Les Machines de Lile. Tuesday 23rd June 2009.

The sun shone brightly on the garden this morning. I wandered about checking the progress of the raspberries, strawberries, red-currants and zucchinis; they were all coming along just fine. The warmth had sprouted many new berries for us to enjoy over the coming week and the zucchinis had doubled in size from the day before.

We arrived at Nante’s premier tourist attraction at 1pm, in time to visit the Galleries of the machines before our ride on the giant, mechanical elephant at 2.45. We fronted up to the ticket desk to buy our tickets to both the gallery and the ride, this was not possible. We could only buy the ticket to the Gallery, then, at 2pm precisely, we had to come back to the same ticket desk to purchase the ticket to ride the giant elephant at 2.45. Strange we thought and shared a little chuckle. We bought our first ticket and had one hour to visit the gallery, when 2pm came, one of us would duck out, buy the tickets to the elephant ride and come back into the gallery to finish the tour. This was not possible. Once you were in you had to complete the tour. We were perplexed at why we could not buy both tickets at once allowing us until 2.45pm to explore the gallery and then go straight to the elephant. Oh well, it was not possible. We toured the gallery which was a little ho hum, after all, the staff had kicked the joy out of us at first sight. We returned to the ticket desk at two minutes before two and ordered 3 tickets to ride the elephant. No, this was not possible, we were two minutes early. Can you believe the administration of these places, it’s crazy! We all shared another little giggle, waited precisely two minutes and when the magic hour of 2pm arrived the lady behind the counter said, ‘Now, you can buy your tickets to the elephant’. Voila! We are still unable to work out what had changed to allow the ticket seller to process our request but were happy to have the tickets in hand. Now we had 45 minutes to twiddle our thumbs before the ride, after all, it was not possible to re-enter the Gallery.

They had the strangest toilet signs too!

The ride was wonderful and so much fun, you can see by the pictures we were so high up, it was well worth the palaver to get there.

We BBQ’d the French way tonight – without a Barbie Mate or gas. It was fun and JR showed AJ how to light the fire and keep it going and they both did a smashing job of the snags!