For the second week of our trip, we spent a week eating and relaxing in Provence at a small village called La Roque-sur-Pernes, not far from Isle-sur-la-Sorgue where I stayed on my previous trip with Faye.

We had a fantastic week, but the highlight would have to be randomly ending up at a bull-fight in Nimes. Now I’m a vegetarian, and I will confess I’m not too comfortable with the whole treatment of animals aspect, but to see a bull-fight in a two thousand-year-old amphitheatre is an opportunity that doesn’t come along everyday. It was certainly a real spectacle.

Plenty more photos in the Photo Gallery…

Well, so finally, here is a bit of an update on Dad’s visit to Europe.

Surprises were the order of the day and I had great fun springing them on him. Dad was a very good sport about it, so while he was in London, we took him to see Cabaret and the Proms without him knowing where he was going.

The best surprise though was surely taking him to Europe. I had booked the three of us on a cruise up and down the Adriatic, but I refused to tell Dad where we were going. I kept joking that we were going to Finland. When we arrived at the airport, we got in the check-in queue for Thompson Fly to Corfu, and Dad was surprised but still had no idea what was up. That he should have believed that I would take him for a two-week beach holiday to Corfu on his first trip to Europe in over thirty years suggests either that he doesn’t know me as well as he thinks, or that he thinks that I don’t know him as well as I should!

In any event, I managed to keep him in ignorance even after we arrived in Corfu and as I herded us onto the coach to the boat, and it was only when a total stranger sat down next to him and said
“Looking forward to the cruise?” that Dad realised with start that he’d been had!

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