Counting down the days and hours

After Robyn left Paris for the USA, I took the train back to Lyon.  I immediately started counting down the days until I would be able to go home.  I needed to complete the project that I started when I first came to France, or at least complete the collection of the data that I will need to write a paper.

The sun finally decided to make an appearance for more than a day at a time.  Of course this happened when I was about to leave.  It has been an exceptionally rainy winter and spring for all of Europe.  Everyone was happy to see the sun and I even saw some of the locals smiling.

On Saturday, Rachel and Torsten invited a few of us over to dinner at their home just outside of Lyon.  They have a busy multi-generational household (baby, parents, mother,  grandmother, and two dogs).   We decided to play a board game and I got ready for another humiliating defeat.  The game, "Empires: The Age of Discovery", was about exploring the new world.  We started playing around five o'clock, and with 5 players and breaks to feed the baby, we did not get finished until after eleven.


Europeans living in the cities tend to eat later, but this was even later than any of us had eaten before.  Torsten fired up the grill as we counted up the points in the game, then we sat down to a nice meal.  We were so full that we never did eat the dessert that we brought.

By the way, when we tallied up the final points, I won by one point.  I thanked them all for letting me finally win.