Our Family’s (2nd) Year in the South of France
Kids and Castles - Our year with kids in the South of France

About Kids and Castles

Welcome to the KidsAndCastles blog.

We have always loved to travel. We dreamed about quitting our jobs one day and backpacking around the world. But the timing was never right. Then we had kids – two daughters, 19 months apart – and the timing became REALLY bad.

But the kids got older. Backpacking around the world isn’t quite our thing anymore (although have HUGE respect for families that do that) but living in Europe for a year seemed like a good alternative. The timing was still not right, but when L was 6 and Z was 5 we decided to go anyway.

The “where” was easy – the South of France. JM is French-Canadian.  Thanks to his efforts, and a really great school, the girls are both bilingual. Diane unfortunately is NOT. The hope was that this trip might help take her basic “La table est jaune” and “Ou sont les toilettes?” level French and get to the place where maybe she might understand some dinner conversation with JM’s family. So that’s the France part.  The south part was because we figure that the weather in the south of France would be kinder since we’ve lived in California for the past 14 years and have lost our Canadian weather tolerance.

So we did it. We spent 10 months in a small village in Provence during the 2010-2011 school year.  It was AMAZING, although very intense and difficult at times. We are so glad we did it. Then, since we knew it could be done, we did it again. We’re now spending the 2013-2014 school year in a small village the Languedoc.

If you are new to this blog, here are a few of our favorite posts to start with: