57. Hobo Dinners

 

With camp right around the corner- and no stove/ oven in this house – we are having everyone’s favorite camp meal for supper tonight – Hobo Dinners! At camp this means we take a crate of meat, carrots, potatoes, and head out to some camping lot with our cabins. We then set up a tablecloth of trash bags on the picnic table, and let the campers cut up all the fixings in piles. After about 5 minutes they have potato and carrot juice all over them. Once everything is sliced up as thin as possible they fill up tin foil bowls with all the food they want and throw it in the fire to cook. It’s clean safe fun! Here, we are doing the same thing with the grill we found in the basement/garage.  

We have found many gems in this house. Without internet, every night has turned into movie night. We’ve been through Highlanders, and Oceans 11. So now Brody, Arden, and Scarlet have spent much of their time analyzing the plot of Oceans 11 and how they might pull off the same feat. Scarlet’s first remark about the movie was “They make robbing a casino look so easy!”  They’ve made plans to watch all of the other Ocean movies when we get back to the states.

Today though, our most exciting news is not about hobo dinners or our plans to watch Frozen after supper, but that Aunt Anne is now with us! She has spent the last 5 weeks working at a hospital in South Africa and has one more week before heading back to Arizona. What better place to spend this week than in Louire Valley with her family?!

We set out this morning not knowing when her train was going to come in, but there was enough to do around the train station that we knew we could find something to keep us busy. The big station was in Orleans where Joan of Arc lived. We saw a huge statue of her on a horse in the town square where Brody exclaimed “That’s a GIRL!” this might have been the first time he’s seen a large woman statue that wasn’t the virgin Mary. We went to the cathedral a block away and looked around until we found the stages of the cross, which is the highlight scavenger hunt of our cathedral visits.

Anne’s train came in at 2:30 and we spent our waiting time serenading the locals with a free piano that was located in the middle of the station. The first place we took her was the Chateau des Jeux. She had been up for 24 hours so a castle full of games was the obvious choice. And we played A LOT of games. From ball throwing to balance board to string ball maze game, we are now ready for any 18^th century game you could throw at us. We were one of only a few families touring the estate, so most of the time it felt like our own personal playground. We touched anything and everything in the house and tried to get into all of the locked doors.

After exploring the mansion, we headed to the back yard to the petting zoo. I quickly realized that there were no animals. Excluding the two wild bunnies hopping around that wanted nothing to do with me regardless of how much delicious grass I waved at them. There was, however, a train and a Putt Putt area. Dad and I checked out the train pressing every button, pulling all the mobile levers, and trying to unlock all the immobile levers. After unsuccessfully trying to move the train down the tracks, I annihilated Arden in Putt Putt. Then we decided we were all starving so we bee lined it to the car where there was a tub of Nutella waiting for us. It’s going to be hard to break the habit of carrying a spoon everywhere I go.