Milking all we can from holiday
Every time I go to France, I am shocked they don’t really do fresh milk-this is why they are so quirky! They do lots of dairy, having a wonderful obsession with cheese, yoghurt and butter but they hardly drink milk and on the very rare occasions they do, it’s the UHT rubbish. You cannot buy two litre bottles of milk of any sort. It’s no wonder that the coffee they drink is shockingly bad!
In nearby Denmark you can buy fresh milk (albeit still only in 1 litre packages) but (shock, horror) their skim milk masquerades as regular milk. In what is, apparently, the most unlikely of events in Europe- that anyone would want full cream milk- you have to ask, and risk the condescending look of the shop attendant, clearly baffled by “who would buy that”.
Back in the UK, I like that the one litre and half-litre bottles all have handles (I tend to focus on the important stuff).
We have been on a family vacation- not to study European milk consumption, but for fun. Eight of us jetted off just after Christmas for a month-long Scandinavian-European winter adventure with only a 7kg day bag each- no suitcases or technology.
Four out of five children nominated Denmark as their favourite place to visit (the fifth, Rohan, voted for France). We stayed in Copenhagen before we visited the dairy farm of an old friend in Jutland. The farm milks 1500 cows, 24 hours per day and averages about 11,000 litres of milk per cow annually.
They were one of the earliest adopters of robotic milkers in the world, nearly 25 years ago. Last year, they threw all the robots away and went back to milking in a plain old herringbone dairy.
The cows sleep on an individual waterbed, cleaned daily, and most of the workforce is Ukrainian. Diesel was just a tick over $3 per litre.
By the third day of our visit to France, the boys cried in unison: “Dad, please no more churches, museums or old buildings!” While I did not have any time to visit farms in France, I should confess I did visit as many local fromageries (fancy cheese shops) as I could find, all in the name of research of course!
The boys ate breakfast at boulangeries (fancy bakeries). They got sick of croissants, but cereal with UHT milk is not really a breakfast option. My trip highlight was Mont-Saint-Michel, an ancient tidal monastery. It was like something out of a fairy-tale. We also retraced ancient family steps as we visited the town of Bethune in France. Our ancestors went from Bethune to the Isle of Skye in Scotland before arriving in Australia.
Hamish’s trip highlight was eating a hamburger in Hamburg, where we also tried cooling our drinks by placing them in the snow. We got cold long before our drinks did! George, Rory and Rohan loved the white chocolate and marshmallow waffles in Belgium. The kids couldn’t buy anything big on our travels because we couldn’t carry it in our bags. To get around us, they bought a keyring at each destination (with their own pocket money) and we now have 120 memento key rings.
Waterstones also held us up on our travels. These giant Bunnings-like bookstores kept sucking us in the door. 10-year-old George managed to buy and read all seven books in the Harry Potter series in the month we were away.
My other trip highlight was in London’s West End for a production called ‘The Play that Goes Wrong’, a slapstick comedy. It certainly had Sally and the boys pig snorting with laughter.
We stayed another week on a friend’s dairy farm in Somerset. Proper English folk are delightful- great hosts and incredibly polite. They have no use for our sarcasm, and they do conversation better than Australians.
Before we knew it, we were home again.
Now, the critical question I can hear you ask is where did you find the best chocolate milk on your travels?
This I will answer as I whizz three parts Bethune Lane Dairy chocolate milk with two parts ice-cream at home in the kitchen. As I taste my concoction, the answer is obvious. There is no competition, this beats all comers.