The Liberation of Étretat

After walking on the top of the cliffs the four of us walked down what seemed at least 100 stone steps to the beach.  The air was so still and warm it was a perfect day for sunbathing, and there were a lot of people doing that very thing on the rocky beach.  We started off walking through the town in search of an American flag I'd seen from the cliff-top.  I always get curious when I see the flag of my homeland blowing in the wind and wonder what place it's marking in a foreign land.  

 Wouldn't you love a tower room?

I saw a church built of similar stone on England's

southern coast.  It's so pretty.

We walked through narrow streets, passing a boulangerie closed for les vacances, and we stopped to purchase a couple of bookmarks with painted beach scenes on them, as well as a somewhat random thing we collect in France--plastic place-mats depicting well-known Impressionist paintings.  We enjoy eating off of great art.  K.J. added one of Claude Monet's paintings of the cliffs to our collection.  We walked a little further down the street and found ourselves in a town square where a man strummed softly on a guitar, and we found the flags we were looking for.

I'm always so moved reading these plaques, especially when I come upon them accidentally in small towns like this.  They're an unexpected reminder of a history that seemed very long ago and far away until living in England and France.  Reading this inscription made me think about how many tough decisions were made, how many hard conversations arguing pros and cons of getting involved must have taken place before the events of September 2, 1944.  This is three months after D-Day.  I wonder how much news the people living here were able to receive during that time.  I'm sure they were anxiously awaiting their own liberation.  What was it like the day the men of the 51st Highland Division and General Eisenhower's armies arrived?  What a wonderful, sacrificial thing to be a liberator, how wonderful to be liberated.

Thomas Jefferson visited our town.

Yesterday we woke up to the sun shining through our living room window, and it didn't rain for the entire day!  Sun and no rain is something to take advantage of so I made the kids come for a walk with me to and around the park.  I silenced any complaints about my choice of morning P.E. with tales of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test and how I had to stand in a line of kids waiting to see how many pull-ups I could do.  Answer:  0.  

It's about a half mile's walk from our house to the Parc de Marly, a grand and magnificent park with the remaining foundation of a chateau.  I recently learned in reading John Adams that Thomas Jefferson rode through the park (with another man's wife he was briefly infatuated with), which sheds more light on the plaque outside one of the entrances.  I found some internet speculation that Jefferson modeled some of the designs for the University of Virginia after the layout of the Marly Park.  

Jefferson was definitely a friend of France until the very end, defending the lengths the French Revolution went to against the warnings of his friend, John Adams, that the will of the people can do much evil when the will of the people is unrestrained, one reason Adams was such a proponent of putting checks and balances into the United States government.  Jefferson also turned out to be a really disloyal friend to Adams in the end, actively speaking against him behind his back when they returned to the U.S.  I'm not finished with the book yet, but I don't think Adams ever called him out on it; he seemed to be a class act.

I may have read some negative things about Thomas Jefferson recently, but there is one thing we have in common, whether it be for good or ill time will tell.

President's Day: Paris Edition

Every once in a while I find myself reading a book that I can't help stopping every few pages or paragraphs to read something interesting or funny aloud to K.J.  If I stop often enough with a strong need to share what I'm reading, I give it up and commit to reading the whole book aloud to him.  He's a gem of a husband.  

One of the books I couldn't help but read aloud recently is the hefty John Adams by David McCullough.  We are 66% of the way through a book that chronicles many significant historical moments.  One of these takes place in Paris in 1785.

John Adams lives in Paris through most of the Revolutionary War, working to gain support for the United States in France.  His young son John Quincy travels with him and is educated in Europe.  Many years later when the war is over John Adams is still in Europe, and he is finally joined by his wife, Abigail.  Thomas Jefferson is also selected to represent the newly formed nation in France.  

In the spring of 1785 Queen Marie Antoinette gives birth to a son, and there is a service of praise to God on the occasion at Notre Dame.  Louis XVI is there, of course, and the service is also attended by John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a now 18-year-old John Quincy Adams.  

