Au Revoir, St Quentin la Poterie: Audio Blog

Our little town of St Quentin la Poterie is opening up, like Provence in Spring will do. It's a small town, and a quiet town. The streets are never full. You don't see more than a few people going from place to place. If you want to catch shops open, like the boucherie or the boulangerie that sells the better brioche, you have to be both a bit psychic and a little lucky.

In the last few weeks, things have been changing. People are everywhere! At lunchtime I see tables out, filled with diners, at restaurants that weren't even open when we arrived. The artisan workshops on every

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Carnaval Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie Style

I read that there are 32 Saint Quentin municipalities in France and they had to come up with some name changes to differentiate them all for the postal service. Our Saint Quentin is one of the oldest pottery making regions so, in 1886 the 'la Poterie' was added.

Today was a big celebration in town. The kids and I walked to where we saw everyone else walking and  watched. We weren't sure what was happening or why but it looked like a lot of fun. Nearly

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Scotland to France on the Eurostar -- Part Deux

The next day I left the kids in our hotel and took a shuttle to the Renault Auto Lease office at Charles De Gaulle Airport. It's an incredibly efficient system. We leased a car for about ten weeks -- much cheaper than renting. Once I was in the office, the whole process took about four minutes. I walked back outside, my car pulled up and I got in. I reached forward to enter the hotel address into the GPS system... Wait there's no GPS. And no map. I really thought there was going to be Sat Nav in the car. I can read a map fine, I learned in Mr. Bunte's fifth grade geography class, but I don't have a map and now I need reading glasses and the signs are in French and I took Spanish in high school and I can't even speak that and Brenna's not here, so who am I going to yell at when I take a wrong turn?!?

Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention to the roads when I was on the shuttle from

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