Six months ago today our plane touched down in Nantes, meaning we have reached the halfway point of the sabbatical. I won’t bore you with the details related to us staying on three more weeks in July this year. I’ll just say that it involves airlines and round trip tickets and PSCS and our lives moving forward and…

Six months ago tomorrow, Romain gave us our first tour of Nantes, referenced on this early blog entry. Ah, we were such Nantes newbies then. To mark the occasion of six months in France, the four of us returned to the scene of our lunch with Romain, captured both in text and in print at that linked blog entry. In July we ate outside, wore shorts and flip flops, were feeling jetlagged, and otherwise required the presence of our guide and translator. Today we ate inside near a roaring fire, wore coats and scarves, were wide-awake, and managed just fine, thank you, with the menu and ordering. Following Ella’s July cue, Melinda and I joined her today in ordering a dish that comes with meat one cooks at the table. Ella and Melinda had both steak and chicken. Me, having become a bit of a fan of it, ordered duck. On the near stone in this photo is my duck and on the far stone is Ella cooking a piece of chicken.

As we rode the tram to town today we commented on how familiar everything is to us and how different that feels compared to our first day in town. See, you CAN teach a couple of old dogs, and a couple of younger ones, for that matter, new tricks.