Michaela, Tim, Ryan & Charlie got home from Florida on Monday morning. They had been in the thick of Hurricane Charlie, having been evacuated from their holiday on Sanibel Island back to Orlando, which then got hit unexpectedly by the full force of the storm. They had some exciting stories to tell! But they also had some serious jetlag - well the adults did - so I took the boys to the playground for the afternoon. It was great having some time with them - and I realised that this was the first ever time I had looked after them on my own. About time, Michaela said when I mentioned it to her!

The Tuesday I spent mostly help sort out stuff in the house. We took a whole load of clothes to the Red Cross depot in town, and took a load of other stuff to the dump for recycling. This freed up considerable space in the cellar, allowing us to reorganise quite a lot of junk. But it wasn't all work work work. That evening we ordered sushi from the Japanese restaurant opposite my old flat in Haidhausen - now that's a serious nostalgia trip for me, I mean, I was in that place at least once a week for six months! - and drank beer & wine & spirits. When Selena turned up the boys were ecstatic and wouldn't calm down for ages. Unlucky for Selena, who had been travelling all day! But lucky for us, because we could have a well-earned sit down.

The next day was a sad one for me. I had to say farewell to my two nephews who I won't be seeing for a very long time now. I had to stop myself from blubbing, and luckily they were busy playing with Selena (she's got her work cut out for her for the next few weeks!) so they didn't get too emotional either. Still, I almost lost it when Ryan said "I'm really going to miss you Uncle Richard"! Tim kindly took me to the station and we said our goodbyes there. Michaela had gone to work earlier that morning, which is probably a good thing because I'm sure I would have cried if I'd had to say bye to her in person that day. But hey, when I next see them I'll have plenty of stories to tell!

I got on a train at Hauptbahnhof and, of course, I had to walk right up the bloody platform to find my seat. With Germany's super-long ICE trains this meant adding five minutes more dragging my heavy bags along. But the upside was, my seat was in the very front compartment of the train, and I could see where we were going over the shoulder of the driver. This was especially cool on the high-speed sections of track. It feels good to be leaving the cars on the Autobahn next to you behind.

With a change of trains at Mannheim, I arrived in Switzerland that afternoon. In Basel I had to catch a bus to the airport and in the airport I had to cross into France (bizarrely by walking down a dingy tunnel from one check-in area to another) to meet Pascale & Pepe in the French arrivals hall. From there we drove to their home town of Gérardmer, which is a small town up in the Vosges mountains. It is quite a tourism centre by local standards, and there are lots of bars, restaurants and boutiquey shops, as well as a lake and some top quality mountain fresh air.

Pascale & Pepe have a gorgeous flat over a shop right in the centre of town! They've only been in it for three weeks, but already they've made their mark on the interior in terms of decor. After admiring the flat - it's a lovely old place with lots of wood everywhere and alcoves and things that you just don't find in modern apartments - we walked to a restaurant serving local cuisine. This consists basically of three thousand dishes on the theme of cheese, with the classic fondue, raclette and tartiflette but also some more exciting things like reblochonnade: take a reblochon cheese, heat it under glowing embers, and splat it back onto your plate over some new potatoes and a bit of salad to make you feel less lardy.

By golly we stuffed our faces - hurrah! The local wines weren't lacking either. And even the service had a local flair: it was as slow as the people of this mountain region, famed for its relaxed attitude to, well, everything. Then, just as we began our post-prandial perambulation through town and down to the lakeside, a huge thunderstorm blew up. We got soaked to the skin in the time it took to jog back (our distended stomachs allowed no great speed) to the flat.

We warmed ourselves over glasses of port (bizarrely, the French like to keep their port in the fridge; perhaps it's a climate thing) and lots of catching-up conversation. After all, I hadn't seen P&P since their wedding last summer in Madrid. And the best thing was, I managed to convince them they wanted to spend their first anniversary in Brussels, conveniently then being able to give me a lift there in their car! Which they duly did the next day...

Why is it that I always fall so far behind on my blogs? It's as if there some Prime Mover is deliberately staying my hand, so that when I finally come to write down my experiences I have forgotten half of them. The Prime Mover may therefore be a gestalt of all my readers, who tire quickly of hearing about my daily ablutions & other minutiae of my existence on the road and want me to cut to the chase.

Well, that's as may be. But it's not going to stop me telling you about the little things too! For instance, I just remembered the other day that when I was driving along between vineyards with Anne near Fréjus, an annoying white van driver was all over my arse on the twisty bendy roads that led up into the hills behind the Cote d'Azur. Anne, being Latin, was compelled to flip the van driver the finger at one point. This drove him insane: when he finally overtook me, he suddenly slammed on the anchors and forced me to do an emergency stop. Then HE flipped US the finger and drove off. What a twat! And I thought that sort of thing only happened in Basildon.

Anyway, back to the big ticket stuff. (And I won't bore you with too many details - promise). I drove back down to Fréjus - with much less traffic than the way there, which was nice - and even stopped a few times in Provence just to soak up the atmosphere: once in the middle of nowhere, to catch a few rays and listen to the cicadas rustling in the forest; and once in the charming tiny mediaeval town of Monmeyan, where I had a coffee in a bar which looked like a sort of locals only place but turned out to have no locals whatsoever (the only guests being me, a Belgian and a Swiss).

The town was fab: all crooked winding streets between sandstone buildings, with gene-pool-diversity-challenged locals sitting on steps (the old women) or bouncing balls off walls (the kids) or hanging about on corners (the young adults). From the top of the hill (to be honest it felt more like an anthill, or a termite palace, but in a nice way) there was a huge view across the plains in all directions, to wooded hillsides and distant mountains. And the coffee was okay too.

Back at Fréjus I met up with Anne & Nicolas, and a friend of Nicolas' from his home town. She was visiting for a few days. The four of us had dinner together on the terrace outside the internet café (Anne cooked pasta) and then we drank wine and pastis, both at the café and back at the house. It was a lovely starlit night, and we saw loads of shooting stars and laughed about nothing in particular. Very relaxing.

The next day I brought my car back to the airport and flew to Munich. There I made my way to Michaela's house, let myself in with the key she had given me in the UK (and which I have forgotten to give her back!) and just had time to mow her lawn - I really am a nice guest - before I went out to meet up with ex colleagues from E.ON at the Augustiner Biergarten. We sank many litres of beer (well I did; they were mostly working the next day and behaved themselves) outside, but as the evening wore on the clouds got more and more ominous.

Finally, there was a cloudburst and everyone rushed indoors. It was a severe storm, with gale force winds, flash floods, train cancellations and all sorts! Luckily, by the time I was finished drinking the weather had calmed down again, and I could fall asleep on the S-Bahn & miss my stop & get a taxi without feeling a single drop of rain on my head. The next day I felt like I'd had a rain of hammers on my head though. And me who normally doesn't get hangovers! Oh well, I suppose nine pints of strong lager in five hours is quite a lot, even for me.

Over the weekend I didn't do too much. It was actually nice to have a bit of doing nothing time for a change. Michaela & Tim's house feels like home for me, so I could lounge about reading or updating my blog or just listening to music with great ease. The weather was on and off, so I was catching rays some of the time and chilling indoors the rest of the time. Fab.

Even popping to the shops was relaxing too. It was a nostalgia trip to go and buy the products I used to buy when I was living in Munich two years ago: Weihenstephan Fruit Buttermilk drinks; bread from the Hofpfisterei organic bakers; cheap toiletries from Schlecker (and we're talking a third of the price of the same brand products in the UK).