The hiking trails here are very user-friendly: well maintained and clearly marked. There are yellow painted markers at regular intervals, and signposts at each fork in the path. The signposts are numbered and marked on the maps, so they tell you not only which path to follow but also exactly where you are.

Some sections of the paths are narrow and steep, others are flatter but still rough. Very occasionally we walk on an actual road for a kilometer or two. Mostly the walking is easy for adults but challenging for the kids. They need frequent breaks, especially Adrian, so our average pace is only about 1.3 km per hour, including lunch and all other stops. (For comparison, when Eric and I used to go walking, we’d average about 3 km/hr on easy terrain, so I’d have estimated about 2.5 on these trails.) Our hikes have been about 8 or 9 km per day which is about 6 hours of walking, up to 7 hours on the longest day.

Much of their tiredness is in their heads and can be cured at least temporarily by interesting views, games, challenges etc. Adrian liked looking for and counting the yellow markers.

Both kids had very definite wishes about marching order, and of course the wishes were incompatible and changed over time. One wanted to go first, to be followed by me; but the other wanted to be second and definitely not third. And so on. Mostly we ended up with the kids in front and Eric and I at the back, which is why I mostly have pictures of the others’ backs. Sometimes I jogged ahead to get some variety in my photos.

Today we had a very, very hot and sunny walk today to the gorges de Daluis, the red sandstone canyon of the river Var. In the middle of the day we were crossing hot sunbaked rocks, totally exposed to the sun, and got so hot that we cooled off the kids by pouring water on their heads and clothes.

The highlight of the day was a viewpoint with excellent views along the canyon of the river Var. The viewpoint was a popular destination for tourists and we saw more people here than during all the other days together. These paths were off the beaten track so most days we never met any other walkers. The two exceptions were today, and the very last day when we drove to an even more popular site.

Breakfast à la française: bread, butter, jam/marmalade. Alternatively, corn flakes or super sweet musli. The sweetness got cloying after a day or two and I really did not enjoy it. I do not understand how French people can live on this kind of diet.

On the other hand, dinners at the gîte were varied and ranged from decent to really good, and the staff were fully familiar with vegetarian diets, which was a relief.

I still remember our experience at the little restaurant in Luchon in the Pyrenees, about 2004 or so, where Eric and I were served a “vegetarian” dinner consisting of three side orders (rice, French fries and boiled potatoes) and some mixture containing little pink specks that smelled distinctly of meat. When we asked the staff about those specks, our concerns were dismissed – those were just “tout petits morceaux de porc”, nothing at all to worry about.

The packed picnic lunches consisted of bread, cheese, a salad, a fruit and a chocolate bar. All salads were drenched in a mustard vinaigrette, and after a few days we were pretty tired of it. I asked the staff to please skip the mustard for the remaining lunches. He looked most puzzled.

We stayed in gîtes for the first few nights, and then in a Mongolian yurt that was embedded a bit incongruously in the French landscape. Interesting, spacious and convenient compared to a room in the gîte, but somewhat less convenient in that the shower was located outside at some distance, and the toilet was an outhouse.

Outhouses are a common thing in Sweden but apparently not in France – the one outside the yurt had a printed page with explanations and instructions on the door.

A totally unexpected benefit of late-night outhouse trips was that I was reminded to go out and see the starry sky. Summer skies in Stockholm are bright to begin with, and light pollution doesn’t help. Villeplane is further south and there are no cities nearby, so the sky was darker than anything I had seen for years. So full of stars! Even the Milky Way was easy to see.

For the first time in my life I also saw fireflies. Those don’t live in Sweden. I had expected them to shine with a constant light, but to my surprise these flashed on and off.

The highlight of today’s hike was our lunch break at a shallow stream. The water wasn’t cold at all so the kids spent a long time climbing and splashing around. Eric and I contented ourselves with cooling our feet.

Today was the first day of a two-day trek from Villeplane to Sauze (and back tomorrow).

