Spring Break ~ France {Part 1}

Spring break definitely didn't go as planned or expected but we made the most of it and still had a lot of fun. Thursday, April 4th was the girls' last day of school before Spring Break. Avery ended up getting sick that night! :( We had planned on going to see the Imagination Movers live Friday night but that didn't happened since Avery was still sick. We were then going to leave early Saturday morning to head down towards where the ferry leaves from and spend the day exploring Leeds Castle and the village of Rye. We had a hotel booked for Saturday night because our ferry was to leave Sunday morning at 7:30 -- it's a 3 hour drive there so it just made things easier to do it this way. Well, I had ordered some custom made Disney shirts for the kids and they still hadn't arrived so I was hoping that maybe Saturday would be the day. The post office opened at 10 so we figured we'd at least wait until then since we had spent all that money on these shirts just for this special occasion. They didn't make it and, in fact, still haven't. Also, right as we were getting ready to leave for the post office/on our trip Blake got sick. :( I had also been up the majority of the night not feeling well. Things definitely were not off to a good start.

Blake seemed to be doing better since he puked that morning so we thought we'd go back to Dover castle and go thru the 2 Secret Wartime tunnels that we didn't get to do last time.

 

Blake really did seem better....

 

We were only there a couple hours and then we went to the hotel. Hotel check-ins are always interesting for us. In Europe the max people per room is usually 3; sometimes 4. Obviously we exceed that max and think it's ridiculous to get another room when there is clearly enough room for us in one while the kids are so little. So, Derek and the girls go in and then he'll usually just text me the room # and Blake and I will go in about 10 minutes later. It was a maze trying to find our room at this place....and I was carrying my purse, toiletry bag, camera bag and Blake's blanket. I noticed he was starting to walk slower and then all of a sudden he threw up, a lot. We finally found the room.......Derek went and cleaned up the mess and told the front desk that his "daughter" got sick in the hallway. We gave the kids quick baths and called it a night. At 2am I could hear and definitely smell Blake going to the bathroom. He had the worst case of diarrhea, leaked through his pajamas. We got him cleaned up and settled back in bed and I bolted up. I don't know what made me think of it but we had forgotten our Disneyland tickets!!!! Immediate panic and frustration set in. I woke up Derek and he jumped up and took off on the 6 hour round trip -- at this point we had 5 hours until our ferry left and you have to board early to make it. We usually buy the "flex" pass meaning we can pretty much get on at anytime that day as long as there is room....but didn't this time. Go figure. Somehow he made it in 5 hours. We still missed our ferry but got on the next one. Whew!

 

I was worried about Blake on the ferry ride. Figured it would really upset his stomach. He did really well though. Towards the end of the ride he just wanted to lay down though. Derek got to sleep some which was good. Since Blake handled the ferry ride pretty well we figured we would go about our original plan which was to stop in Giverny to see Claude Monet's house and garden. About an hour into the drive Blake threw up all over. :( We pulled over on the side of the road. We were there for awhile as we had to get him cleaned up, change of clothes, carseat cleaned up, etc. So, in the meantime, French security came by. They never got out of their vehicle just sat and stared at us. They left before we did. After that we decided it was best to go straight to our apartment near Disneyland. Check-in wasn't until 5 and I was supposed to text when we were 30 minutes out.....I went ahead and texted asking if we could check in early. Never heard back. Arrived at apartment, went and found a place to eat that had wifi and I got on and emailed the guy. Still never heard anything. We finally borrowed our waiters phone and called and then got ahold of him. We were starting  to freak out thinking that it was on of the many European apartment scams that are out there. When he gave me his phone # there was a number in parenthesis so I just included it with the text......I guess I was supposed to leave that out.

 

The apartment was nice.......sort of. He failed to let me know that a few weeks ago the tenants above the apartment had a pipe leaking and there was a constant drip of water going into the bathroom. It was pretty gross. I also had specifically told him we would bring our own linens....otherwise they were going to charge us 10 euro a person. Well, he had linens on the beds and towels in the bathrooms so when we went to turn in our damage deposit he wanted 50 more euro. We were like no. He said they very rarely make a mistake. I said I had all the emails and started working on pulling it up and then he was quickly wanting to get out of there. But then we had to take off all his linens and fold and put them away ourselves. Annoying.

 

We then walked down the road to the patisserie and got some yummy pastries for the next morning and called it a night.

 

WHEW!!!