Introduction

Why go to France for a year?

In June, we will be boarding a ship and moving to France for a year.    For the school year we will be living in the town of Angers and Joan will be attending a French school.  Angers is approximately 2 hours west of Paris near the intersection of the Maine River and the Loire River.  The home that we are renting is a 400 year old structure in the heart of the old city. 

You are probably asking why we want to do this.  There is no simple answer.  In part, it is a way for us to give Joan a great experience living in a foreign country.  In part, it is a way for us to rest and rejuvenate before Rick and Bronwyn start what are likely to be their last jobs before retirement.  Rick also likes to claim that he has a rogue gene in his family that causes generation after generation to constantly move to new places.  (He will be reversing about 500 years of family history by moving to France.) It also happens to be a good time for Rick to leave his work with the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation.  We halso hope that a year unchained from our desks will also allow us all to get more exercise.  It also will give us (and already is giving us) a different perspective on things.

Bronwyn, Joanie and Rick

The process of preparing for a year in France is to simplify our life.  We are purging our possessions of non-essentials, giving a lot of things away and trying to remember why we allowed ourselves to accumulate so much stuff.  It is amazing how generous you become when you know that you will have pay to store everything.  We are also reviewing our commitments and activities to try to fulfill obligations before we leave and to figure out what we want to continue doing when we return to the U.S.  This may sound like the Biblical sabbatical year (see Deuteronomy 15) and that is probably not a bad thing.  (More abut the sabbatical concept at here.) 

In further preparation for our trip, Rick and Joan are trying to broaden their minds by learning French.   (In Rick’s case this violates a sacred promise to his French teacher to never desecrate the French language again.)  Bronwyn is polishing her French.  

We hope that as many of you as possible will find time to come visit us in France.  If not, you can keep track of us on our blog.  All of us will be blogging and to make it easier to figure out who is the author of each section, Rick will be blogging in black or white; Bronwyn will be blogging in orange; and Joanie will be blogging in green.