Plans

I didn't exactly have "plans" for today, but I did promise the girls yesterday that we would "do something" together. I didn't really believe that the weather would still be crap (yesterday was kind of grey and sort of half-hearted not-rain), so had vague plans to hit the Domaine de Méric, a beautiful park near the centre of Montpellier.

Méric is the former home of the painter Frédéric Bazille and is truly delightful. It covers a hilly area, so at the top level there's a "wild" prairie, most likely in full bloom right now (cornflowers, poppies, cow parsley...), then a series of small grassy areas and an orchard, then, down in a hollow, a play area for kids and woodland, leading down to a riverside walk. Lovely at this time of year.

So of course it has been not only cold (which would have been scandalous enough, but manageable) but WET all. fucking. day. So that plan was out the window.

L. wanted to go to Altissimo, an indoor "rock climbing" place. It's expensive, particularly as the girls have generally had enough after an hour, but they do enjoy it so I sort of said OK.

Of course, we weren't the only ones to think of this and the place was PACKED. So C. suggested a game of bowling. I was vaguely up for that, but it was even more crowded, with a looooooong queue and a waiting time estimated at "about 45 minutes". No way.

So we ended up at Acrochats, God help me. We had to queue there, too, and it's probably the most expensive of the three, and certainly the most hideous for me. It's basically just a huge indoor play gym thing (like the ones at McDonald's, only much, much bigger), but it's in a massive, cavern-like room that multiplies the sound level a billion times. It's unspeakably hot, the kids get hyper, all types of drink etc. are wildly over-priced and, as an adult on my own, I was virtually comatose with boredom.

So much for our "doing something together". Huh.

The girls then begged to have dinner out too (all these places are in a part of the city called Odysseum, which is an out-of-centre shopping-eating-entertainment place, all open air and accessible by tram), so, as I'm a cheapskate and Acrochats almost bankrupted me, we went to Subway. Splendid.

My head was throbbing from the Acrochats atrocity, and I find Subway to be singularly unspectacular (doughy bread, stingy on the chicken...), but the girls love it, so at least they had a fun afternoon.

The main problem was that the whole thing put me in a bad mood and I spent a fair amount of the rest of the evening feeling annoyed with them that they wouldn't do as they were told (pick up their clothes, go get in the shower, brush teeth, switch the Glee DVD off, go to bed...). I wanted today to be a fun day, just the three of us, and instead I spent the whole afternoon sitting on my own with nothing to do and going almost insane from all those kids screaming.

I know I'm being grouchy and unreasonable - the girls had a lot of fun and that should probably be enough on a day out with kids. But I don't often take the girls places, I don't often get to do "fun" stuff and this was beyond disappointing for me. I should have gone with my instinct and gone to the Musée Fabre - they would have been less enthusiastic at the beginning, but we always have a good time there. And it's quiet. And we could have gone out for supper somewhere reasonably priced (but not Subway). *sigh*

Lesson learned, I guess.