I’m pleased to present the best part of France we brought home with us yesterday, Ms. Manon Boudeau. And this is saying something, especially when you consider that Melinda, Chloe, and Ella all bought dresses in France for a wedding we’re attending on Saturday, and that I brought home a can of duck confit!

Yes, that’s right. Manon is better than French clothing and French food.

Our travel day yesterday was, by and large, uneventful, other than it took 23 hours to get from the front door of the house we stayed at in Nantes to the front door of our home in Seattle. That’s a marathon of travel. At one point, with about 2 hours left in our final flight, Melinda had a look of distress, so desperate was she for sleep. We teased about it today, commenting that everything would have been fine if she would have just been allowed to go home, get some sleep, and come back to finish the last two hours of the flight later.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the travel day was a young boy on the Nantes to Paris train whose behavior was, in a word, challenging. At one point, he grabbed my glasses right off of my face!