What? Another picnic?!! (Part one)

We Pontoon Pirates, when we're not fearlessly patrolling Wolverine Lake but are home in the XX - that's the cool banlieusard name for the 20th arrondissement of Paris - we have neither a lake, nor a pontoon, nor a backyard nor even any outdoor furniture. Basically, we don't have an outdoors we can call our own. So, to get some air on late summer afternoons, we have to settle for picnics. This weekend, you see, the Consul General of the Hauts-de-Seine was putting on a garden party in the Domaine du Château de Sceaux...

...the Consul was stepping in for the duchess of Trevise who had been called to her ailing grandaunt's bedside some 115 years ago. Unlike last weekend in Beauvoir, this time we weren't invited, but we figured we'd try and grub a free lunch... We headed out to crash the Consul Gen's party around 11am on Sunday morning.

Clédo came with us. (In the picture above, you can marvel at the multicultural reality of the XX : see the little girl with the African skirt going up the hill behind Clédo and me? - Henry that is - See her? Mom says African women don't wear underwear under those lovely skirts... Oups! That just slipped out! - It's some basic obstetrical trivia that 10 year-old pirates who don't have midwives for mothers don't usually know! - And, if you are wondering what the black-cloaked figure tailing us is (the one that looks kind of like Darth Vador), don't worry, it's not Death, it's not Salieri disguised as Mozart's father in that Milos Forman film Amadeus), it's just a good Muslim woman on her way home from the mosque. Muslim women do wear underwear especially to the mosque but they have other secrets Mom says she can't tell us about yet...)

Lets get back on track here. It was Sunday, so the Halal butcher shops along Ménilmontant were open - non Halal butcher shops too - but it was also Laïd, last day of Ramadan, so our Muslim neighbors were gearing up for the feast! Mom did a quick bit of shopping...

...Malcolm carried Mom's picnic basket - she's no pirate; she'd decided to come prepared! She wasn't about to crash any parties or try and wing any free lunches...

...She's also overly excitable and when she has a camera in her hands she takes pictures of just about anything that moves. Here's one she snapped of the all-new, one-compartement subway trains on the Number 2 line, and it wasn't even moving! Parisans, born and raised, we were less impressed...

...same goes for the long corridor at the train station...

I did get excited when I saw this picture though. I thought the guy had really swum up the Falls until Clédo said it was probably special effects.

After many subway stops and more advertising and more corridors, we finally arrived at the Parc de Sceaux but, despite Mom's protesting, we weren't hanging around for a posed picture with the wrought iron gates, no way...

...and the first thing we found was this...

...that was one big spider! Mom said she might even have squished it had she found it crawling up her shower curtain... but since it was outside at the park, we just poked at it a little.

Next, we saw the French National Soccor team taking a break after its morning workout! Wow!

And then, Sarkozy's finest celebrating their graduation from the National Police Acadamy at Sceaux...(Mom was getting really worried that this picnic-in-the-park business was not going to turn out quite like she had imagined!)

And since les cuffs - cool banlieusard word for the cops - were on hand, we figured the party crashing idea was off! Luckily, Mom had brought enough for all of us and we finally found a patch of shade we liked and settled in for lunch!

Turned out, Clédo's mom had also thrown some potato chips in his bag - two different flavors no less - so we had a potato chip dégustation - a must at any picnic worth its salt in the park of a château! We decided we liked the Count of Carrefour's Bolognaise flavored chips best! (In the next photo you have another reason why Clédo fits right in with the Paret-Darnay's...

...as soon as he'd decided which chips he liked best, he immediately added some to his saucisson sandwich - exactly as Max would have done!)

Just as Mom pulled out the fruit she'd bought on Ménilmontant (those are Reine-Claude prunes you see there - she thought they would be appropriate for a picnic at the Château...), I spied something we found more interesting...


...you can't see it here but we are chasing a mouse!
A mouse on the duchess' lawn! Off with her head! Off with her head!

(Mom actually saw it herself later but said it looked more like a rat from where she was sitting comfortably reading a novel about the president's wife - no rats on the White House lawn, if you please! - Not to mention in the Oval office!)

But what we'd truly come to do was to show Clédo the very cool kids' play area. So, when we'd had our fill of chips and mice and were hot and ready to move on, off we went! The last time we'd seen the play area, we were 5 or 6 years old so Mom was a bit worried we'd be disappointed. No way, José! First of all, we had to walk through the woods to get there...

...We found acorns which Malcolm then planted...


...we found walking sticks and the kind of vines that our Papy taught us to smoke like he used to when he was at camp in Etueffont...

...and we found sling-shot sticks and sword-fighting sticks...


...and, since I'm an environmentally aware pirate, as well as being an extremely clever inventor, I used mine to carry the garbage till we found a garbage bin! Luckily, even though this looks like virgin forest we're walking through, we found a garbage bin way before we found the play area, so I didn't have to tote that bag too long.

Isn't this a cool playground? See the neat wooden armchairs around the wooden trampoline-like structure? There were too many kids and we were headed for the books - tall, wooden sculptures shaped like books that you can climb on - so we didn't stop to play here, we just charged straight ahead!

But Mom got lost in the labyrinth of hedges! She tried to take pictures of us anyway from afar...


...but when she finally caught up, we'd already done tones of wild and crazy things with no one there to document them! AAARRRHHH! She was frustrated! AND she found Malcolm taking a breather...


...well, more like a smoker! So she wasn't too happy to say the least!

But what about those sculptures, you're wondering, huh? Well, I was first to the top of the tallest book!

(For any newcomers, I AM twin number one - as French ultrasound artists say - so I AM usually first : first out, first to crawl, first to walk, first to the top of the tallest book! C'est normal!)


But Malcolm was second! (Ca, c'est normal aussi!) He made it up one of the smaller books and Clédo was a bit frustrated...

...but if you want to find out if he ever did make it to the top, you're going to have to wait for Part TWO!