My parents and my brother Dan came to visit me for the holidays. We spent a few days in Paris before coming back to Nantes for Christmas. Paris was beautiful as ever and we took it a little slower, seeing some sites that my family hadn't seen yet like Musee d'Orsay and the Catacombs. We made Christmas dinner in my apartment in Nantes with my roommate, Sam. Dinner was one of the highlights of the trip and Sam and my family got along really well. Sam had prepared an assortment of cheeses for us at the shop he works for in Nantes. Unfortunately, we didn't get to taste it with him because I had failed to pick up the platter the day before, but he was kind enough to get up early and bring it to the train station for us before 8:00 AM the morning after Christmas. What a guy?
We spent a couple of days after Christmas visiting the famous Chateaux of the Loire Valley before heading to Poitiers to visit Badette (an old friend of my grandfather from when he was stationed in France in the 1950s) and her family. This turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. We had lunch and dinner with them and they spent the afternoon showing us around the city. Everyone spoke wonderful English, including Badette's two teenage granddaughters. They were incredibly welcoming and this gave us the opportunity to share and taste the cheese Sam had prepared for us a few days earlier.
From Poitiers we headed to Florence, Italy for the New Year. We climbed to the top of the Duomo, saw Michelangelo's David (which may be the most impressive work of art I have ever seen) and experienced some beautiful panoramas of the city, in spite of pretty consistent rain.
On January 2 we headed to Pisa a little early to see the Leaning Tower before we were supposed to catch our flight. There were some awesome clouds that made for really good picture taking. Looking back at the pictures I find some irony in the presence of a storm building in the distance in many of the days photos. Our flight that night was canceled and EasyJet left us hanging without even having a representative in the airport 36 hours before Mom, Dad and Dan were supposed to catch their flight home in Paris. Fortunately, we were able to arrange a roundabout train route at the last minute that took us through Genoa, Monaco, Nice and Marseilles before it got us to Paris. We spent 17 painful hours on trains on Sunday, but we did get some incredible views of the Mediterranean and the Provencal countryside.
In spite of the stressful travel at the end, it was a great couple of weeks and it did me a lot of good to see my family.
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