'Tis better to have loved and lost...

After almost eleven months of living there, we said good-bye to our home in Paris in mid-July and became nomads exploring rural France for our last month.

It was difficult to leave our lives as Parisiens. Over the year we made some great friends, improved our French, and really got to know the city. I loved walking out and about and running into someone I knew and greeting them with a “Bonjour!”. It made a large city feel like a neighborhood.

I miss the interactions at the markets -- “Bonjour madame”, “Bonjour monsieur”, “Je voudrais...”, “Merci madame”, “Merci monsieur”, “Bonne journee”, “Bonne journee a vous”, “Au revoir”, “Au revoir”.

I miss the walks -- whether morning walks around Parc Monceau, evening explorations across vast distances of the city, or organized group walks to learn about Paris’ history and arrondisements.  I miss the talks on wine, food, and culture. I miss our friends.

I miss having the Louvre or Orsay practically to myself on cold winter mornings. I also miss arriving home at Charles de Gaulle or Gare du Nord as a Parisien. I really miss that. Paris grabbed a piece of our hearts and became a part of our lives and it was difficult to walk away from that.

But our time in Paris was meant to be a year and I’m sure it would have been even more difficult to leave after two years (or more). 

So I tell myself that it is "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" and know that we’ll be back.

Parc Monceau

Of all of the places in Paris, when we look back at our year there the one that will probably stand out the most over time is Parc Monceau.

Located about a five minute walk away from our apartment, it was so central in our lives. For the kids, it adjoined their school so this is where they went every day for recess. After school, we all went there, for most of the year in the freezing cold, where the parents would huddle and talk while the kids disappeared in groups and played.

There would be times when we wouldn’t see our kids for half an hour at a time as they played with their friends. But we somehow felt safe there and allowed the kids to have a taste of independence that they would never have back home.

The parents were a village, keeping an eye on each other’s kids, breaking up quarrels, and helping each other track kids down when it was getting too dark (or too cold or too rainy) and it was time to go home.

In the fall the boys played soccer, in the spring the girls did cart-wheels and saved (and hid) money to buy candy. In between they just roamed around and played.

We celebrated Clay’s birthday in the park with a group of his friends and celebrated the end of the school year with a great picnic.

And, like many local Parisians, I used it to exercise. A lap around the park is about 0.7 miles and I would usually do five laps on spring days after dropping the kids off at school.

I’m not sure what we would have done without Parc Monceau nearby. It was an oasis of outdoors that kept these suburbanites sane in the urban landscape of Paris.

Deciding to come home

Many people have been surprised that we only stayed one year in France. Why come home from such an idyllic existence in a magnificent city, with wonderful food, culture, and things to see and do. Why not be like the many expats we met who came for a year and stayed for three, five, twenty, or a lifetime.

Our original plan was to just come over for a year. Shortly after arriving, though, I quickly fell in love with Paris and the lifestyle and had a strong desire to stay longer. Erin wasn’t on board initially but after a couple of months, she was thinking the same thing. The kids, however, had no interest in that. They always, the whole year through, wanted to return after just a year.

Our time to decide came in late winter when we needed to notify the kids’ school in Paris whether we would re-enroll them for the next school year. This was a difficult decision and we had very mixed emotions. On one hand we had everything we loved about living in Paris and on the other hand were all of the things that made that life uncomfortable – the loud neighbors that would party above us until 5am, the cranky man next door that posted notes on our door, the tiny apartment, the things we missed from the States, the daily challenges of living in a foreign country and language. Erin was sick of the apartment and Paige really missed our cats. And we were all cold.

The winter of 2012-13 was long and cold in Europe. In mid-October we visited Disneyland Paris and were so cold we couldn’t really enjoy it. In December we made trips to the Christmas markets in Strasbourg and Munich and again were so cold we couldn’t enjoy them as much as we had hoped. At the end of March, we went to Prague for Easter and it was freezing cold with snow flurries.

