When showing us his barn, Uncle D accidentally revealed to me that he had a classic motorcycle from 1950 or so that the french farmers used to get around back in the day. It was covered literally in a cm of dust and hadn't been touched in four years. I made it a priority to get that thing running. Using a trick my older brother taught me, I got the carburetor to stop leaking and added oil to the dry oil reservoir. It started on the fifth kick. It was tricky because this french machine had the brake pedal on the left and the shifter on the right- just the opposite of normal bikes. It was un registered/inspected/insured so I stuck to small farm roads but found myself riding this piece of history through French farmland covered in yellow sunflowers. All of this land was situated in a beautiful valley with a castle on the ridge above. It was truly one of those golden moments in life where you ask yourself "how the hell did I get here?"
We spent a couple nights listening to music from Uncle D's album collection. We had movie nights where we set up the projector and watched documentaries. We had family dinners every night. All of these things were time well spent.
Every morning a lady from the local bakery drives around honking her horn. All of the neighbors come down out of their houses and wait for her to come around and sell them croissants. It's a pretty cool thing which serves as neighborhood gossip our. Arwyn says its like he ice cream truck for adults.
Our last day we packed up camping gear and headed of to the wine region where Uncle D's mother in law lives. In true Kaiser fashion we bought great amounts of sausage for the campfire. Some changes worth noting are that beer was replaced with wine and hot dog buns with baggettes. We stopped at the vineyard next door where the proprietor gave us wine samples of his stuff and casually said things like "this wine uses the grape vines planted out back by my grandfather." He is the fifth generation to run his family vineyard and his daughter is taking it over now. We made a fire, drank the next door neighbor's wine, ate sausages and talked all night until we fell asleep next to the fire at 4:30 am.
This morning we woke up at 0700, packed camp and set out for Carcassone, one of Europe's best preserved medieval walled cities. 
It was like a ferrytale. We walked around, had coffee in the square and booked it for our train. Outside the train station there was a canal with canal barge house boats going through the locks. I want one.
After a week of adventure and quality family time, Uncle D said goodbye to us on the train platform. We are going to St. Jean Pied de Port to start our camino. We start walking our 500 mile trek tomorrow.
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