Having booked our villa in Porto Vecchio in advance, we set off on the 13th to Birmingham airport, laden with six times our usual amount of baggage! Makes a change from just grabbing a rucksack as we head out the door I suppose. We checked in at the airport nice and early and wheeled Sas up to the departure gate where we were able to hand over the pushchair and carry her onboard. Once on the plane she was as good as gold and actually slept most of the two hour journey - not even crying when she did wake up.
Once we arrived in Corsica and got out of the airport, we were given a comfy Megane hire car - but things weren't so hot with the baby seat, which turned out to be 653 years old and to require a PhD in engineering to fit to the car. Undeterred we drove off down the coast to Porto Vecchio a couple of hours away telling Sas to "grip fast" all the way.
We got to the villa easily enough, although were then stumped as the owners didn't materialise to let us in for a good hour. It then transpired that it had been open all along - zut alors! But we weren't disappointed by the house itself - ludicrously luxurious with a beautiful pool area overlooking the river and trees, a huge living room with giant TV screens everywhere, big kitchen, lovely main bedroom and shower with water jets to buffet us from every direction.
The Wilsons soon arrived and we all settled in for our week ahead. Which was a lovely, relaxing and sunny time. Sas seemed to enjoy it hugely. Her most exciting new experience (apart from the funny lingo and seeing her Dad in his trunks) was no doubt going swimming for the first time. She donned a colourful swimming hat and waterproof nappy and then happily floated round the pool in an inflatible armchair while we followed her round ready to intervene at any moment. But no need to worry: Sas took to swimming like the proverbial duck to water.
Her other swimming excursion was in a much bigger pool - the Mediterranean to be precise! We went to the nearest beach once earlier on in the week, but the wind was up and Sas found being blown in the face not that much fun and suggested we should go home instead.
So a few days later we went back to Santa Giulia when it was a bit calmer. Saskia sported her sunhat and dress on her own lounger (see below), and then went for a dip in the sea for ten minutes or so, by which time she was a bit bemused by the whole thing but still sportingly putting up with her parents' determination to get her wet.
We shared babysitting a few times with the Wilsons, although while Hannah didn't make a sound when Ed & Em were gone, we were hastily summoned back from our evening out to a yelling Saskia - who had woken up to find that not only was she in a strange room in a strange house in a strange country, but Maman and Papa were nowhere to be seen either! So we scoffed our main courses and rushed back to look after Mademoiselle. Fortunately on our last evening all the grown-ups were able to go out, and Sas was well-behaved enough that we didn't get any emergency phone calls from the babysitter.
At the end of seven warm days that rushed past ridiculously quickly, we made our way sadly back to Birmingham and then Cheltenham. And just for good measure decided to leave a bag with most of Saskia's clothes on the transfer bus - zut alors encore une fois! Luckily she had grown out of most of them...
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