Between October and April, the temperature hovered right around freezing the entire time – sometimes a little above, other times a little below – and we saw snow on numerous occasions. Living without a car and walking everywhere – to school, to shop, to explore – the cold had a real impact. It didn’t help that our apartment had ancient single pane windows with gaps to the outside that let the cold air easily flow right in.

So, ultimately, it became a pretty easy decision to return to the “warmth” and ease of our lives in the States. As much as we loved Paris, we really looked forward to returning home.

I’ve wondered if we would have chosen differently had the decision come in June or July, instead of March. I think probably not because I’m confident that if we would have stayed a second year our roots would have grown that much deeper and returning home would have been that much more difficult. That’s how people end up staying a lifetime in Paris and that is something that we really couldn’t do.

Brittany and Normandy

In June, Erin and a friend went to a week-long cooking class in Brittany. At the end of the week, I rented a car and the kids and I drove out to pick Erin up.

We drove on Friday night after school and spent the night outside of Rennes. On the way, we stopped in Chartres for dinner and quickly visited the ancient cathedral there. This was something that Erin and I had wanted to do earlier (a day trip for her birthday in January) but the weather was too cold and we canceled.

Perhaps the most spectacular element of the Chartres cathedral is its size relative to the rest of the city. Unlike, for example, Notre Dame, which is surrounded by the seven story buildings of Paris, Chartres really stands out. As you are approaching the city, from miles and miles away, all you can see is the cathedral. It made me think of the medieval pilgrims and how awed they must have been on their approach to Chartres.

After picking up Erin and meeting her instructors and fellow cooking students (as well as seeing the home in which they worked), we drove to Dinan to explore the city. We had lunch at the port by the river then hiked up cobblestone streets and walked along the fortified wall.

We then began driving to our hotel that night in St. Malo. However, along the way, we discovered that the hotel was named “Hotel Porte de St. Malo” and wasn’t actually in St. Malo but back in Dinan. We weren’t entirely disappointed since we really enjoyed Dinan. So we continued on to St. Malo for a visit, highlighted by a beach where the kids played among the rocks for a while.

We then turned around and went back to Dinan for a wonderful dinner and more exploration.

The next morning we drove straight to Mont Saint-Michel for a visit to one of the big attractions in France. There we climbed around, trying to find off-the-beaten-path streets and imagined being defenders against Viking invaders. We snapped a bunch of photos, absorbed the atmosphere, and had a terrible lunch (which, against all French norms, is about the only kind served there).

After Mont Saint-Michel, we drove back to Paris and, along the way, decided to stop in Bayeux to see the 800 year old tapestry chronicling William the Conqueror’s ascendancy to the British throne. Even though Erin and I had seen it previously, this was still the highlight of the weekend. The museum has done an excellent job with an audio guide that walks you through the entire story. It keeps you moving, highlights details otherwise missed, and makes the tapestry come alive. They even have a kids edition that kept both of ours engaged.

Dinan

St. Malo

Dodging the waves in St. Malo

Back to Dinan for the night

Mont Saint-Michel

Squeezing through a narrow passageway in Mont Saint-Michel

Amsterdam

Our second trip during the May holidays was to Amsterdam. We left the Gare du Nord train station in Paris and within a few hours were in the heart of the city.

We stayed in the Jordaan, a residential area in the western part of Amsterdam. Our apartment was a little different from others we’ve rented (before and since) in that it appeared to be the primary residence of the couple we rented it from. Their pictures were up, their refrigerator had their food, their kids’ toys were lying around, etc. It was slightly odd to see them off and take over the place but the wonderful canal views made up for any misgivings we had.

The Jordaan is a casual, family-friendly neighborhood with a wide variety of restaurants and English spoken everywhere. We enjoyed a traditional Dutch meal in a small restaurant, had good pizza another night, and were surprised by how much the kids enjoyed Turkish food. We also had the opportunity to indulge in a marvelous apple cake that brought back many memories of growing up and spending time with my Dutch grandparents.

The next morning we rented a car and drove about 30 minutes outside of Amsterdam to see the tulips in bloom. The place to go was Keukenhof, which is more or less a park dedicated to flowers, and tulips in particular. It had around a hundred arrangements of tulips (and a few other flowers such as daffodils, hyacinths, etc.) each done by a local bulb producer. It also had a playground for the kids, multiple exhibition halls, a windmill, and lots of food.

