It all started back in December of last year: I met the president of our local city partnership committee and we chatted about this year’s trip to our partner city in France in the Loire valley. I told her, that we were interested in participating in 2023 and would love to stay with a guest family. My wife and I took French classes in school many years ago and have not had too many chances to practice the language since then.
The trip was planned for mid May and towards the end of April I have not heard anything about the trip. The plan was to travel the 800 km (500 mi) by bus, so I called the person in charge of the organization of the trip. She did not have the time and just returned from a sick leave but wanted to send some general information by email the same day. She also told me that for all those of us who wanted to stay with a guest family a match was found. So that was good news. No word though about some other details: the cost per person, some information about the guest family, time of departure, the other participants and so on. She said, that she wanted to send that around on an individual basis at a later point in time.
So it was less than a week and still no sign of the details which caused me to send an email to her as a short reminder. Of course, this happened on a Friday and I was not too much surprised that I did not get an answer. But on Monday morning she called me, told me the price, the time of departure and the name of the lady who will be our hostess. Later the same day I received an email with all the information together with the account to send the money to. So I added a new payee to my KMyMoney database and transferred the money using the online transfer feature of this application. Still no information about the other people on the bus though, but name and phone number of the tour guide and two contact persons. Lucky me, I knew all three of them. So I called one of them just to hear, that he had to cancel the trip due to health problems. He already participated a few times in the trip but unfortunately, he also did not know our host. Looking at the name, we thought of a lady maybe at our age or a little older who might live by herself.
Two days later, we woke up early to have a coffee, wrapped up our luggage and walked over to the bus stop. We were 21 people on board and to my surprise we already knew most of the others, just did not know that they participate in the trip. 11 hours later we arrived in our french partner community. Most of the others knew their hosts from earlier trips so we looked out for someone who did search for his guest. No one in sight, though. We simply asked someone in French and were told, that our hostess is on its way and will arrive soon. So we all gathered and had a warm welcome and an aperitif. A few minutes later she arrived. Our imagination was totally off: she was younger than us and lives together with her husband and two sons (almost 6 and 14) in a nice town house.
After the reception ended we drove over to their house and had dinner with nice conversations on the patio. Our hosts also speak English which helped here and there but we tried to stick with French as much as possible. After all, practicing French was one of the reasons to do this trip in the first place.
The next morning we had a small breakfast with coffee, tea, croissants and brioche at our hosts house. Then we headed to meet the group down-town and started for a day trip on the bus. Some of the hosts also joined us, not ours though. We went for a little stroll along the river Loire. Unfortunately, we had chosen a footpath that is part of the Loire Cycle Path, which starts its 700 km in the centre of France near Nevers and ends on the Atlantic coast in the small town of Saint-Nazaire. Since the weather was beautiful, there were many bike riders and constant shouts of “Velo, Velo” to announce the next group of them that passed us. We reached the bus safely and continued our travel to a cavern where we had a typical french lunch. The next leg of the day trip took us to a local winery. The wife of the vine-grower originated from Germany and she spoke in German to us, which made it a lot easier for us to understand all the specific vocabulary of the wine making business. A little wine tasting rounded up the visit of the winery before we jumped on the bus again to return to where we started in the morning.
The other German visitors were picked up by their hosts, but I let our hostess know in advance that we wanted to walk back the approximately 3km from the meeting point to their house. We had a nice walk through town, reached the house and took a shower before we had dinner. Meanwhile, the brother of our host arrived. He lives in Great Britain and is married to a German. Also for him, the three languages are no problem and we practiced all of them while having a nice Goulash outside on the patio.
On Saturday, we visited a town nearby and had a guided tour around the ancient church and castle. It was rather chilly but by the time we started our pick-nick in a local park the sun came out and it got warmer. After returning to the bus, we drove back home. In the afternoon, my wife and I accompanied our host and his brother who wanted to visit one of their aunts. This provided us with the chance to visit the castle and park of the town were we had lunch the day before. We didn’t do any of those due to the rather high entrance fees but hiked up a hill and had a nice view over the town and the river Loire.
In the evening, we all met with our hosts for a reception and dinner. The mayor of the town and one of the city councilwomen were also there to represent the city. A very nice evening. We laughed a lot, danced and had a good time until almost mid-night when it was time to return back to the house and prepare for a short round of sleep.
Sunday started at 6 am. We packed our luggage, had a croissant and cup of coffee with our hosts at 7 before we met at the bus to have another cup of coffee before we all had to say au revoir to return back home partially exhausted after another 11 hours bus ride.
All in all it was a very pleasant trip and great experience. We got to know very nice people in France, made new friends not only with our hosts which we certainly want to meet again. Chances are, that at least some of the French participants will visit us to staff their stand on our local Christmas market. We also noticed, that we can still understand French to some extent and even speak that language, certainly not fluent. And please don’t ask for any grammatical rules.