Picture this scene:  a monarch giving thanks for the birth of his son with great pomp and circumstance.  In just four years revolution will break out followed by mass chaos and the king's execution in 1793.  He has no idea how his fortunes are about to change.  Three future U.S. presidents are present at this stately occasion, but at this point in time there is no U.S. constitution and not even a first president.  They have no idea the courses their lives will take or that they will one day hold the highest office in their new republic.  

John Quincy records his thoughts afterwards:

What a charming sight:  an absolute king of one

of the  most powerful empires on earth, and perhaps

a thousand of the first personages of that empire,

adoring the divinity who created them, and 

acknowledging that He can in a moment reduce

them to the dust from which they spring.

Indeed.  

Friday Favorites, vol. vi

This week seemed to go by really quickly!  Here are some of my favorite things from the past seven swiftly-passing days.

1.  reading The King in the Window to the kids

K.J.'s mom found this book about a 12-year-old American boy in Paris that she gave us for Christmas, and since it is filled with locations around Paris and Versailles that we'll get to see, and has humor aimed at middle-grade kids, it's been such a fun read this week.  We're about halfway through it.

2.  looking through old family photos

Thank you for all your kind words on my Mother's Day post.  It was pure nostalgia!

3.  attending a small group at a lovely home outside the city

We relished the company, the quiet, and the smell of roses.  Paris has a lot of beautiful things, but it also has millions of people, cigarette smoke, honking horns, and the roar of a dozen motorcycles in your ears.  Walking down quiet streets was nice.

4.  visiting the Louvre with Lua

It was so fun to go after dinner when it was less crowded and without the kids this time.  The Louvre is so big, and we walked thousands of steps before finding what we were looking for, which is not the most fun thing to do with kids.  The Egyptian things are just so, so cool.

5.  being creative

I thought I would make a little something bookish for our ladies book exchange tomorrow to remember the day.  I thought and thought about what quote might encapsulate marriage and books, but then realized it was obviously the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice.

If you click on the picture you can print some royal wedding bookmarks of your own.  It's designed to print on A4 paper, but hopefully it will also work just fine on American letter sized.  Happy weekend!

Haarlem + The Corrie Ten Boom House

Perhaps like many of you, my knowledge of Holland (or The Netherlands) is very scant.  I knew they had wonderful tulips, and they used to wear wooden shoes.  And the windmills of course!  We ended up making our ferry journey from Hull to Rotterdam a couple of days earlier than we originally planned in order to avoid a spike in prices for the Halfterm holidays, so that left us with about three days for a little family vacation. We were just a couple of weeks too late to get a glimpse of the colorful tulip fields, but when I started doing a little research to see what was near Rotterdam I realized we'd be very near the house where Corrie Ten Boom lived, where she and her father and sister helped several Jewish people hide and escape to a safer place during WWII.  Ella was just about to start studying WWII at school, so it was a good time to introduce her to this inspiring lady.

We saw many windmills, old and new.  I don't know what the exact temperature was, but the word PERFECT comes to mind.  The air was sweet and cool and fresh.  Other observations from this day? Roads are really good and easy to drive on, even when in a British car with the steering wheel on the right side.  It felt really natural and easy driving on the right again.  The landscape was very flat where we were and reminded us a lot of driving through Florida.  You have to pay to use the restroom everywhere, even in McDonalds!  Our American selves were pretty shocked at that.

The Ten Boom family lived in Haarlem, which is a really beautiful and quaint city complete with cobbled streets, colorful houses, and a canal.  It was easy to walk in as long as you were mindful of the bike-riders and very quiet on the day we were there as older children were all in school.

This church towers over the old streets filled with restaurants and shopping.  The strangest store we passed there?  Foot Locker.  Sometimes it's funny which stores migrate to Europe.

As has become our travel custom, we walk by all the pretty cafes and all the restaurants with fun names towards the familiar and the known.

But even the familiar and the known is wrapped in an old and quirky building with the fun roof shape we began to recognize as distinctively Dutch.  KJ says he is happy to accept that we are not the adventurous-eating kind of people that others might be while traveling.  We've also come to love ordering off the self-order touch screens at foreign McDonalds.  It gives us time to figure out the menu differences without feeling like we're holding up the line with awkward exchanges when we forget and ask for French Fries.

