Homestays

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We have not often been SERVAS travelers (www.servas.org) in our other travels. Yes, we did visit a few families in Australia and New Zealand, and we did visit one SERVAS traveler in Guatemala, but this is the first time that we consistently stayed in homes.

What a difference this makes to our view and understanding of French life!! Just imagine the difference between visiting us in the Catskills or my daughter in Forest Hills (Queens) versus staying in a hotel near Times Square! Contrast the difference between our home cooking and conversations with sitting quietly being served in a restaurant.

We stayed in B&Bs only if SERVAS wasn't available. Those nights, we biked in, took a shower, headed for town, ordered pizza, and biked back to sleep, eat breakfast and back on the road.

When we biked into a SERVAS home, we relaxed, often with a glass of Ricard or Pastis, and our hosts picked out their pot holder (which I made using the City Quilter subway maps and a Statute of Liberty fabric).THEN we were shown our room and we calmed down, unpacked a bit, got out of biking clothes and more visiting until dinner.

And WOW! what fantastic dinners...As I am sure that you would do, and we certainly do, our hosts made "company" dinners, numerous courses, and often, each with a different wine, always ending with a cheese plate and of course, more bread.

So far as we can tell, breakfasts are a BOWL of coffee (for those of us who drink coffee) and bread and jam. A common variation is a bowl of milk, often mixed with chocolate powder, with more bread dunked into the milk. Only two hosts eat cereal for breakfast.

We were usually sight seeing during lunch, so for us, lunch was a baguette, cheese, sometimes sliced meat, and when possible, India water, i.e., tonic water.

Wonder of wonders, when I stepped on a scale and converted kg to pounds, I am pretty close to what I was before I left.

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