It was a wonderful adventure for our family and putting this blog together was a great adventure for me and a great opportunity for our family to share some of what we experienced during our trip with our family and friends.

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After saying our goodbyes to the Kerwers, we headed up to the Frankfurt airport, or more specifically, a Holiday Inn near the airport that was the designated Auto-Europe pick up and drop-off point for their vehicles.  A shuttle transported us from here to the terminal and our departure gate.

In this photo Allister and Charlotte stand beside our trusty Jean-Pierre Peugeot who had been our reliable companion for the previous 4 months.

Jean-Pierre had about 11 kilometres when we picked him up and here you can see the final tally from our trip – 17, 424 kilometres!

Allister and Charlotte say goodbye to Jean-Pierre properly.  We hope Auto-Europe and Peugeot found him a good home…

And then we were off to the airport to board the plane for the long trip to Vancouver and then the ferry to Victoria and home.

With such a kind offer, we made this fit with our plans so the day before we were due to depart Frankfurt we met up with the Kerwer family in the city of Seeheim-Jugenheim, located less than 50 kilometres south of Frankfurt.

The Kerwer home was located on the edge of a large green space that we explored on a brilliantly sunny but cool day

It didn’t take long for the snowball fight to break out.

The Kerwer children’s school was located in part of this common green space area.

It had some pristine snow that was calling out, “snow angel, snow angel…”

I’ve remarked earlier in this blog about how impossible it is for kids of a certain age to pass by a playground without experiencing it.  This day provided another data point in my ongoing research.  We took advantage of the opportunity by having the kids pose for this picture.

A little further on from the school was a pond that was frozen quite solid.  A circular track had been cleared for skaters.

A group photo of the Kerwer family with Charlotte and Allister.

Our hotel was in the old section of Heppenheim – they gave us the same room we’d stayed in our previous visit – and, as before, we were impressed by the view from our room of the rooftops of the old city.

The area around Beaune, the Cote de Beaune, is known for its Burgundy wines, with Beaune serving as the hub of the local wine business.  Many famous French wineries had buildings in town and the town had a very established, organized feel.

I looked through the my archive of pictures and couldn’t find any of Beaune so you’ll have to make do with my memory.  When we arrived in the early evening it was snowing and a light accumulation of dry snow on the ground.  We had a very nice room at the Hotel de la Paix and had a nice dinner at a nearby restaurant and had a relaxing evening.

When we left the next day the snow had stopped and the roads were in good condition for our trip to Heppenheim, Germany, a trip of just under 500 kilometres (according to the Google map linked here).

We made a couple of day trips to the surrounding area.  This is a group photo taken in a place called Here is a group photo at a place called Les Baux-de-Provence (Google Maps link here).

We highly recommend this area and it was the second time we had visited it.  Fortunately we hadn’t  visited the old city and its fortifications on our previous visit so we joined the MacDonald’s in a visit to the site. 

They had visited once before, in summertime, when the temperature had been almost 40C which was quite different than the weather on this day – clear, windy, and quite cool.

This is view from the fortifications (which was a high point of land in this area) of the surrounding valley.  As you can see, there is an agricultural area where they were growing olives and lots of grapes.

This is a view from the fort of the city below.

The fort had been redeveloped into a museum, part of which is shown in this picture.

The museum contained a number of well-preserved medieval weapons.

Just to show that the wind that whipped us during our visit was not a fluke – check out the pocked walls of the fort.  I think they were a specific type of rock – limestone, sandstone, something like that – that is a little porous but this degree of erosion spoke of the exposed placement of the fort and a consistent prevailing wind.

Within two kilometres of the museum was a winery located inside an old limestone quarry.  They weren’t actually open to the public but on our previous visit to the area we’d also visited this winery and one of the employees remembered Charlotte so they provided a tasting and let us use their seating area for a picnic (and to get out of the wind).

On our way back to Aix-en-Provence, we passed through Avignon where we saw this unique tunnel entrance mosaic made out of different types of creeping (clinging) wall plants.

Another image from our day trip through the French towns around Aix-en-Provence.

A typical tree-lined French road we travelled on our way back to Aix-en-Provence and some very enjoyable group dinners with our friends.

