to Cotignac, and the need to pack really, really light (turns out by the time you pack the Scenic full with 7 people you’ve pretty much used up most of the room for baggage).

Okay, that's better. No more flinging of insults at poor ol' Mark. Good too that Erica is back on firmer footing here: Expressing her love for our car. Which, by the way, really did a splendid job of handling all seven of us and all our stuff. And, despite the need to pack light, it actually wasn't a small amount of stuff at all. We had to provide our own bedding at the beachside camping cabins we rented. That's a lot of pillows and blankets we had to jam into the car, including a bizarrely oversized thick duvet for Bob and Erica that ended up being about sixteen times bigger than their bed itself. Plus an entire crib for baby West. And my computer too, so that Erica could compose this litany of insults and grievances that we have so generously allowed her to post on our blog.

On the whole, I would say that this restricted luggage idea paid off for us since our "cabins" [tiny mobile homes: the “RapidHome”] at the "campground" were enchantingly small. Like living on a boat I imagine: 2-ft wide doorways, bedrooms hardly larger than the beds, etc. I particularly liked the arrangement of the two bedroom doorways at 90 degrees to each other so that no sooner had you crashed through one doorway (say at 2 AM to get a crying baby) then you had to crash right into the next one more or less within the same step. I say crash because I’m not entirely convinced that we could walk through the doorway face on, and particularly not while carrying West, so there was a fair number of impacts with the door frame. It didn’t help too much that our whole mobile home was listing slightly so that one of the doors always wanted to shut and the other always wanted to swing open.

Meanwhile, over in the Schaller/Young unit, Jasper and Maddox were sharing a room roughly the size of a coffee table. Now, when I was a kid (living in the Serengeti, traveling the Karakoram Highway, reading and re-reading "The Catcher in the Rye" that one summer in Brazil, et cetera, et cetera, et parody-able cetera), my brother Eric and I always shared a room and I was used to it. But not Jasper and Maddox. They live like royalty. In Vancouver they have their own rooms. Here in Cotignac, they not only have their own rooms, they have their own bathrooms. Maddox even has his own office! So it was a bit of an adjustment for them to sleep in such tight quarters, on beds so slim that, one night at 3 a.m., Maddox actually fell right out of bed and cut his face on the floor. Luckily, it didn't really bleed much, because we needed to save our bandages for his various cuts and scrapes on his hands and feet and knees. Happily, injuries heal. Insults, however – especially parenthetical remarks about someone else's blogging style – well, they just hurt and hurt and hurt.

However, much as we may have felt that the quarters were perhaps on the tight side, West was a big, big fan of the "RapidHome": lots of smooth faux-bamboo flooring to worm around on, built-in doorstops to chew on, and easy access to the outdoor deck with its rubber doormat (yum). And the campground was delightfully quiet. Or at least it was until they started into three solid days of continuous chain-sawing of the trees at the front.

There was also that pesky seagull that kept hanging around, hoping to steal some of the food we were eating at our outdoor tables. Carol especially seemed leery of the lingering bird. At one point I jokingly threatened to toss some cheese rinds on the roof of Carol's cabin, and she in return happily threatened to sneak out at midnight and slather peanut butter all over the roof of ours. "How would you like that?" she warned. I told her that I'd like it very much – that, in fact, I'd actually pay money to have her spend her night smearing peanut butter all over our roof, because it would be one helluva funny thing to blog about. Although, of course, Erica would probably just make fun of it later, leaving me deeply, deeply hurt.

Bob and I had scoped out the beach on Google Earth and were pretty excited about our second trip to the Mediterranean. We had previously hiked the Cinque Terra in 2004 and had really loved that deep blue colour, so different from our local ocean in Vancouver. As we walked down to the beach on the first day, we exited the seaside forest and took in the vista and were taken aback by what looked like endless drifts of brown garbage. Blech! The stuff formed spongy piles as much as 3 ft high all up and down the beach, and getting into the ocean required a trip both on top of the dried portion and then through the sludgy mass at the water’s edge. The source of the drifts was a bit of a mystery until we read an informative sign: meet Posidonia oceanica, a sea grass. It probably goes without saying that the kids looooved it – kind of like playing in piles of dead leaves in the fall. The weirdest thing about this stuff is that in addition to drifts of dead biomass, it forms these little balls of fibre, some as big as baseballs, that also line the beaches. If the berms of dead and rotting seaweed hadn’t put us off the local beach, the realization that West + sandy beach = non-stop parental management kind of extinguished our remaining desire/ability to hang out peacefully a la plage. Luckily, the peninsula was encircled almost entirely by a hiking path (le Sentier Littoral), which we availed ourselves of and much fun was had by all…

It was fun. I think Erica was finding it especially delightful because, while hiking the trail, she was also thinking about how she would blog enthusiastically about it later and how she would use that blog to make parenthetical remarks strategically designed to insult – indeed to wound – one famously small-headed and thin-skinned friend.

Our daytrip to the island of Porquerolles was also hectically fun – nothing like carting around a nap-deprived baby to put some extra "verve" into your sightseeing! However, West was generally quite a good sport and survived his first bike trip (sans helmet bien sur). There are very few cars on the island so the only way to get to the various gorgeous beaches is to hoof it or rent bikes. I didn’t expect that the roads would be quite as rustic as they were, but then without cars I’m guessing there’s not much impetus to do a whole lot of paving and upkeep. West’s bike seat had springs underneath it, and he spent much of his time in the seat chewing on the safety bar. We spent the afternoon at the Plage de Notre Dame, which was beautiful, although the name struck me as somewhat sacrilegious. And it turns out that a rocky beach is a much better bet with a baby – then all you have to do is to monitor the rock intake, direct him to relatively large stones, ply him with palm fronds and sticks, etc. Sand sucks. Carol and I were both struck with the feeling that we had been dropped into a James Bond movie: hot sun and sailboats anchored in turquoise water with good-looking tanned women sunning themselves on the decks (the Bond girls). We all agreed that we would be happy to come back and stay a lot longer – but never, ever any later in the summer than June. The Island of Pork Roll was already plenty hot in April, and it apparently gets a staggering 6,000 visitors A DAY in July and August. Gah.

Okay, I'm over it. Yes, of course, my mock-outrage was all tongue in cheek. Besides, from my perspective, there is no higher compliment than to be made fun of.

Anyway, I’ve barely scraped the surface of our escapades but I’m tired of typing. Got to save my reserves for another exhausting day in Provence tomorrow – wine-tasting, market, etc. You know how it is…

Oh yes, I know how it is. I know all too well. Meanwhile, let's all give a big hearty "thank you" to Erica, for keeping our blog lively and up to date, and for keeping it (mostly) clean.