There's some wooden shoes!  A lot of signs were in English and Dutch, as you can see, and that made it fairly easy to get around.

Members of the Ten Boom family no longer operate the jewelry store, but the name has been kept. There are still beautiful and well-made watches being sold here.

"They died in faith believing that the best is yet to come."

I remember reading The Hiding Place in college with a feeling of half-dread and expectation knowing what was coming, that eventually they would get caught.  I learned a few more amazing details to the story as told by a lovely older Dutch woman in the Ten Boom living room that day.  She told about how the Nazis searched the house for the hiding place for two days and never found it, and of the police officer(s) who knew about what the Ten Boom family was doing and managed to be there to let the what must have been the so frightened and hungry people hiding for two days in that small space out when the Nazis left.  It gave me such a feeling of admiration for the courage not just of the Ten Boom family but for all the Dutch people who bravely risked their lives to do what was right when their country and lives had been invaded by an evil regime.

The hiding place was constructed by putting a false brick wall in Corey's bedroom.  A hole has been put in the wall so visitors can see it and even crawl inside it themselves.  Corey's bed would have been against that wall, and the Nazi soldiers never found the hiding place since it had cleverly been constructed of brick and didn't sound hollow.

The very bottom panel of the wardrobe can be pulled up from the inside of the hiding place.

The small little rooftop terrace was the only safe place for the Jews living with the Ten Booms to get a little fresh air and exercise.  I met a girl from Daphne, Alabama up there who was studying at the University of Amsterdam.

We left Haarlem a bit abruptly with certain members of our family feeling a bit seasick from the ferry ride the night before, and certain members suffering from what is called Hay Fever here, but it was a beautiful and special visit I'm really thankful we got to make.

100 Pictures of Stonehenge (or at least, it might feel like it)

It's a good thing I blogged every day in the month of October because writing and photo editing took a serious hit in November.  Let's flashback to our last days of vacation, though, shall we?

When we knew we were going down south for our vacation it seemed like the perfect time to visit Stonehenge.  Stonehenge is almost as synonymous with England as Big Ben for Americans, and we knew it would be pretty horrible to show our faces back in America without having seen this historic monument.  So:  CHECK.  We did it, and we took lots of pictures.

As ever, English Heritage (who manages the property) had wonderful activities for the kids, and we all had our own audio guide as well.  When we first began walking up to the monument I felt a little underwhelmed.  Stonehenge is such an iconic place in the historical imagination that there was an initial moment of letdown; however, that feeling changed for me the closer we got to the famous stone circle.

If there was ever a boy who loved audio guides, it is this boy.  Though it was not intended for children with extensive comments and speculation about how the stones came to be here and why, James faithfully listened to each segment.

Maybe it's because KJ is writing a book that has some important scenes taking place at Stonehenge, but I felt like there was so much "scope for the imagination" here, as Anne Shirley would say.  There is such a sense of history, and it was fun to imagine people coming here in the past for so many years. It definitely helped that we had a gorgeous day to complete our walk around the circle at a leisurely pace and really enjoy it.  If it had been wet, rainy, or windy I'm sure we would have been in a hurry to just get back inside.

It really is amazing to think of the effort involved in moving the stones and smoothing them and setting them up.  It really is a perfect location for a structure of some sort, as you can see it from a long way off.  There are still old pathways leading up to Stonehenge, and it is surrounded by barrows, believed to be where important people were buried.

Because we weren't in any great hurry we took the time to walk down the paths to some of the barrows.  I was a little surprised you were allowed to walk around on them.  But first, I did take a few more pictures from different angles.  I wanted to make sure KJ would be able to describe everything perfectly.

I even found a face in the rock.

I love the autumn colors in this picture of James.

We had watched Big Hero 6 the night before so the kids were giving each other fist bumps and saying, "Fa la la la."  It was a good day out for the Pugh fam.