Francophile in the West

Well, this is the end... I'm back in Nantes now for a few days with my family (hooray!), and we will be leaving for the Charles de Gaulle airport on Friday afternoon to fly out Saturday morning (boo!). While I know I'll be melancholy on Friday and Saturday and again in a couple of weeks when I fully realize that I won't be coming back to France for perhaps several years, I must say that I am very much looking forward to returning home and spending the summer in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with my family and Kris. Adventures in Washington, Colorado, and California are already being planned before I move to Denver in mid-August. In the meantime, I have nine months of incredible, life-altering, uplifting, and sometimes extremely challenging moments to look back on. In nine months, Nantes became my home and I was able to visit over forty cities in France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Turkey - ten