Canadutch
I know it’s not totally unlike me to not write regularly, but just in case you were wondering why I went so silent after my last post, it’s because I’ve been away for the last three weeks! I’ve been blissfully knitting, designing, reading and generally being a big ol’ lazy butt while traveling through France and Belgium!
You see, it all started months ago when my in-laws invited us to the south of France to spend Christmas with them. My husband and I haven’t spent Christmas with family for years. Not because we didn’t want to, of course, but things like time, money, dogs, work and everything else always got in the way. You know how it is. This year we said enough. ENOUGH! It’s just been too long and we weren’t going to let anything stand in our way. Not even things I haven’t written about yet here on my blog, like one of our dogs recovering from surgery and me being fresh out of having my ankle in a cast for five weeks. Come hell or high water, we were going!
This is where we spent the three weeks of our amazing holiday:
Click to see a larger version
We ended up sorting out the following plan. We would go to my in-laws and stay in a cottage owned by their friends that live up the road, as this would allow us to get our dogs away from each other if they didn’t like each other… and boy didn’t they! Well, that’s a lie. My in-laws dogs liked ours just fine, it was Bailey that acted like a jerk. So, in the end we were glad to have somewhere to separate them, for all of our sanity! Don’t feel bad for our dogs, though. They had three weeks of not sleeping in their crates at night and they were happy to lay on my mother-in-law’s furry sofa pillows (when she wasn’t winning them over with bits of bread!). They hardly suffered, trust me…
In the weeks before and after that cottage, we’d book ourselves relaxing places to stay. It was wonderful! Our first cottage was in Limousin, France. A two bedroom cottage in a row of three which have been beautifully renovated by a British couple who just started renting them out this year. The second, as I mentioned, the one up the road from my in-laws, and the third week brought us back for another visit to Rensiwez (in the Belgian Ardennes) where we stayed in one of their newly built cabins. Once again, escaping the madness of Rotterdam on New Years Eve!
It was wonderful to see family during the holidays, even though I just realized we didn’t even take any photos! Me! Not taking photos… what is this world coming to? Anyway, I just can’t believe it has gone by so quickly. It seems like the holidays went by in the blink of an eye this year and I’m still trying to come to grips with the fact that it’s 2016 already!
I also feel like there’s so much I haven’t told all of you about this past year! I’ve not covered the medical situations with the dog, or myself… I’ve not discussed the continued frustration of trying to get a visa to move to Pittsburgh, or even finished posting about our cruise. Man, I’m such a slacker. I’m going to really try to be better in this coming year! We have some great travel plans and I have a few design ideas floating around in my head that I want to work on. I’m going to try to make breathing life back into my blog a priority this year, I miss blogging, maybe because I’m rapidly falling out of love with Facebook, which has been taking up most of my ‘sharing news with the world’ mind space.
I hope to talk more about these cottages / weeks individually, but that can wait. For now I will just say Happy New Year and here’s to a crafty and adventurous 2016 for us all!
