Living in a foreign country is a humbling experience. Sometimes trying to integrate into French society make us feel like teenagers who are too square to know how to say or do the right thing. This has nothing to do with the French, who have offered us their friendship, laughed with us, not at us, and welcomed us into their homes. This feeling is just something that goes on in our own heads where the culture of our savoir-faire is American, and leaves us guessing about simple French rules of comportment. In order to avoid all of the insecurities of our youth, we like to spend some of our travel time each year in familiar places.

This summer in order to round off that square feeling, and to rest up for our next big adventure, we returned to Saint Jean de Losne,our very first familiar place in France.

St. Jean and the neighboring village of Saint Symphorein sur Saône were where our French life was born, so we settled in for a couple of months to enjoy the amitié of our locals friends and of the boating community.

We moored in the basin of the Canal de Bourgogne,near the Saône River, where from our back deck we could see the first lock that we ever passed through, 7 years and thousands of locks ago. Before we learned how to pilot our barge, that lock gave us the willies just looking at its narrow entrance. Locks are full of surprises, and we have learned to respect them, but they don't scare us anymore.

St. Jean is on the Côte d'Or and with our car rescued from its garage in Roanne, we were free to travel on familiar roads to towns like Beaune, Dijon and Dole, where we don't feel at all like strangers. Market days in these towns have always been a delight for us. It is easy to get carried away, and while shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables, somehow local cheeses, pates, tapenades, and pâte feuilletée treats always find their way into our baskets.

We drove to Monthelie, a village neighboring Meursault to visit one of our favorite vintners.  We had to go back because the friends who were with us when we discovered this winery years ago, were visiting again. Combining the wines we bought that day with treats from the Beaune market, dinner on our back deck on a warm summer evening was a little bit of heaven.

At the beginning of August, refreshed and relaxed, we went through our very first lock one more time and headed toward the Canal de la Marne à la Saône on our way to our winter mooring for 2006/2007. Comforted by a couple of months spent in familiar surrounding, we felt prepared to tackle the hustle and bustle of city life.

Last summer while we were at the Port de Plaisance Paris-Arsenal, they told us that we could have a mooring for this winter. Did we have to think about this offer, or talk it over? No, we both said yes at the same time which was just about immediately. This had been our dream in the beginning, and even though we love Roanne and plan to return next winter, we jumped at the chance to spend a winter in Paris. After all, how many chances do you get in life to live for 7 months in the center of a city as beautiful as Paris.

We arrived on the 15th of September and realized that because we have come to Paris so often during the summer months, we feel as comfortable here as we do in St. Jean de Losne and Roanne. We quickly settled into our mooring, ordered a land line with high speed Internet, signed up for French classes and conversation groups, became Amis du Louvre, got our Navigo passes, picked out our favorite cafés, made a few friends, even got our photo taken by Google Earth, and so far, we are living happily ever after.