Thursday, July 28, 2005

Vroom Vroom Vroom

The cicadas are singing and the evening is blowing us a warm breeze to accompany the dinner of lemon and basil chicken with a chilled glass of rose. Sounds pretty idyllic doesn't it? Well it is!

Having finished dinner I just waved goodbye to Frog who is off to get his arse kicked by his sister on a tennis court and I'm about to sit out on the terrace with my mum.

Yes, my mum is on holiday with us for a week and we've had our first summer escapade this afternoon. Gone are the days of mum dragging her whining children (alright whiny child, my sister's pretty easygoing) around the Normandy peninsula on a bike with just two panniers each and a task to find a 1* hotel or Youth Hostel each night. Now, I get to to drag her around the Provencal villages and ports. Actually, we've spent most of our time so far reading by the pool but we went for an afternoon trip today to visit a nearby port and chateau.

Frog and I had agreed that it made sense to insure my mum on the rusty old Renault Super 5 that lives down at the summer house. I have no licence and I didn't want Frog to feel obliged to chauffeur us for the week. So, mum jumped into the little car this afternoon and had to add some new life skills to her already long list - driving an automatic.

I have promised Mum that I won't recount to Frog some of the events of our trip on the road today. As she says, she was driving like a little old lady (which reminds me that tomorrow I need to grab a cushion for her so that she can see above the steering wheel). I will not tell about the riding up the kerb, the near misses of a wall or the inability to get from "drive" to "neutral" as we crawled through the Provencal countryside. But it did make me laugh and nothing more so than the yellow lambourghini behind us on his way to St Tropez (or perhaps Ramatuelle) who was forced to join us in our crawling speed as Mum refused to drive over 40 kmph with no overtaking allowed.

We'll be hitting the bars in the port tonight!

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