What Grand Adventures We May Find

I have just returned from the most wonderful of weekends!

I hopped a train on Friday to take me to Niort, a lovely town about 80 miles south of Nantes, to visit my friend Katie, who is working there as an assistant. I wasn't sure what the trip held in store, but I figured that it would be fun to travel a little bit, since I am doing so very little work here, and I was really looking forward to seeing Katie, since gosh, when is a little Montanan solidarity not a good thing?

She greeted me at the train station with that familiar, beautiful, blue, Montana flag and walked me back to her house (which is adorable!) where we were almost immediately joined by the landlord's 7-year old daughter. She's great! I love talking with kids because our vocabulary is very similar!

All this was good and dandy, but good and dandy escalated to Friggin Fantastic when, that evening, we went to go see a concert by a group called MORIARTY who I'd listened to a bit before and knew I liked but really didn't know that much about them.
All you need to know is that they are amazing (and yes, they sing in english, so fear not) and the show was really powerful and moving; a Rock&Roll religious experience, if you will.
Seeing music live is always something special, but there exists a certain kind of passion that, when added into the mix, can reach directly into you soul.

They had that passion.


















Also, they're opening band had a ukulele player as the lead singer, a girl who played the singing-saw and the violin and a pianist who also played a horse's jaw-bone.
It was all like some sort of gypsy fantasy!





I had assumed, as one is inclined to do after an amazing show, that that would probably be the highlight of the weekend, but gosh! Was I ever wrong!

Waking up early Saturday morning, after getting only a few hours of sleep, we walked down to the cathedral to meet up with one of Katie's friends and a brother and sister, Alex and Marie) that they had met through couch surfing who were kind enough to drive us to the nearby town of La Rochelle and it's neighboring island, L'ile de Ré. They took us to an open-air market, showed us around the town and we spent the day on the beach, picnicking, wading into the chilly water, watching waves crash over the dikes protecting the town, and of course, trading vocab and linguistic lessons back and forth, speaking a happy mixture of French and English.






The ocean always makes me feel better – peaceful, calm, pensive etc – and so I was ready to call it a day, but as it turned out, Alex and Marie have some friends who were hosting a party, and they had decided to take us along.
Now, I was expecting a house party, maybe, MAYBE, a cook-out, but what we got was SO much better.






There's a group of people who live in yurts all year long, and during the summer they organize camps for kids, to teach them about nature and how to live outdoors etc, but staring this week, they are moving their camp to higher grounds and so this was their farewell-until-next-summer party, complete with carneval-esque lights, a theater performance based on several of Mark Twain's writings, and musicians that were still going strong by the time we left at 3am!





It really was this magical sort of dreamland that can only exist at very specific moments in very specific places and with just the perfect mixture of people.

I simply could not have been happier.





(also, here is a video of the most amazing violin-playing 10-year old ever! Holding his own with the big dogs...)





The next day, Katie and I slept until noon and lazed around the house until it was time for dinner, at which point we pulled ourselves together and went to eat at a really great Asian restaurant and then wandered the deserted warmly-lit streets of Niort.

All in all, as bout as much happiness and adventure that one could hope to fit in to 48 hours.