For those new to Melinda’s and my travels to France, let me just say that the city of Nantes is our second home. We lived here for 13 months in 2010/11 and have traveled back many times since. Some of our closest friends live here. So today, arriving in Nantes is a homecoming of significant sorts for us.
I’m tired as I write this after a short night of sleep and a long day of travel so am hoping the above photo will serve as the main happy announcement of our safe arrival in Nantes. We drove 90 minutes to the Montpellier airport this morning, arriving less than an hour before our scheduled take-off. Then it was a 75 minute flight to Paris, a 50 minute flight to Nantes, and a 25 minute taxi ride to our old neighborhood, the place where we met Christine & Bérnard in 2010 and whose home we now are at.
I walked over to the Hippodrome, one of my happiest places on earth, and snapped this selfie.
Denouement is a fine word to describe the day after a French wedding, I’m thinking. More literally, it’s the final part of a story, the point when all the plot points come together and we can close the book.
That said, I’m not really sure there is such a thing as a “day after” a French wedding, at least not the one in which Melinda & I have been enjoying since Friday. If yesterday’s reception didn’t ever end (word this morning is that Frédérique, Romain’s mom, was still dancing at 6am), and today’s brunch and pool party began at 11am, maybe there is no denouement.
Besides, a wedding is the BEGINNING of a story, not the END.
Melinda & I managed to keep dancing until 3am, at which point we (read: Melinda) drove the 15 minutes to the incredible spot at which we’re staying (well done, Melinda). We slept in until almost 10, before heading back to the venue for today’s brunch, the same spot used for Friday’s white party and yesterday’s reception.
My brunch plate.We enjoyed a catered brunch, cooled our feet in the pool, and made a final connection with a number of French friends that have become as important to us as family.
After that, we drove to Avignon, about an hour away, where Melinda spent a semester in college in 1984. We hunted for the home at which she stayed with uncertain success before entering the walled city and enjoying a festival taking place. These two photos of us come from when we stopped to cool off with a glass and a small meal.
Rosé & Ricard, aka Melinda & Andy.
Hmmm… considering we head to Nantes tomorrow to reconnect with Christine and Bérnard, denouement is the wrong word for what we’re feeling, for sure.
Okay, so there is NO WAY to fully summarize this wedding. From its 90 minute ceremony in an ancient French church in a tiny town to the reception that started at about 6pm and continued for at least 12 hours (Melinda & I managed 9 of those – not bad considering jet lag and all), what I have for you are some photos:
Exiting the church to the cheers of the crowd!Their car for the 30 minute drive to the reception. Melinda & I were part of the procession that followed them along tiny, winding roads, honking horns, and waving at smiling passersby.With our dear friends, Frédérique & Laurent, parents of the groom, Romain.Having fun with the photo booth photos!The happy couple saying hello to Chloe, Alex & Remy.The father of the bride (left), and the father of the groom (center) wanted a special toast with me with the most incredible wine I’ve ever had, a local Châteauneuf-du-Pape.This picture was taken between dinner courses at approximately 11pm, about 90 minutes before the dancing began.Yeah, after a couple of hours of dancing, some jet lag, and a couple of glasses of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, this is what I look like.
So one of the big reasons for this year’s trip to France is to celebrate the marriage of Romain and Cléménce. Romain, you longtime blog readers will recall, is a member of the Boudeau Family, the family responsible for us choosing to live in Nantes back in 2010. We became fast friends with them during our year there, something that is a vast understatement.
Today was the first part of the wedding celebration, what is called a “white party.” In short, this means that people wear white clothing, I guess. I’m not sure if all parties of this sort take place in southern France but if they do, I highly encourage you to attend one. The venue was, perhaps, the most spectacular spot for a party I’ve ever seen (and I was born in Omaha, mind you). I don’t think any words I could use would do it justice. Let me just say that there were views, and some trees, and a big sky, and some buildings. It was about 90 degrees and there was a band and an open bar, and a pizza truck.
Oh, there were some really nice people there, too, most of them French (all of them, I think), and many of them our friends. People seemed genuinely pleased to see us and by us I mean Melinda AND me. Go figure.
