October Vacation - continued

It was a real pleasure to go to Nantes and look up Elise Edwards, who was a student of mine for several years at Elgin Academy and a good friend of my daughter. She is enjoying a year abroad in this lovely city, and is now doing the second half of her year in Paris. We hope to see Elise in Switzerland when Nicole and Travis come to visit.

QUIMPER. It was a real treat for me to go to Brittany, this northwest corner of France which is known for its unique culture. I felt very comfortable in this city because it was French, but it also had an Irish feel to it, because this is where its inhabitants came from years ago. There were plenty of Irish shops and bars here. These Breton ladies don't look very Irish certainly; they have their own traditional way of dressing and their own language which is still spoken by some people.

ST. MALO was a city that I have been curious about for a long time. For years I have taught and listened to songs that were sung by French sailors who had left from this port to go to Canada to trade beaver pelts with the Indians. St. Malo is right on the tip of the northern part of France. The tide is out in this picture, but in the evening when I stopped at a small restaurant on the street that you see above, the waves were crashing over the seawalls with a terrific sound and force and came splashing onto the street. I was sitting right by the window of this restaurant eating my seafood soup, watching people tempting these waves to hit them. Several of them lost the game, and got drenched. I didn't envy them as it was a very cold and windy night.

Roly from Caen

CAEN. Roly is an old friend of Terry Davis from Cary. They had met during by chance during World War II when Terry was in the army in France. They have maintained contact ever since, although the language barrier makes it a bit difficult. I have helped with telephone calls for many years, Terry sitting at my side prompting me. It was a real pleasure to finally make Roly's acquaintance in person. She was kind enough to offer to let me stay with her for a couple of nights. In this picture, she is showing just a very small bit of material for a book which she has been in the process of writing for several years.

ROUEN. I met this very nice young man in the bus station in Caen. In the course of conversation we discovered that we had similar itinaries for the next few days. We had a layover in Rouen, and so we set out to see where Joan of Arc had been held prisoner and where she had been burned at the stake. In this picture, Stephan is standing in that square not far from the marker.

DIEPPE. Stephan was on a mission. His passion is World War II, and Stephan is Canadian. Before D-Day, the Canadians tried to storm the cliffs of Dieppe, but suffered a terrible defeat. There are still the remains of many bunkers, but there are plans to get rid of them soon. Stephan wanted to film them and explore the area before all traces were gone. He made me very nervous because there were signs all over saying that people were not to cross the fence since the cliffs were unstable.