Virtually Home

Last Christmas season, I had undertaken a fabulous holiday journey that started at my friend Tom's house in Poole, Dorset, England. After a horrendous number of setbacks that made me believe I would never make it to Tom's, he picked me up at the train station. We had some great times, in a house full of kittens and new friends. We drank a lot of cider, and walked to the grocery store in the freezing rain singing Tilly & the Wall at the top of our lungs. A year ago today, I left Tom's house to meet Rachel in Geneva, Switzerland, where everything was cold, beautiful, and expensive. We traveled to Lauterbrunnen and Zurich, too, and encountered such difficulties as coin-operated showers and respiratory illness. We met up with Hunter in Paris and spent several days in a shuffle of hostels and holiday crowds. We saw an anniversary light show at the Eiffel Tower and met an excellent Danish couple under the Arc de Triomphe at midnight. Hunter and I went on to Berlin and c...

On Saturday we woke up earlier than any of our bodies would have liked, and the extra-France residents had their first experience with a curtainless shower. Meredith was still feeling pretty exhausted and opted to stay home for the first part of the day, and save her energy for the Eiffel Tower that night. Mel and I took a few metro lines to the RER C and rode it all the way out to Versailles, which was a trip I hadn't taken before. Since we'd seen the Louvre just the day before, the whole trip felt like a big tour of Louis XIV's ego. The palace was, of course, beautiful and incredibly grandiose. It was also choked with people, and Mel and I were pretty constantly exclaiming over various photographic opportunities we might have had, were we given a shot that wasn't full of other tourists. There was a photographic exhibition on display, celebrating the palace and its significance over the years. They had photos from pretty much the inception of the camera, to the sig...