Adieu, Paris.

Tonight is my last evening in Paris; as I am flying all the way through to San Francisco tomorrow, it promises to be a very long day, literally and figuratively. Let's hope that my shiny new green card means that I can avoid the not-so-delightful "secondary screening" process when going through immigration. It's happened to me twice at Washington Dulles already, and I'd just as soon avoid the hat trick.

This visit has been amazing. I haven't blogged as much as on previous trips, but that largely reflects the huge number of private lessons I had scheduled during half the time I was here. These were expensive and draining, but extremely rewarding. I feel the same way about this whole autumn adventure -- the side trips to Ireland and Scotland took a certain amount of energy to set up and carry through, but were unforgettable in all the right ways.

Etc etc. Add superlatives and stir -- you get the picture. It's been a terrific two and a half months, and I feel blessed to have been able to do it. And, I know that I go on about this, but it bears repeating, I feel totally blessed to have rediscovered this crazy language thing in my fifties, that ignites my passion and acts as a doorway to a completely different kind of life than I might have imagined.

As I don't generally post from San Francisco, the blog will go on hiatus until the French adventure starts up again in the spring. The target date for my return to France is March 1st. In previous years I've always used getting my taxes filed as a reason to procrastinate, and then ended up requesting an extension to file and doing them in July or August anyway, so I'm hoping to avoid that particular little trap next year.

I leave you with the very first photo I took on this trip, taken on Labor Day, just before we took our class trip on the bateau mouche.

Hope you will tune in to the sequel in 2012. Thanks for reading!

David