Our flight was scheduled to leave JFK airport at 5 PM. In the back of a  shelf in our kitchen, we found a water bottle from the school at which I  was a preschool teacher for so many years,  Earthplace. We decided to take it with us.

Before leaving, we took one last look at a photo in our living room. It was taken when Nick and I visited Carla, when she was in school in England in 2003. Together, the three of us took the Eurostar to Paris, where we met with Jose-Maria and Agnès. We’d be seeing them soon!

In the  world of international travel, they day you leave home is counted as one of the days of your trip, even though you will not arrive at your destination until the following day. I always enjoy chatting with our Uber drivers, persons  from locales that I am not likely to  experience for myself. This was the first time that our Uber driver asked if he could listen to a podcast on the way to the airport rather than chatting, so that is what he did.

You may know that the highway to the airport has been under construction for  many years. Eventually I learned that our driver had grown up in Queens, just as I had. His familiarity with  the area enabled him to take, as Nick calls it, the “sneaky back route” rather than the route that is still under construction. We arrived in plenty of time.

Once on the plane, we were told that some couples would not be seated together because  a change was made, and would be taking a different aircraft from the one that was expected. Nick and I were not assigned adjoining seats, but a sweet young woman who was flying alone offered to switch seats with me so that Nick and I could be together. Our first destination was Amsterdam, and from there, we would get a plane to Lyon, France.  The dinner, meat balls with mashed sweet  potatoes, was remarkable tasty.