Successfully Landed in France

Messages from friends reminded me that I hadn’t updated the story of Earl’s travels.

He landed in Paris Sunday morning, and the same flight for the next day through Iceland was cancelled because of snow storms. He just made it.  

The required photo with the Eiffel Tower -- but he does look happy. 

He caught a train into Paris and settled into his lonely (I imagine) hotel room near the Pantheon, without me.

The Pantheon

That night he joined our friends Linda (Frenchless in France) and Maurice for drinks and we Facetimed so I could see the beautiful views and the fabulous remodel. I can't wait to visit Paris again so I can see the apartment myself.
Earl wandered the city the next day, complaining about the cold until I explained that it was 12 degrees here (-11 celcius).
He went to the Rodin museum, one of the museums we haven't explored yet in Paris, but it was closed "exceptionellement" for a private event.
So, instead, he headed to one of our favorite places, Saint Chappelle, a gothic church that amazes us with the colors of the windows every time.

Soaring windows. When the sun is bright the bystanders are bathed in blue. 

Some details

I don't know if he ventured into any restaurants and had a meal alone, which I have done in Paris, reading a book on my phone or just people watching.
But he did stop by his favorite creperie on Rue Mouffetarde to buy a panini before he headed back to his hotel room.

Eating it on the street like a real American

This morning, he caught the train to Carcassonne where friends will pick him up and he'll return to our new/old house.

I'm sure he stopped at Starbucks because he was thinking of me. 

It will be nice to picture him under the covers in our bed tonight, even though he'll be freezing without me there to warm him with my hot flashes.

First Post From France -2017

I never know whether I should post about the things that happened the past few days or jump to today. But if I start posting about the past, then I never seem to catch up.
Traveling here was exhausting. I took melatonin on the plane but never managed to fall asleep, instead just dozing a few times. Maybe I'm getting too old to fly overseas and skip a night's sleep. Someday, I hope to relay the entire story -- two planes, two trains and one automobile, which the rental people seemed very reluctant to give us. "It is a new car," the woman said.
"Look, we aren't planning to wreck it," I wanted to say
But things improved rapidly after we got to the BnB, I took a shower and we went out to dinner.
The town where we are staying is fairly small. It has a boulangerie, a small market that sells everything, a pharmacie and a couple of wine makers. But it doesn't have a legitimate restaurant. Instead, it has a restaurant rapide, pizza place.
The woman in the market said it had good food, so we walked there.
We started with a glass of moscat, which is made locally.

It is very sweet and tasted delicious.
The menu offered goat cheese pizza with black olives, so that is what I ordered., along with a $14 bottle of red wine and a salad. About halfway through that bottle of wine, things started to feel much better.

By 9:30, we returned to the room and I fell asleep by 10.
I started my morning with a run. It's strange to run in a place that is unfamiliar. I needed to make sure I didn't get lost. So I ran through town and turned right. That took me out into the country a bit. I heard a rooster crowing and in the distance a ridge of mountain jutted up.

That distant spire is the church in the town where we stayed. 

 In Ohio, it's very flat so I'm not used to real mountains, only fake ones in the clouds that look like mountains.
I only went about three miles so we could go off on our daily jaunt. Our goal is to visit cities with markets in hopes of choosing an area we want to move. Not many cities have markets on Friday mornings, but Séte, a city on the Mediterranean said it had a small market, so we headed there. It's just half an hour by car, and although I nearly got us killed when we first started driving there, I got the hang of it and didn't put a scratch on the new rental car.
The market at Place de Stalingrad took up nearly two blocks.

It had every kind of fruit or vegetable we would want to buy. The cherries seemed quite popular. And it had lots of prepared foods too, like this paella. The man had several giant pans of food.

We enjoyed the sunshine and walked toward the Mediterranean. The town is quite industrial with a lot of fishing boats and other industries along the waterfront. The canals seemed to be the places that people enjoyed the water.
Some of the architecture reminded me of Nice,

while others reminded me of typical French style.

The restaurant where we ate lunch had mediocre food, which is always a surprise in France, but we have made up for it in other ways, with lots of other foods.

Thanks for visiting. I'll try to get a post written tomorrow before we run over to Aix en Provence to visit our friend Delana.

Dreaming of France -- Language Practice

This is it -- crunch time. We leave for France in just a few days.
And I'm feeling the pressure to dredge up all that French language I once knew so well. I've been doing Duolingo, but I also have been listening to a podcast called Coffee Break French.

If you haven't discovered podcasts yet, I urge you to give them a try. I listen to some of my favorite radio programs on my podcasts, which I simply download to my phone so that they are there to listen to whenever I have the time.

Coffee Break French has four seasons and I started with the first one. I know the language too well for season one, but it's nice to be reminded about specific sounds.
The lessons last about 15-20 minutes, the time of a good coffee break. The first season goes through the basics like numbers, days, directions, ordering in a restaurant. It's helpful just to listen to the French.
It's also made a bit more fun by the narrator, A Scottish professor of French. I love listening to his accent in English.
We'll see when we arrive if listening to Coffee Break French helped me prepare for my latest trip to France.
It's possible (maybe probable) that the next time I blog, it will be from France.
And, one of the best pieces of news my husband has received is that we scored an exit row for our flight to Paris. That means he'll have a little extra knee room.
Here's how much room he had on the last flight.

So this week, I'm not just dreaming of France, I'm going. Lucky me. 

À toute à l’heure!
Thanks for playing along with Dreaming of France today. I hope you'll visit each others blogs and leave comments too.