At the risk of offending someone else, I hereby am declaring Laurent Boudeau as the #1 Blog Reader! I bestow this esteemed status on Laurent because he has gone to significant effort to see to it that I can post to the blog by providing a device that lets me temporarily connect to the Internet each night. He also has been a faithful daily reader and despite not being a native English speaker even caught an English writing typo I made one time. Anyone wanting to challenge Laurent for this position needs to figure out how to top these things.

That being said, I am excited to announce that we have arrived in Les Carroz and are comfortably sitting inside the Boudeau cabin with the entire Boudeau family. Throughout the day, Frédérique and I kept in touch with each other via text messages. She sent her first at 4:45am, the time they departed by car from Nantes. I was sound asleep then, like a reasonable person. I sent her my first message soon after 10am, just after our train left Paris. Then we compared arrival times in Les Carroz and ended up here at almost exactly the same time.

Today’s photo was taken late this afternoon as Manon and Chloe were trying on ski boots at the ski equipment rental shop. As good-looking as these two girls are, a better picture would have been of the 2 or 3 year-old French girl who engaged me in conversation inside the shop while her uncle tried on his boots. I learned that she has a family of five in Les Carroz, including her grandfather. She also told me that she arrived today by plane. I stumbled through telling her that I was from the United States, a fact that clearly made no sense to her, even after her uncle explained that the US is lots of water away.