A vacation should be easier to come home from. The two weeks I spent in northern France last month with my friend and life partner, Mooch, seem to have set up housekeeping in my head, so that wherever I go I have to walk through a few rooms filled with the soft yellow light of luminous clouds, the sound of colloquial French chatter and the smells of coffee, wine and grilling meats.
We flew from Boston, where we had spent two delightful days with our friends J.D and Michelle training fo the French connection by walking and looking at old churches and slowly and convivially consuming good food and drink. The flight was via Reykjevik and landed us at Charles de Gaulle at about 1 in the afternoon. We had gone through passport control in Iceland and were surprised to find that we had to go through neither immigration nor customs in Paris. Those are the sorts of French customs I like. After claiming our baggage, we waited about half an hour for a shuttle to the Radisson Blu, where we had arranged to spend the first night in France. We checked into our comfortable room and promptly lay down for a five-hour nap. We awoke with a good appetite, but decided to have a drink in he bar before going in to dinner. The food in the restaurant was typical, tasty French bistro food: lamb brochettes, steak and frites, that sort of thing. There was some sort of mix-up with our order which caused a small delay. When the waiter came to tell us about it, he offered us free wine and free desserts as compensation, which we gaciously accepted, even though we had barely noticed he delay. Next moring we had a lovely European breakfast, which was included with the room, and took the shuttle back to the airport to pick up our rental car.
Paris soon gave way to the Normandy countryside, which was vibrantly green under a watercolor sky full of floating clouds. We were on our way to Connelles, 26 kilometers south of Rouen, but we decided to make a stop at Giverny to see the home and gardens of Monet. Soon after we stopped, the sky turned a soft, succulent gray and it began to rain lightly. We got out our umbrellas, paid the admission price to the house and gardens and strolled through the flowers and by the lily pond as the watery brushstrokes of the summer shower softened the landscape and made it shimmer.
A lovely, late lunch and a carafe of wine at a country inn set the stage for the way we would eat during our two weeks in France as we continued on our way to Connelles. We arrived late that evening, checked in and settled into our modern one-room flat at a smal lresort on the banks of the Seine called Le Manoir des deux Amants.
After a comfortable night's sleep serenaded by frogs, we were ready to innaugurate our exploration of Normandy. Rather than go anywhere by car on the first day, we decided to walk through the village and out into the countryside of rolling hills covered with wheat fields dappled with the occasional red poppy. Hedgerows and woodlands blend with the cultivated fields to provide a healthy, balanced effect in which the inhabited places coexist with rather than dominate the landscape. After we had walked a few kilometers, we were able to see a church steeple on a hill in the distance and decided to walk as that village, which is called Daubeuf. There we found a little cafe where we ordered a couple of beers and had a very pleasant two-hour chat with Fabienne, the proprietress and a young fellow who had a feed business in the village. We gotto talk about the locally made hard cider, for which the region is famous, and before we knew it the young man was on his cell phone talking to a local farmer who pesses his own cider. He then politely excused himself and returned five minutes later with two bottles of cider, which he presented to us, refusing any payment. We carried the two bottles home with us. I opened one as soon as we got back. It was excited after the long walk, and spewed nearly to the ceiling, but when it calmed down we drank the golden nectar and saluted not only Normandy but allof France and all who live the French life. We spent many an enjoyable day after that on the road, visiting castles and churches, Mont St. Michel, the Bayeux Tapestry, the D-day beaches, but of all the days we spent, the one dearest and most vivid to me is that cider-sprinkled afternoon with the friendly bar owner and the lovely walk through the green countryside.
Our Normandy chapter came to a close and we made the drive back to Charles de Gaulle to return ou rental car in about two hours. Freed of our vehicle, we took the Metro with our bags to the 11th Arondissement, where a bed and breakfast room awaited us at what turned out to be the apartment of charming, petty young graduate student. The apartment was tiny but efficiently laid out and Carine, our hostess, was friendly and very glad to learn that we spoke French. She was rarely there, actually, so Mooch and I more o less had our own apartment again. There was coffee with fresh croissants every morning, to which we served ourselves, and Mooch and I settled into a routine of strolling, sightseeing and lingering late in the long summer evenings. It stays light until about 11 p.m. in Paris in June, and the streets, parks and cafes are full of people hours after the sun has disappeared. Mooch and I quickly adapted and moved into a sort of swing-shift existence, staying out until one or two each night and sleeping until nearly noon. We set the pace on our first evening, June 21, our aniversary. We had booked a dinner cruise on the Seine and invited our German friends, Cristiane and Dierk, to come and share it with us. They flew over from Munich for the weekend and met us at the dock with hugs and numerous little gifts for our 30th anniversary. The dinner cruise began at 8:30 with a bottle of champage and hors d'hoeuvres, followed by entrees, main courses, two bottles of wine, dessert and coffee, all in the mellowing twilight as we floated past some of the great buildings of Paris, including the Eiffel Tower, which appeared to be lighted with luminescent gold. A trio of musicians provided background music and it was, all in all, the most romantic evening I can remember. Mooch looked pretty in the Paris light, and radiantly happy, as if she were on her honeymoon, which in a way it was, because we were too poor to have a proper honeymoon when we were maried 30 years ago. When dinner was over at 10:30 and the boat returned to the quay, we contined cruising around Paris on foot. At one point we had an after-dinner brandy at a cafe in view of the Eiffel Tower, which every hour popped into a froth of twinkling white lights.
Paris was like that. We looked at paintings and gorgeous cathedrals and palaces but it was walking around the city hand in hand, sipping wine and dining amid the gentle exuberance that flows like a breeze through this city that I remember most fondly. The 11th Arondissement is a modest, thoroughly French neighborhood of older apartment buildings, bakeries, butcher shops, fruit and vegetable shops, book shops and, of course, a cafe on every corner, and many in between. People from all over the world seem to live there, and there are Middle Eastern, Turkish, Chinese, African and even Brazilian restaurants.
For a week we lived there, bought our crispy baguettes and bottles of wine. On June 28 we finally boarded our flight back to the U.S. and another pleasant, though brief stay with our friends in Boston. The flight back to Sacramento, with stops in Chicago and Phoenix, actually took longer than the flight from Paris to Boston. We arrived, exhausted at about 10 p.m. and our son, Josh, who had been waiting patiently in the cell-phone lot, came around to meet us outside baggage claim. It took about 20 minutes for himto arrive because there was a huge traffic jam. Josh hadn't had any dinner, so we stopped at In'N'Out to get him something to eat. We joined six other customers, all of them fat, the first truly obese people we had seen in two weeks.
I left part of my soul in France and will not get it back until I return.
