France

As many of you know we were sad to leave family and friends but very excited for our new adventure together as a family. It has been almost two years since we've been on our own...so, needless to say we were excited! Then the craziness began!
Our first flight out of SLC was delayed thus cutting it close to make our second flight in Detroit. We thought we were going to miss this flight until it was also delayed about 1 hours thus making it extremely difficult to make it to our connection flight to Marseilles from Amsterdam. So, we were seriously running from flight to flight. All three flights had major turbulence, which I thought I was going to die from. Seneca was a trooper. She slept on most of the flights which was awesome!

Seni on our flight from Detroit to Amsterdam. She is using the TV remote as a phone.

 She manages to know how to use the remote, especially the flight attendant button.

When we land in Marseilles, two pieces of our luggage were not there; which happened to be mine. While Matt was filing a claim Seni threw up (must have been the turbulence). Ugh! Then we finally pick up a larger rental car to at least help transport our luggage from the airport to our vacation rental. 

We are alive and made it to Marseilles

From there we enjoyed a very beautiful drive to Pierrevert.

 This is a picture of our vacation rental. The upper level are the landlords and the lower level is where we stay.

Here is a sweet pic of our "tiny" car. Wow is it small. We turned in our larger one to save money, plus we didn't think we needed more space until....

we realized how big our stroller is...or how small our car is. So, another "to do" is purchase a car a bit larger than this one.

While we've been here we've had the chance to explore the surrounding areas so we can get a feel of where we would like to live. Here are some pictures documenting our excurions.

 Aix en Provence

Greoux-les-Baines

 La Tour-d'Aigues

Pertuis

It has been great being here. I am finally able to practice my french. I am not very good, but feel bless to at least have some words come out of my mouth. I laugh at myself and find that I leave conversations smiling even though I didn't ask correctly or they really didn't understand me. So, this part of the process has been good. As for housing, it will be difficult finding a furnished place during Provences' high vacation season. This is the time where most Europeans come to Provence to vacation so housing is at a premium right now. We hope we get lucky and find something reasonable for our budget. Besides this we just need to get adjusted. Overall, the people are very friendly, the area is gorgous and the food is wonderful!
Oh, we had a chance to attend an LDS church here in Manosque and it was very small...about 30 people. It was different from our larger congregations we encounter in the US but this was very delightful in a different way. I loved meeting the members and truly felt loved.
Well, we are still pooped, not to mention still having a lot of work ahead of us to get established...it feels like a never ending process that began almost two years ago. Maybe we will feel settled sometime.