It was a nice day and this drive is very scenic.  One of the scenes that caught our eye was these terraced hillside on which, if you look closely, you can see large numbers of green houses.  All faced south towards the Mediterranean.

Also along this route are Monte Carlo and , along this route is Monaco and Monte Carlo.  I still have not figured out the relationship between these two names.  Some references suggest that Monaco is the district and Monte Carlo is an area within the Monaco district but I’m not sure.

Regardless, although quite dark, you can see the following sign provides directions to the famed Monte Carlo Casino.

Unfortunately, on the day we were passing through this area was chock-full of people and cars and we didn’t have an opportunity to get out and walk around.  Here is a picture of the Casino taken from the car as we moved slowly through traffic.  Allister is a James Bond fan and became quite interested when we told him this was the site of some famous scenes from old Bond movies.

More scenes from Monaco.  It was exciting to think about the Formula 1 auto race that runs here every year navigating these narrow streets.

This wasn’t a Bond car just a beautifully preserved Austin Healy 3000 whose loveliness we had to record.

The following picture is of our hotel in St Raphael.  Its owner (barely visible in the middle right part of the photo) was just about to close up for a few weeks (or months).  He was headed to Lyon for a few days and then planned to go skiing.

We stayed in a room on the second floor of the hotel and the balcony shown in the photo above (to which the ‘Auberge Provencale’ sign is attached) offered a view similar to the following photo.

Its probably redundant to say that the French Riviera was a nice area.  But it was. 

St Tropez was about 40 kms away from St Raphael and we couldn’t miss the opportunity to visit.

A view of the yacht basin.  There were boats of all shapes and sizes but lots of large ones.

These were some of the more impressive large yachts.  The boat in the foreground is the tender for the sailboat immediately behind it.

This made us feel right at home.  It wasn’t particularly warm this day – probably 3-5 C – but they still needed an impressive generator / refrigeration unit to keep this and another sheet of ice (not shown) cold enough to support the number of skaters.

We had a room in a bed and breakfast located in this building that was huge and cold but I was sick and just wanted to get into bed and stay there.

We were in bed before midnight but kept awake both before and after by the detonation of approximately 1 bezillion firecrackers and other assorted fireworks in these seemingly peaceful streets.

We were served an excellent breakfast in a charming old dining room but, despite this, weren’t unhappy to put Quiliano in the rear view mirror.

Our guidebooks suggested Orvieto was a nice hill town and it didn’t disappoint.  We stayed down in the new town at the base but made a couple of forays up the hill to visit the old town.

Orvieto was celebrating the season by decorating the old town with lights and hosting a jazz festival that, from the voices we heard around town, had attracted a range of different nationalities.

More evidence of the Christmas season.

These boars run wild in parts of Italy and France and there are shops like this one that specialize in boar products.

There were lights on the facade of this church, but sunset lighting helped make the lighting for this photo more interesting.

We had also made arrangements with friends from Victoria, the MacDonalds, to meet in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France and wanted to keep moving north so we wouldn’t have to rush to our rendezvous with them.

There were a couple of good images on the way to Orvieto.  We don’t know what this structure was but it looked so dark and forbidding but at the same time like an elevated restaurant that Allister named it Darth Vader’s Diner.

A little further up the highway on the east coast of Italy, we saw these wharves that we assumed were fishing platforms of some kind.

More than once on this trip I observed how nice it was to have someone to share the driving.

We arrived in Patras in good time and boarded our ship, the Ionian Queen.  The Minoan Line boat that Allister is looking at is a competitor but gives an idea of the size of ship on these routes.  As with our trip to Greece, this boat was a car ferry and we had booked an inside stateroom so we could sleep on our overnight trip.

Here is another view from our ship.  Allister is looking in the direction our ship would take after departure on our way to Italy.

There are also mountains to the south of Patras and you can sure tell its December from the snow at higher elevations!

This was interesting.  A crowd of young men had gathered on the other side of our ship as we waited to depart.  You see them in the photo below just to the right of the middle of the photo. 

We asked crew members who they were and why there was military and other law enforcement so visible in the port area and were told they were immigrants trying to stowaway on a boat bound for Italy.