a walk through the woods

It’s the middle of February, and the rainy, gloomy days typical of winter here in northwest France are winding down. Yesterday was a beautiful day – clear skies, not too cold, and not raining – so we went for a walk in the woods in a park called the Vallée Humide de Bois-Ainaux. It is a forested wetland in the northeast of Brittany (Ille-et-Vilaine) with a variety of different natural sites to see and educational areas for the children to play with and explore. It’s a great place to visit on a clear, cool day, and we were the only people in the park throughout the entire afternoon. Of course I had my iPhone with me, so naturally I took a bunch of pictures.

I’m going to start with a picture of me, as I notice I don’t post many pictures of myself on my own blog!

And here is a picture of Amelia and me… after I got Yvonne to take a picture of me, Amelia wanted one of the two of us in the same place.

Here is Callum by a pond in the middle of the forest. Inside the pond were thousands of frog eggs (frogspawn), ready to turn into tadpoles.

The kids found some big boulders in one part of the woods, so they did a little climbing.

And finally, here is a picture of our Shetland Sheepdog, Lilou. We kept her off her leash for most of the walk, and she was very well-behaved… at one point we thought she was going to jump into the frog pond, but fortunately she came to her senses and decided against it. Nice work! Otherwise she ran around, sniffed stuff, and let out a lot of energy.