Peacocks, My Birthday and More Virus - Evora, Lyon and Les Deux Alpes

After our stay in Lisbon, Portugal, we had a couple of nights in a cute town called Evora. Evora had castle walls and you weren’t allowed to park inside them. We went on a few walks around the town, met a few peacocks 🦚, and of course, ate a few too many Portuguese tarts.

From Evora, we drove back to the airport and flew to Lyon, in France. We caught the airport train and an Uber to our accommodation, which once again following European tradition, was not on the ground floor. The apartment was very big and it took us quite a while to find the cooking implements.

There was a little French bakery around the corner where I got to practise my French, “Bonjour, quatre pains au chocolat s’il vous plait”. We went for a few (socially distanced) walks around Lyon and on one particularly wet day I got a hole in my shoe while out on one of them. Fortunately, we were on the way to Decathlon, so I didn’t need to endure squelchy feet for too long.

We caught a bus from Lyon Airport to Les Deux Alpes (pronounced “leh derz alps” and meaning “The Two Mountains” for all you non-French-speaking folk) where we thought we would be skiing for the next month. We dumped our bags at the accom, which, you guessed it, was on the 3^rd floor, and went for a walk around town to sort out our skiing for the next day.

We checked in at ski school to make sure we would be good for the next day, got our ski hire ready and bought passes for the ski lifts. Also, we got cold, like really cold, like Europe cold! 🥶🥶🥶🥶

The next day, we got up early and got ready for our first day of skiing! We had to be at ski school by 10 o’clock. Since it was our first day, we only went on two easy runs. The ski lessons only went for three hours, but they felt longer since we had so much fun.

You may be surprised to learn that you can get seriously sunburnt in the snow, but it’s true. The Sun’s rays come at you from all directions because the light reflects off the snow, I found this out the hard way🧴☀️.

You’ve probably heard the old saying ‘When in France, eat bread,’ (at least I think that’s how it goes) we did just that. Every day we ate at least one loaf of delicious, fresh French bread, we had it with soup, with salami and my personal favourite with cheese a.k.a fondue. YUM!! The apartment had a fondue maker and Dad jumped right in (he was very keen, he didn’t actually jump into the fondue maker), also we found out that Mum used to have fondue parties (the things you find out when you don’t leave you parents for months on end).

While we were at ski school, Mum and Dad were following the news and, it wasn’t looking too great. There was talk of closing the ski resorts and we thought we might even have to go home (back to Australia). Every night Dad sat in front of the TV using Google Translate to follow the French President’s speeches.

On Saturday evening, it was announced that the French ski resorts would be closing for the remainder of the season and we would have to return all our ski gear the next day, that also meant I wouldn’t be able to ski on my birthday, which was on the Monday.☹☹

Well, this was the last straw, so Mum and I started to look for flights back to Australia. After a bit of searching, we booked an Emirates flight from Edinburgh, Scotland back to Melbourne. We had to go back to the UK as we had left some bags there, but in the meantime, it was my 12^th birthday.

France isn’t such a bad place to have a birthday, even if you’re in the midst of a global pandemic. For breakfast we had bacon, potato rosti and eggs. We went for a careful walk through town to a bakery where I picked a delicious-looking raspberry and lemon mousse cake. The bakery lady was very specific that we couldn’t eat the cake before 5pm, (since it was frozen) she wrote ‘1700’ on the cake box so we didn’t forget. The cake was 110% delicious and, considering our current situation it was a pretty good birthday.

The next day was Tuesday, (as you would know if you had been paying attention at school, and in the last 200 words) and that was the day we left the snow, 3 weeks early😭 (I googled really sad face to get that emoji). On the bright side, we now owe ourselves a month in the snow somewhere.