Sundays here are family days. No stores are open (or hardly any… or not past noon, which is when I’m finally ready to go out on a Sunday). We thought we’d take advantage of the new lifestyle and take Kaitlyn to the park in Uriage with the carousel. She’d finally noticed the carousel last night but we couldn’t stop because at about the same time she saw it, she announced she had to pee pee in the potty, which required a quick trip the rest of the way home.
We arrived at the park to find it set up for some kind of horse competition. There were kids and their horses trotting around getting ready. It took some convincing for Kaitlyn to believe me that those were not horses there for her to ride. The only horses she could ride go around-and-around-and-around.
There were no kids on the merry-go-round and no kids waiting to go on it. No obvious place to buy a ticket for it. We saw a couple of people who looked suspiciously like they worked there, so Bill walked up to them and did manage to buy a ticket. Kaitlyn and I climbed on, she picked a horse, the ticket guy came up and collected the ticket he’d just seen the woman next to him sell Bill, then he fired up the carousel. It went fast. And there are no straps to hold a child on the horse. You just have to hang on tight. Kaitlyn loved it. I got a bit sick, till I figured out to look in at her not out at the things whirring by.
Behind the carousel are little surry type bikes with fake horses on front. Kaitlyn is too little for even the smallest one so we rented the grande… for four euros, the three of us sat behind this big, plastic horse and Bill and I pedaled around the park. It was fun and we weren’t doing too bad until Kaitlyn took the reins (yes, you steer with reins) and tried to direct the horse. She directed us toward some stairs, toward some people, toward some trees. We made it back in one piece and got the horse close to where we’d picked him up. Then Kaitlyn demanded one more carousel ride. Well, she was demanding an endless number of them, we negotiated one.
While they were riding, I watched the horse competition. It was a horse race relay. There were four lanes. The rider in each lane rode to the end, dropped a tennis ball in a bucket, rode around the bucket and had to pick up another tennis ball perched on an orange traffic cone on his or her way back… handing that ball to the next team member. It was the most unusual horse race I’d ever seen. I would have stayed to watch it but Kaitlyn wasn’t interested. She was tired.
A tired Kaitlyn and two frustrated parents usually ends in a car ride; that’s exactly what we did. We thought we’d explore the area while she snoozed. I couldn’t believe what we found. I looked up at a mountain and saw some two dozen parachutists making their way down to the ground. They had JUMPED off the mountain. Then we passed a sign pointing to this area… it’s ORGANIZED. We drove around until we got close enough for Bill to take pictures. We ended up right next to where these nuts land. There is a restaurant there, where you can sit and enjoy a glass of wine and the action. There are houses pretty close by, too. How weird would that be to have all these people jumping off the mountain over your roof. How do they get up to the top? There is a tram that goes basically straight up on tracks. We think that you can take this tram up and back down, rather than jump down. We may do that sometime.
We wrapped up the evening with dinner at another ISE family’s house. The Roeders. They’ve been here since January and I was just so impressed at how at ease Amie seems with just plunging into a situation and using bad French. She said she knows it isn’t correct grammar but people understand her and correct her to help out. She found a choir to join and said that has helped her learn a lot of French. I am going to have to find something interesting to take part in. To help my French and to get me out of the house.