Hotel Room Musings

We've spent a lovely few days in Nice.

The port

I walked and ran more than 23,000 steps yesterday exploring the city,

I love the colors here

It reminds me a lot of St. Pete, Florida, now that it's so cosmopolitan. 

 and the weather was warm, but not as warm as it was inland, apparently.

The children relished playing in the mirror fountain in Nice

We used our credit card points to pay for this hotel room and it got me thinking.
Hotel rooms are different all over the world and even within yards of each other, but their little idiosyncrasies sometimes baffle me.
Since we're in Nice celebrating our 30th anniversary, I couldn't help but think that most marriages would not survive a bathroom door like this one.

Hard to get a good shot of it. 

It's not a shower door. That's the door to the bathroom from the hotel room. No latch, no lock, no seal.

You can see the black area where the door doesn't touch the frame. 

Yep, I'm glad we only had a celebration here and not a complete 30-year marriage with a door like this.
We're off on more adventures today. Thanks for reading.  

Dreaming of France -- Falling in Love With France

Thank you for joining this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

I've written some guest posts for the FranceBookTour of my novel Paris Runaway. I thought I'd share one of the posts that I wrote for bookwormerz which ran on Sunday. It tells the story of how, after a
rocky start, I fell in love with France.

Falling in Love With France

I visited France for the first time at age 20. My college boyfriend and I went on one of those 21-day tours where we visited 14 countries, or maybe it was a 14-day trip with 21 countries. Either way, one of those countries was France.

I’d gotten sick in Rome, with Montezuma’s Revenge, and it lasted into Paris. I remember visiting Notre Dame and desperately searching for a bathroom nearby. What I found was a Turkish toilet.

Those are hard to find in France these days, but a Turkish toilet was a stall with a place for your feet to go on either side of a drain in the floor. I still can’t work out the mechanics for a woman that doesn’t result in damp underwear. That experience could have ruined my love for France, but it didn’t.

A year after college graduation I was working at a newspaper and dating a photographer, whose sister was married to a Frenchman. The sister, who was pregnant, her husband, and their two little girls had tickets to go to France for the summer, when the sister was ordered to bedr est. Someone needed to step up and travel with the girls. I volunteered.  

Here are the two girls and their grandfather, along with a couple of cousins, on the balcony in Corsica. 

I told my boss I was going and that I didn’t care whether I’d have a job when I returned. Picture me as a bossy, impetuous 22 –year-old. (Luckily, they found a summer intern and my job waited for me.)

So with two little girls and a Frenchman I didn’t know, we flew to Paris. The first few days could have ruined my love affair with France as I took the girls on a bus to their great-grandmother’s apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris. But the bus went the opposite direction that we needed and we ended up on an impromptu, hot, diesel-fueled tour of Paris, getting off at several stops in hopes of finding our way.  Another day I got separated from the girls when they stepped through a Metro stall with sliding doors, and the doors closed before I could follow them. A flight attendant behind me had an extra ticket and used it to reunite me with the girls.

But every negative experience melted away as I traveled with the girls and their grandparents over the next three months. We flew to Corsica and spent our days splashing in the Mediterranean and enjoying each meal as a symphony of tastes and textures. 

Me, on the beach. There are probably naked, or at least topless, people right behind me. 

Our evenings filled with concerts and tennis matches and nights on the veranda watching the star-spangled sky for the slowly moving space station.

When we returned to mainland France, we stayed one night in Aix en Provence. I can still remember the thrill of coming home that rippled through me when I stepped onto Cours Mirabeau, the wide boulevard lined with plane trees.

For a month, we stayed in the family’s country home near Bourges. The house came into the family during Napoleon’s reign, and it had served as a base for the Germans when they invaded during World War II, then the Americans when they drove back the Germans. The numerous sets of French doors opened onto a yard, which led to fields of sheep and flocks of chickens. We walked to the village for bread each day, stopping to feed a pony.

Here I am, prepared for dinner, as I sit on the terrace writing. I wish you could see my
adorable ankle socks and aqua shoes that matched my top, but this print is not the best quality.

Finally, we returned to Paris and the grandparents’ apartment in the suburbs. The grandmother urged me to explore the city while she watched the girls, and, oh, what adventures I had as I wandered alone.