We were pretty tired, given we had flown 9 hours from Seattle to Paris, then another hour+ from Paris to Montpellier. In Montpellier we rented a car and drove 90 minutes into the center of French bliss (see attached map and the black arrow, that’s us).
About where we’re staying this weekend, I encourage you to visit this website. That’s where we are; in fact, it’s where I am as I write this.
Now about the marriage, the wedding ceremony is taking place tomorrow at 3:30pm, followed by a reception that is supposed to last into the wee hours of the morning. And by “wee hours,” I think that means the party will extend into next year.
More on that in my next post. And about posts, here’s what Melinda & I were doing on this day in 2012.
That’s right, Melinda & I are back in France. After the sabbatical in 2010/11, we vowed to come back every year and, mostly, pulled that off until 2018, the year I left PSCS and we moved for a year to California. Soon after, well, there was this little thing called the pandemic. And while we did make it to France last year courtesy of Melinda’s mom as part of a Shaw holiday, I didn’t update the blog (which I’m kicking myself for not doing).
So we’re back and I’m back!
We left Seattle today on an Air France flight and with this nifty new neck pillow (seen in this photo). It attaches to the airplane seat and then connects under your chin, thus allowing you some comfort if you want to relax your head forward or to either side. It worked fairly well for me, but especially well for Melinda.
Speaking of Melinda, she was trying a new concept for the few days before we left, one in which she goes to bed an hour earlier each night and gets up an hour earlier each morning. Today she got up at something like 2am.
I think what worked for her was being sleep-deprived. She more or less passed out on the flight…
In other news, certainly significant news, it’s Carib’s 90th birthday today. 90 is a big number when it comes to age (it’s less significant when you think of dollars, that is unless you have those new-fangled dollars, what Jed Clampett referred to as mill-EE-on dollars).
My brother, Steve, who came up from California with his wife, Deb, to celebrate the occasion shared this photo with me.
Happy birthday, Carib! As a flashback, here is how we celebrated your birthday 13 years ago.
Since we had taken two trips to France in 2014, one during the summer and one in December to celebrate Ella’s 18th birthday, we didn’t make a trip in 2015. In London, 2016.So Melinda’s and my next return to see our friends in Nantes was in 2016. This time, to do something different, we flew in and out of London, staying for a few days both times. It was my first ever time in England and I thought it was fabulous. Even though we weren’t in France, I tagged the days we were in London with the “France 2016” moniker so they will appear when you click the link below.
While in Nantes, we rented a house in the neighborhood in which we lived during the sabbatical year, just a couple of blocks from the Bertail’s. Part of what I loved about this decision is that it put us on the same tram line (Ligne 2) that I fell in love with when we were there initially in 2010-11. It also put me in close proximity of the Nantes racetrack (the hippodrome) which is where I began running in 2011. Each morning, I’d get up and go for a jog from our house over to and around the track, plus anywhere else that suited my fancy.
Also, this was another one of those trips that consisted of just Melinda and me. While we missed having the girls with us, there was something liberating about traveling “sans enfants.”
To easily see the posts from 2016, click this link.
Here’s another one of those posts designed to take the dedicated reader (I think I mean myself) back in time to revisit my family’s various trips to France. This time, the blog time machine is taking us to December 2014/January 2015 when we returned to celebrate Ella’s 18th birthday.
It’s fun to visit a familiar place at a different time of year, especially one in which you’ve experienced all four seasons. Because of our work responsibilities with a school, returning in the summer was fairly straightforward. Going in December, even over winter break, required a little more coordinating.
We began this trip in Paris which is where we celebrated Ella’s 18th, much as we had done in 2011 for Chloe’s 18th birthday. What an experience – to be able to celebrate both girls’ 18th birthdays in Paris!
We also had both the Boudeaus and Bertails visit us in Paris before we all gathered back in Nantes. This time around, Melinda & I rented a wildly cool apartment inside the Passage Pommeraye in the center of Nantes. Having access to this place allowed us to show off some hidden Nantes treasures to our friends.
