Day 51: 02/08/2017 Lights in Chalons

Last day in Chalons  before moving onwards and south. Esmé made her first lapbook, a popular homeschool method of working on a project. Hers was a French one which was pretty much downloaded from Twinkl. She really enjoyed cutting, sticking and colouring and we will continue this tomorrow. AJ again did a lot of reading, and his favourite Big Numbers app on the iPad as well as helping Patrick out with some jobs.

Esmé and I went out to top up our shopping as the next leg is fairly remote and also not all the stops are accessible to us as some are quite shallow. That just left washing clothes and us to do as well as topping up the water tanks as opportunities to fill up are a bit scarce on the next leg. We'd forgotten to get the tokens for the washing machine in the morning so needed to wait until the Captainaire got back at 4pm before doing the washing so we had a lazy afternoon watching and I made a start on making some fly nets for the boat.

Leftover curry for tea with home made flatbreads... a favourite of ours made with 350g yoghurt, 350g flour and 1tsp baking powder.

Then for our last night I took the kids out at about 10pm to hunt for the famous lumiers of Chalons. We walked to the tourist information office where little boats charged crazy amounts of money for a lit tour of the city, and tried to work out where the lights were. In the end the rather drunken group of men I had been trying to keep the kids away from actually came over to help us and tell us which way to walk. It struck me that I am too quick to judge. They were really friendly and despite their English being far worse than my French, they were really keen to help us.

Anyway the lights were actually projections on buildings, along with lanterns along the waterway. I'm sure the boat ride would have been quite magical, but we enjoyed looking at the moving images on the old buildings, and the kids are learning lessons about budgeting.