I’ve included memories from this trip in all of my novels set in France – The Summer of France, I See London I See France, and Paris Runaway.

In each of my French novels, I try to recapture the magical experiences of that first immersion into France – the trip that taught me the importance of savoring each bite of luscious nectarine, rather than worrying about the juice that ran down my arm.

Thanks so much for playing along with Dreaming of France today. Please leave your name and blog address in Mr. Linky below, and leave a comment letting me know what  you think about my love affair with France, or your own love affair. And consider visiting the blogs of others who play along so we can all share the love. 

I'm also linking to Paris in July. Hope you'll play along with both Dreaming of France and Paris in July. We can't have too much France love, right?

Dreaming of France -- Finally Going Back

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
After nearly five years away from France, I'm finally returning. It's only for 10 days, but I'm ecstatic at the idea of once again immersing myself in French culture. Every picture someone posts from France, I think, I can see that myself very soon.

We'll be traveling to the South of France, so for only three days we'll be in Paris. We've seen most of the main tourist attractions. What should we see or do in Paris?

Earl says he wants to visit a jazz club. 

I think I'd like to do a tour or class with a chocolatier. 

Now I'm counting on you all to direct us to the best off-the-path places to visit or take a tour or to sit and drink in the wonderful ambiance that is Paris.

I look forward to your suggestions. 

Thanks for playing along with Dreaming of France. Please leave a comment and visit each other's blogs too. You never know when you'll find something new to fall in love with.

Dreaming of France -- Must-See Spots in France

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

I've read a lot of good books set in France this year. Memoirs and fiction and history, but I haven't read any books that recommend places that I must visit. Until now with 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go by Marcia DeSanctis. I'll be reviewing this book for France Book Tours on Thursday, with a giveaway too, so please check back to see what I thought about the book. 

Meanwhile, I'll tell you that the author has done the leg work for you and come up with some amazing things to see in France, starting with Paris. 

The book focuses on well-known public places as well as some off the beaten track destinations for people who know France intimately. 

And one of those places every woman should go is a French lingerie store. Imagine the pampering. I might just give it a try. 

I'm interested to see what  you are dreaming about today. Thanks for playing along and please stop by other bloggers' Dreaming of France posts.

Entertaining Out-of-Town Visitors

Our friends' son, Nicolas, 27, came to visit for two evenings and we needed to figure out how to entertain him. He came to Columbus in between New York City and Chicago, so obviously we were never going to live up to either of those.

The problem is that Columbus' motto is "It's a great place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit."

I had only one secret weapon to make the stay worthwhile -- a 21-year-old daughter. And I do think he enjoyed the stay because he and Grace went out on the town both nights.

During the day on Monday, we ate lunch at Dirty Franks -- it's a hot dog place. We figured that was pretty American. 

We visited an Indian Mound and explained that they dot the countryside around Ohio. Some of them are much more exciting, like Serpent Mound, but is more than an hour away.

I wanted to take Nicolas to a place that no one else would, so I drove to the Field of Corn. Only in Ohio. It's a field with statues of giant corn. I plan to post a panoramic photo on Saturday, so don't miss it.

Next we visited Chief Leatherlips, which is a statue built into the bank of the Scioto River. Chief Leatherlips didn't even do anything that exciting, but he is memorialized here and you can walk on his head. 

The highlight of the day for me, was the soiree we planned that evening. In addition to eating and drinking, my friend Pam busted open the piano and there was singing too. I served goat cheese pasta with shrimp and a green salad. When Nicolas saw the salad dressing, he offered to make a vinaigrette, but I said it was an American meal so he had to eat the bottled salad dressing. I promised that it had no GMOs and only real ingredients without chemical sounding names. 

I was most worried about the wine, but I had a chardonnay from Italy (bought at Trader Joe's for only $4.99 per bottle, don't tell!) and he proclaimed it good wine. 

For dessert, turtle cake with a layer of chocolate cake, a caramel and butter layer, then chocolate chips and another layer of chocolate cake. We had a New York Riesling with dessert.

When everyone left, Grace and Nicolas headed down the street to the local bar again. Apparently he was quite popular there with people buying him shots and guessing where he was from. No one guessed France, although someone guessed Belgium. "How could they guess Belgium and not France?" he raged. "Belgium is so small."

A lovely visit.