To see the posts from this trip, please click here.
Last spring, I started adding posts that included links to Melinda’s and my return trips to France, something we vowed to do each year after our brilliant sabbatical year of 2010-11. I got away from that and am committed to getting back to it. So, yes, in the summer of 2014, we again returned to France with Ella and, um, a girl named Chloe*.
Boudeau Pool in Nantes, 2014But not our Chloe.
Ella’s best chum in high school happened to be named Chloe* so back in 2014 I joked that Chloe*, Ella, Melinda, and I were returning to France. But I added an asterisk next to Chloe’s* name to indicate that this Chloe* needed a footnote.
Pretty soon, I just called her asterisk.
The trip includes an extended trip to Normandy and the WWII beaches for anyone interested in this kind of history. To see all the posts from this summer trip to France in 2014, use this link.
So as I mentioned in previous posts, toward the end of our sabbatical year, back in the early summer of 2011, Melinda and I began dreaming of the idea of returning to France, and specifically to Nantes, for the better part of a month each summer. We worked out the details at PSCS to make this happen and in 2012 we returned with Chloe and Ella, as summarized in my previous post.
In 2013, Melinda and I returned to Nantes without the girls. At age 20 and 16, they kinda liked the idea of having time by themselves in our Seattle house.
How odd…
While not having the girls with us provided a lot more flexibility, I’d hate to suggest that we didn’t miss them. To be honest, some nine years later, I don’t really remember missing them. I do remember posting on the blog little tests for them, cryptic photos of places in Nantes that I invited them to identify. So clearly, I was thinking about them…
The point that really felt different without the girls is when Melinda and I spent extended time in Paris, just the two of us. That was, indeed, a glorious time.
To gain easy access to all the posts from our 2013 trip, use the France 2013 tag or, even easier, click here.
In my last post, I talked about how Melinda, Chloe, Ella, and I spent 13 months in France beginning in July of 2010. These 13 months got dubbed the “French Sabbatical” as Melinda and I were granted paid time off from our jobs during that time.
From our “bonus” night in Iceland after missing our connecting flight to Paris. Not surprisingly, while we there we grew quite fond of living in France, especially living in the city of Nantes. I’m not quite sure how to describe this, but living as we did in Nantes, as well as traveling to various destinations in France and once to Italy, felt completely ours. It was different than anything done by other members of our family and carved out a super-special context in our lives that the four of us will forever share.
Melinda and I would go on regular walks while the girls were at school and it was on one of these walks that we talked about taking a month off from work each summer to return to Nantes.We spent our first week in Pornichet where it was unfortunately quite rainy and cool. We starting seeing this as a focal point for the next phase in our lives, one that would ultimately settle with us living in Nantes and Seattle for maybe 6 months each year. At first, though, because of work and other responsibilities, this would need to be a single month in the summer when school wasn’t in session.
So in 2012 we put the plan into action. Our good friends in Nantes, the Boudeaus (who were responsible for us choosing Nantes in the first place) and the Bertails (who lived around the corner from us during the sabbatical and had become among our closest friends), were only too pleased to help us. And it was Christine Bertail who found a place for the four of us to live for the month of July, 2012. A colleague of hers and his family would be in Spain that month so it worked out for us to rent his house.
This is more like it. Summer in Nantes! As I had done during the sabbatical year, I decided I would post to my blog on a daily basis while we were there. Truth be told, I had kept doing this once we had returned to Seattle in August, 2011. All of these posts can be found here by using the “Monthly Archive” pull-down menu below and selecting one of the months. Still, the idea of returning to France in 2012 and not posting daily seemed sacrilegious in some way.
So here was are in 2022, nearly ten years after our “Return to Nantes.” It’s hard to believe that much time has flown by. Because of the pandemic and other reasons, it’s been five years since we’ve been back but we do have plans to go this summer! And, yes, we did return in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. I’ll be focusing on each of those trips in future “From the Archives” posts.
For now, I invite you to explore our trip in 2012 using the “France 2012” tag.
Andy Smallman 