We’re back after an amazing 12 days of wow after wow.

Overview

Fly out evening of South Africa's Women’s Day

Three of us - @tim-beck, me and Tim’s daughter Emma, were off on a pilgrimage triggered by a wedding taking place 16 August in a lovely region of France called Pas-de-Calais. There’s a reason I say region and not town, but we’ll get to that when we get to the wedding. And how the 16th was really only the "centre" of the wedding. Apparently the festivities would start Monday 14 August and end somewhere towards the end of the week once everyone was dead, so the idea was to get to the wedding area (yes, area) by the 14th.

I discovered when I planned this trip in December/January that if we left South Africa for Paris on the public holiday of 9 August (Women’s Day in South Africa) and returned home 21 August via Amsterdam instead of Paris, the air tickets would be substantially cheaper. Gee, forced to spend four days in Paris to save money. If you’ve gotta do it, bite the bullet and do it. And if we have to spend a couple of days in Amsterdam at the other end, ah well, so be it. The price of thrift.

Basic itinerary

So here's what our trip looked like once we'd landed in Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris from our overnight Air France flight from Johannesburg - I hope you can read the map and the itinerary up top. Don't pay too much attention to those South African rand prices; they're just estimates. But it's a cool site to use to map your itinerary.

We took four and a half days in Paris – Thursday through Monday afternoon, staying at an Airbnb apartment – got on the train at the Gare du Nord to go to Boulogne in the Pas-de-Calais region (not that far from Dunkirk on the northern coast of France) on Monday afternoon where we picked up a rental car to then drive to our base for the next five nights, a pristine town called Hardelot. There we stayed in a lovely hotel (which I booked on booking.com in January to secure the exchange rate) from Monday evening to Saturday morning , then drove to Lille near the Belgian border to get on a Thalys train to Amsterdam to spend two nights in another Airbnb flat in the western area of Amsterdam.

Those four days in Paris, five days in Hardelot and one and a half days in Amsterdam were non-stop. I now seriously need a rest from this holiday, and my feet have threatened to self-amputate if I ever do anything like this to them again.

I'll tell you more about each of our stays, and the wedding itself, in separate posts, otherwise this one would be waaaaaaaay too long. But a bit more background so you have a feel for the nuances of the posts which I'll share over the next week.

Whose wedding was it?

My closest friend, she of the orchid, had her amazing daughter Elizabeth (also of the orchid) in January 1991. Elizabeth met Yoann in Montreal some six or so years ago, and to hear them tell the tale, it was love at first sight. Fast forward to 2012: Elizabeth lived with us while she did an internship in Johannesburg, went back to Montreal, then she and Yoann moved to Johannesburg a few years ago where we got to spend a bit more time with them. The two of them have subsequently moved to Mauritius as they are part of the team creating the African Leadership University. Here's a quick pic of them once they'd gone through the wedding ceremony - but that wedding will be a post in itself.

Don't worry; there'll be plenty more wedding pics.

And who was travelling together?

Tim, Emma and I made up the travelling trio. I'm confident you'll be able to figure out who's who in this pic.

Unfortunately, Emma's brother, @wesleybeckza, couldn't join us because he was planning to be in Cambodia all year. He'll have other tales to tell in other posts.

Background

Besides attending the wedding, one of the main reasons for going on this trip was to help Emma get a start in her travels outside of South Africa. Until early 2016, she had never been outside the borders of South Africa and was really struggling with self-confidence and independence. She loves fine art and studied a bit of architecture at university. Last year we arranged a trip for her to London for two weeks in June as a birthday present. She stayed with family which gave her a soft landing into overseas travel, and absolutely loved it. But visiting one country beyond one’s own doesn’t do that much to broaden perspectives, so we saved up for what may end up being the trip of a lifetime (depending, of course, on where Steemit goes!).

This trip to France and the Netherlands was a combined Christmas/birthday present from me to both Tim and Emma. Now 22, she’s become much more confident through working in promotions and at her day job as a property administrator, but there’s nothing like travel to get you out of your comfort zone and into the delights of experiencing different languages, cultures and foods, appreciating diversity, figuring transport out on the fly, and seeing great art and architecture close up.

International travel is also a really good opportunity to work in a team – to experience collaboration and consideration for others and to learn how to take accountability for one’s own actions. Stuff always happens when you travel, and it’s when stuff happens that character gets built or shows through.

And group dynamics?

Tim and Emma are very much peas in a pod, artistic, creative people whose relationship with time and self-organisation is, shall we say, more informal than mine. Neither is a morning person. It’s a really good thing I knew these things before we left, because I’m different – I usually wake up around 5:00 and while not totally Prussian in my punctuality and planning, let’s just say I’m reasonably organised and know where everything is when I travel, and am usually about half an hour earlier than I have to be at whatever departure point I have to be at, just because stuff happens. So I knew I needed to plan around them, and make my peace with late mornings. Be ready for stuff to happen, and stay Zen.

My original thinking was that we’d have days of strolling leisurely around Paris, admiring the sights, stopping for a little bit of shopping (more for Emma than me – “retail therapy” is an oxymoron for me, but I knew she would want souvenirs), then stopping again for a coffee and a pâtisserie here and there to watch the people go by as we soaked up the Parisian ambiance.

Image source

The next few posts will tell you how it really went. Read between the lines because there’s a lot I simply cannot tell you. “At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” Until the next post, friend Steemian.