For this year’s skiing trip, we again drove across to Austria, meeting up with Aunt Sabine, Uncle Edgar and Cousin Lea in Brandertal. The trip was more like a holiday than last year’s, chiefly because the boys took far more readily to their skis. They joined the same class as Lea, and the three of them picked up where they had left off, and were soon turning and braking with ease. After three days of lessons on the magic carpet, they were promoted to the next class where they learnt to ride the t-bar and poma lift. All this gave Mama and Papa time to do some skiing themselves.

On Friday, the classes took part in a ski race. The course was about nine professional racing gates covering perhaps 200 metres, with a laser timer and a public announcement system for running commentary. Given that Loxon, Wiki and Lea had only joined the class on Wednesday, they did impressively well to make it down. They weren’t in the top three places (who were all at least 50% taller than our three), but they weren’t last either. And everyone got a medal, of course.

It was March as we left the snow behind hoping it would be the last we’d see for a while. On the way home, we stopped for coffee in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, a quiet village which was perfectly ordinary save for being stuffed full of investment banks with names no-one has ever heard of. And we also dropped in on some friends in Zurich for dinner. As a result we were caught in a ferocious snowstorm that coated the autobahn in ice — we were forced to creep along at 40km/h all the way home from there. But at least we avoided being in any of the, according to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, over 300 resulting accidents.

Our next trip was to Tuscany for Easter. An Italian couple, whose son goes to the same childcare as Wiki and Loxon, invited us to stay in their family house. This turned out to be a huge mansion in the hilly countryside to the south of Volterra. It had dozens of rooms, including whole wings that had fallen into ruin and could no longer be used, and ornate decor, such as the frescoes in our bedroom and hall.

Fearing holiday traffic, we left home at 4am on Easter Thursday. This worked well — the St. Gotthard tunnel was empty when we reached it at 6am. And we skirted to the west of Milan, for a smooth run down as far as Chiavari. But after stopping for lunch beside the beach, we were soon stopped dead in a tunnel, waiting 15 minutes before continuing at a crawl. A couple of further stops, and more inching through tunnels, lasted about an hour before we emerged from yet another tunnel onto five centimetres of snow. Snow in Tuscany in April had been enough of a surprise to bring the traffic to a standstill, but by now we’d started to think of it as normal.

At the house, we were some of the first guests to arrive, but over the next two days a steady stream of people appeared. In total there were around 50 guests for Sunday lunch, including perhaps twelve children. Enthusiastic conversation erupted everywhere amongst the mostly native Italian speakers, although French, English and German were juggled by everyone according to the listeners — a challenge for the merely bilingual among us. The heating was primarily provided by wood fires, but there was an enormous electric oven in the kitchen, which produced a constant flow of delicious Tuscan food, prepared by various members of the extended family. Despite the chilly weather, it was a fantastic few days.

We also took a day trip to the beach near Follonica where we gazed across to the island of Elba (famed as Napoleon’s place of exile in the palindrome Able was I ere I saw Elba) and tried out Mark’s Kubb game (involving the tossing of wooden pieces across a rectangular court) which had been waiting since his birthday in September for a suitable occasion.

We broke up the trip back from Tuscany by staying in our favourite bed and breakfast on Lake Como, and then braved the St. Gotthard tunnel traffic on Easter Tuesday morning. The wait to enter the tunnel was only 45 minutes, but what with the earlier traffic near Genoa, it took 11 hours of driving to get home. In total, we had spent 23 hours on the road over the six days, but the Tuscan familial experience was worth it.

On a rainy day in early May, Mark took the boys on an excursion into France to see the Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg, a wondrous castle built from the 12th century onwards. It was painstakingly restored in the early 20th century, complete with intricate twisting gates and drawbridges that would have been virtually impregnable to medieval armies. More importantly, from the boys’ point of view, it had a large collection of cannons. Mark wasn’t sure if he should answer their increasingly precise and technical questions about how exactly these functioned, and was thus relieved when his knowledge (salt) petered out on the question of where one could obtain gunpowder.

Later in May, Loxon’s godfather Andrew came for a week’s visit from Australia, finally bringing some summer weather with him. We took him to a dinosaur park in Réclère, on the border with France to the south-west of Basel, which had dozens of life-sized dinosaur statues placed along a lovely forest walk.

And with that, the Basilisk’s Gaze is finally up-to-date. We’ve been in Basel for 21 months and have decided that we will return to Australia around the end of this year. We have plenty of adventures planned between now and then though, so stay tuned.