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The Ellis Page French Sabbatical |
Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology ("MAC")
The parents of Brice Lechevallier, our exchange student of the previous summer, had invited Merry and me to come to France to set up the details of the sabbatical. It was a wonderful offer and one we gratefully accepted. The trip turned out to be like a second honeymoon. We spent five weeks in July and August (1994) in and around Paris, the romantic capital of the world.
One of the highlights of the trip was a spectacular firework display on Bastille Day. Standing under the Eiffel Tower, we watched choreographed fire exploding above the Seine while theme music thrilled the crowd. Of course, we saw all the tourist sites of the city: the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, and so on. The family also took us to see the Liberty Armada in the city of Rouen. Ship from all over the world came and we spent hours seeing the sights. I was able to visit Professor Mellier, the department head at the University of Rouen, to talk about the sabbatical.
Our
favorite part of the canals was the
fantasy village of Lutzelbourg. Buried
among tree-covered hills, the entire village looked like a vestige
from an earlier century. The canal
snaked right through the middle of
town
with a lock in the center of the village. We
took dozens of pictures of old One amusing note: it took us over two hours to sail from the little town of Moussey to the base at Lagarde. After loading up the cars, we looked for a gas station. The nearest one, they told us, was back at Moussey. We drove there by car in eight minutes. After the excitement of Paris and the romance of a week on the canals of Alsace, a week in the country, not far from the beautiful port city of La Rochelle, was the perfect ending of our trip. The ancient home in the tiny village of "Frichebois" had ceilings supported by ancient rugged beams held together with wooden pegs. The walls were of white stones cemented together and the roof was made of red tiles that were well over a hundred years old.
What an adventure this all was – and we hadn’t even started the sabbatical yet! Back to Ellis Family page |
| For email contact use either: gellis@stmartin.edu or godfreymerry@home.com |
But
the real treat of the vacation was something we had been looking
forward to since the Lechevallier family invited us to come.
Then,
on the way to the airport to leave, we stopped for a couple of hours to
see some of the beautiful châteaux of the Loire Valley.