As lovely as the tulips were, the highlight of the visit to Keukenhof was seeing my Mom and Dad and Aunt Anneke. They had just arrived in Amsterdam -- Mom and Dad for a river cruise to Vienna and Anneke for a few weeks stay in the Netherlands -- and took an organized tour to Keukenhof the same day. I was hopeful we’d be able to find them (among the acres of tulips) and, sure enough, we did. The kids were particularly excited to see “Oma and Papa” as it had been about nine months since they had last seen them.

Together we walked around Keukenhof, caught up, snapped photos, and had a very enjoyable day. And after they caught their bus back to Amsterdam, we continued our explorations and walked around some more.

We spent most of the next day at Vondelpark, a large park in the Museum Quarter. We first met some family friends of Erin’s, Chris and Allison Hull, for coffee. We had last seen Chris twenty-one years prior at our wedding when he was a teenager. We had a lot of catching up to do.

We then met my Mom’s cousin, Daan Knuttel, along with Mom, Dad, Anneke, and Daan’s partner Jaap, for lunch. Daan and I have always had a special connection, begun on a trip of his to the States when I was a five or six that I remember well. As always, it was so nice to see him again.

That night we walked from our apartment to Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam for a Remembrance of the Dead gathering and moment of silence. Dam Square was crowded but we made our way through the crowds and were able to see, at a distance, King Willem-Alexander, who had been newly crowned only a few days prior.

The following day we drove out to the part of the Netherlands near where my Mom grew up and visited the town of Hoenderloo. We went first to the cemetery there to visit the graves of my grandparents, great-grandparents, and other relatives. We were met there by Mom’s Aunt Lisbeth, her three daughters Ellen, Monique, and Tanya, their partners, Ellen’s daughters, and my Mom’s Uncle Arthur. It had been about five years since I’d seen this part of the family and it was great to reconnect and catch up.  We went to a nearby restaurant, where we’d met them five years previous, and enjoyed lunch together. Afterwards, Arthur took us to another nearby cemetery to visit the grave of his wonderful wife, Ally.

It was a long day but I so enjoyed seeing such special people and such a special part of the Netherlands.

On our last morning we visited the famous Rijksmuseum, which had just recently reopened after being closed for renovations for a number of years. We then grabbed our bags -- had a bit of a mix-up on the trams (everybody made it off except me so we were briefly separated) -- and went back to the train station. There, in a very nice surprise, we were greeted by Mom & Dad to see us off.

Our trip to Amsterdam was one that we really enjoyed. The city itself and the people were so pleasant. Compared to Paris everything felt so relaxed and easy. There is a huge difference when English is spoken by everyone vs. when you pretty much need to speak French.

We’d like to return to Amsterdam for a longer time (maybe a summer) and enjoy the city, the diverse food, the friendly people, the bike culture, and spend some more time with my second cousins.

Cooking School in Brittany

Mom was fortunate to take a week off in June for cooking school in Brittany.  (Thank you Dad!) My friend Noreen, who I met at another cooking class, and I bravely hopped on a train to a tiny town near the coast.  What a great week it turned out to be.  Noreen and I shared many laughs along with our cooking buddies (Marade from Ireland, Linda from Australia) while we chopped our way through the week. They  allowed us to sleep in but by 10 am we had our knives and cutting boards at work.  We finished lunch by 2 and spent the afternoons walking about the rural town and its unique inhabitants, visiting other neat towns such as Jocelyn and Dinan and walking amongst the cows.  Then we reported back by 5 to make dinner and enjoy a 3-4 course meal with beaucoup du vin.  Noreen and I stumbled back to our apt giggling about this and that after midnight and were thankful to be able to sleep in.

We weren't sure we would graduate or if they would just want to get rid of us.  But thankfully, the last night we passed the quiz and enjoyed our last meal with our homemade elder flower cordial and champagne along with beef wellington.

Jocelyn

Dinan