All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - or said otherwise: All study and no change of scenery quickly fries the brain!! We needed to get away from the Paris area with its heavy traffic and wall to wall people once in a while. And we would come back ready to hit the studies again! Those European countries are so small and close together, and so it was easy travelling out of France.
Our first sortie was to the World's Fair in Brussels. Several of us in our team decided to go one weekend on the train going from Paris to Brussels. We took a taxi from our pension to the train station. (This was before we moved to the suburbs.) We had our two heavy girls (more than thirty pounds each!) and their twin strollers and our suitcase with clothes for the weekend and quickly found a taxi to take us. The taxi was a bit rattly and the rattling got louder and then finally the car broke down altogether, just sort of disintegrated under us! . We hauled the girls and suitcase and strollers and ourselves out of the broken down vehicle and started looking for another taxi to take us to the train station. Everyone else was there and on the train ahead of us, and we just made it in time to climb on board in the last car of the train bound for Brussels.
Going to the World's Fair is sort of a once in a lifetime experience - but with all of our paraphenalia it was a very tiring weekend. Once we got settled in the train, all was well, but then came the challenge of getting all of us and our stuff off the train in Belgium and into another taxi, this time to take us to a cheap pension someone had recommended to us. Our whole party stayed there and it was both inexpensive and clean. We were amazed at how beautiful and clean everything was in Belgium and the other European countries in comparison to Paris, which was basically a dirty city at that time in history.
Early the next morning we all took off for the Fair and it was wall to wall people. Arnolds had one child, Bowers had one child and we had our two girls. A couple of our singles also accompanied us. It was fun seeing all the wonders of a World's Fair, but it was also a very tiring experience. Both girls fell sound asleep in their double stroller as we wheeled them through the crowds, and we heard a passing couple commenting about these Americans who would subject their childen to a crowd like that! At least we could say we had been to the World's Fair - but our weekend was pretty exhausting!
Once we had our VW bus, it was much easier to make trips. The three single women in our group wanted to visit Germany and so they asked if we could all go together and they would pay us enough for the gas. They would stay in hotels in the cities we visited and our family could sleep in the Volkwagen. Actually this worked out quite well. We made a soft bed for you two wee girls over the engine in the back of the VW and we each slept in a seat. We would drop the ladies at a hotel where they spent the night and we would pick them up in the morning and all go sightseeing in the morning. Germany was beautiful and so CLEAN. The rivers and mountains and forests all made a nice change from flat Paris. We would park our VW in a trailer park and use the facilities there and set up with our little family and spend the evening and night. We met a lot of interesting tourists from other European counties that way too.
At Easter time we had vacation from school and we three couples - Bowers, Arnolds and we - decided to pool our resources and go in our VW to Holland. There was a Dutch Alliance center in Holland, right near the sea, and we made reservations to stay for a week at this missionary home where the price was reasonable - and even included meals. We made day trips and just relaxed there in the beautiful home and grounds. The kids had lots of place to run and play and it was a great vacation for us all. When Saturday came, the people in charge told us that the Dutch did not take their small children to church, so the men could go with them but the mothers would have to stay at the Center with the children.We thought that a strange custom, but when in Holland, do as the Dutch........
After everyone had gone to church we had a beautiful, quiet morning at the Centre. They had a piano and the three of us women were singing trios together while our four children were outside playing in the grounds. The place was safe and we did not worry about them as we sang our hearts out inside the home! And then the unexpected happened: the children came trouping inside with their arms full of purple tulips, beautiful flowers on little short stems! Cheryl had picked a whole bed of this one color of tulips, with almost no stem at all on the flowers! It was Springtime and the solid colors were arranged in beautiful beds outside. Cheryl loved the purple and had the kids help her and they brought them in to present them to their mothers! We were of course horrified and hated to see the owners come home from church! The hostess took it pretty well, and piled the purple flowers in flat bowls and decorated the tables with them for lunch that Sunday noon! Talk about life's embarassing situations.....!!
By the end of that year in France, we were all more than ready for our next step - going to Africa! We were going to Guinea, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon, and we did not shed many tears when we left la belle France! But there was still another long trip to make and Arnolds and we took that one together. It really was...........
A Trip to Remember!!
I laughed out loud over the purple tuplips! Never heard that story before.
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