The Wanderers Return - 10 Weeks in Europe - Part 6

France to Revisit a Family Connection
Next we were off to Metz, France for a very special project. Gene’s Uncle Nello had lived in a hotel in Metz during WWII, 60 years ago.

He has often talked about the year he spent there and what a beautiful place it is. He used to talk about taking a trip back one day, but in the past couple of years has been saying the trip would be too much for him, although he’s a very hardy 90 years old, and probably healthier than I am! So we had decided that our trip had to include his town and his hotel in France. Upon our arrival at the beautiful train station in Metz, we walked across the plaza to an outdoor cafe for coffee. We spread our map out on the table and asked the waiter if he could point out where we were on the map. He did so, and asked us where we were going. When we told him the Hotel Royal, he laughed, and said it was right around the corner! We got a room at the hotel, on the same floor that Uncle Nello had lived on, spent a couple of days wandering around the streets of that beautiful little city, stopping to have coffees (!) and taking a ridiculous number of pictures. As we started reporting back to Gene’s uncle via e-mail, he started remembering all sorts of things he had forgotten (like that the hotel was only a block away from the train station), and got very excited about our trip, asking us to report as much detail of our trip as possible! I guess we got him started, because he and Gene’s aunt have now decided to come visit us in Costa Rica (something we could never talk them into before) and will be here for 2 weeks in July! After our amazing stay in Metz, it was time to head back to Spain for the final weeks of our trip. We took the train to Paris, spent an afternoon there, seeing as much of the city as we could from a double-decker bus, then boarded our night hotel-train for Madrid, a delightful trip, with a private berth with our own bathroom, including shower! Our tickets included a pleasant dinner, with wine, in the dining car, as well as breakfast the next morning. We enjoyed a relaxing breakfast as we approached Madrid, talking with an interesting fellow from France, but originally from Colombia. He was on his way to Colombia to work on a documentary film he is producing.