Mom's Thoughts on France, Pt 2

Here we are again with another installment of my mother's impressions of her trip to France. Before I post in her comments, though, I should point out that the blog typeset has not gone crazy. Yesterday's post had a lot of bizarre characters in it - in fact, odd characters have turned up on previous occasions, for those who read this blog "nested" inside our commercial website. For instance, if you access the blog via this link, you probably experience unusual characters. If you access the blog direct, via this link, you have no idea what I'm talking about because your text presentation is always proper. It has something to do with our website's font page specs conflicting with the blog's character set, but I've been too busy to bother tracking it down yet.

On another note, I mentioned this in our pipe blog but not here - We now have a Frappr map. It's a fun way to have one big world map showing stick-pins for everyone who visits our site and reads our blogs. It's very easy to stick in a "virtual" pin - just visit our Frappr map, click "Add Yourself", and type in your name and location. It does all the rest for you! I'd like to ask everyone who reads here regularly to go and pop in a pin, so we can see where you are.

And without further ado:

I had planned ahead. Each piece of four bags was packed to full capacity. We each were responsible for one bag- my husband’s piece required the strength of two oxen to pull.

Trev’s required only one and one half oxen. Emily and I had the two smaller pieces, which compared to each of us carrying about a well-fed Rottweiler. After carrying this poundage through two airports, and now onto the TGV train, I pondered the fact that I could have left out a few pounds of popcorn.

(Trever's comment - No, she couldn't have!)

Sailing along on the TGV, everything so far had fallen right into place, perfectly. We finally exhaled our fears. We were ready for adventure. Then it happened, adventure showed up. The train exploded, skidded to a stop and smoldered. The knot in our stomachs that had accompanied us from North Carolina to this point once again took up residence in our intestines. The conductor came on the intercom and began muttering in tongues. Since our train was dead, other trains were dispatched to pick us up. In all, four train connections were made, linking us to our final destination, which was Saint Nazaire, where their tiny car awaited.

(For my version of this story, see my post TGVictims)

Emily, being the only fluent French speaker of this family foursome, quickly turned into Wonder Woman. We walked, ran, and jumped from train to train joined to her hips.

At last we arrived in Saint Nazaire, a bit weary and a whole lot hungry (some things never change). We packed all our monumental pieces of luggage into their tiny car. Then we opened the doors of the wee vehicle and crawled in. We realized at this point that Americans do indeed eat too many Big Macs. The little French cars were meant for little French people, and certainly not those over six feet tall, like my husband. Packed tightly inside, we were now on our way home to Herbignac, the newly adopted home of our children. We were about as excited as two middle-aged people could be. We looked forward to seeing their village, their home, and our grandcats, Loki and Freya, who we had also missed deeply.