The start of today’s walk followed the same trail as yesterday’s, but after about 2 km the paths diverged. The whole hike today was only about 10 km but there was an amazing amount of variety packed into those kilometers.

North-facing slopes were almost like Swedish forests and meadows, with familiar flora everywhere: familiar grasses, pines, daisies, wild strawberries. But then suddenly there’s a clump of orchids, or a martagon lily growing next to the path, and it was very clear that we were not in Sweden after all.

The mountains themselves were made of unfamiliar materials. Rocky outcrops are black shale instead of granite.

South-facing slopes were like picture-book scenes of Provencal nature: sun-baked rocks with tufty carpets of low flowers in all sorts of colours. From afar some of it resembled familiar vistas from our walks in Great Britain (Scotland and Cornwall) but what looked like gorse turned out to be Spanish broom, and instead of heather there was lavender and thyme.

The warmer, south-facing areas had a lot of small lizards, but they were so quick to hide that often the only sign we saw was brief movement and maybe a rustling of fallen leaves. In the forests we often heard cuckoos calling.

Everywhere was full of butterflies, grasshoppers and crickets. And ticks. So many ticks! The rest of the family got one or two each during the whole week. I got so many I lost count – I felt like I was constantly picking them off myself, despite wearing a long sleeve top and long trousers most of the time.

Donkey day!

We’re in Mercantour for a week of hiking. We have the option of being accompanied on our walks by a donkey to carry our stuff. Today we did a half-day hike to try out this donkey thing.

More work than it’s worth, was our clear conclusion. Libellule, our donkey, was good-natured and a good walker, but it was like having a third kid whom you always needed to be aware of. And a kid whose needs are totally orthogonal to the other kids. You had to keep her walking, but not too fast so she gets uncomfortably close the kids; keep her from eating grass all the time; find a place to tie her up when taking a break; make sure you’re not behind her where she can kick you by accident.

The final straw was when our path passed through a donkey grazing area and we (or she) were accosted by loose donkeys. She didn’t like them and aimed a few kicks at them, but they kept crowding us, to the point where we started to get worried about them accidentally pushing us off the rather narrow path. Eric had to hurry ahead with Libellule while I fell behind to push back the other donkeys, so the kids could walk without worrying about falling off the path.

Afterwards we could look back at the incident as an exciting adventure, but it was more stressful than fun at the time.

No more donkeys for us. Carrying our packs is just a bit of extra work for the body; managing a donkey is work for the brain which is not what we want from this vacation.

We’re off for a week-long vacation in southern France, in the Mercantour national park. Today was a travelling day: up early to catch a morning flight to Nice, then pick up a rental car, and then a two and a half hour drive to Villeplane, the little village where we will stay for the week.

Nice was all hot and steamy and palm trees, but the mountains were right there around the corner, and the further we drove, the more mountainous our surroundings got. The final 20 km of the road, after leaving the main highway, were narrow and twisty and with interesting tunnels. Often the tunnels were so narrow that they only fit one lane, so the other lane passed on the outside of the mountain. And the final 7 km were on an even smaller road, all uphill, with one hairpin turn after the other and a worn and bumpy road surface as well. When we got to the top Adrian was quite badly carsick and said he didn’t ever want us to drive down that road again.

Adrian quietly commented that it’s been a very long time since we grilled sausages, and could we maybe do that some day?

It has indeed been a long time. Winter is not my favourite time for that kind of thing. But today really felt like spring, with a warm sun in a big blue sky. So we drove to Ursvik and grilled sausages. To make the outing into more than just a walk from the parking lot to the nearest grilling spot, we got one geocache as well.

This was the most fun cache yet. Finding it wasn’t hard, but reaching it required creative thinking, the co-operation of two people, and some equipment. It was a good thing that it was spring and the Igelbäcken brook next to the cache was not frozen over – without the brook it would have been impossible.

Eric and Adrian, both reading.

Eric, catching up with work late at night.

The builders did their part renovating the roof. Now Eric’s painting the new siding boards they put up around the roof.