How It All Began

1. How It All Began

✔️My mom gave me a very unique name for the US, Yvette. From a young age, I knew it was different and was told it was French. Thus began my fascination with France. We were not well off, and I was unsure if I would ever be able to travel to France, but I knew that I wanted to go there. On my 18th birthday, my parents pulled their money and bought me a ticket to Belgium (where my sister was living at the time). I couldn’t believe it; I was going to get to travel!

I will admit that I was very scared to be taking a plane by myself (for the first time) to Belgium. I managed to navigate switching planes and made it to my sister’s house in Brussels. My sister’s first lesson? How to avoid jet lag. I arrived at 7 a.m. (which was about 1 a.m. my time), and I was ready to sleep. She wouldn’t hear of it and instead dragged me around Brussels until about 5 p.m. By that time, I was so ready to go to sleep. Instead, she fed me dinner and made me stay awake until 7 p.m., by which time I thought I was either going to die or kill her! She did eventually let me go to sleep, thank goodness, and sleep I did. That is, until 7 a.m. when she woke me up! I was furious, but as I ate breakfast, I realized that I was no longer sleepy and was ready to go. We spent a couple of days seeing Brussels and Bruges before she left the country.

First stop, Paris. And thus began my love/hate relationship with Paris. I will go into this in future blogs. It was a magical time, Paris at Christmastime. We went to a Latin mass at Notre Dame, saw the Eiffel Tower, and had a magical time. It was then time to say goodbye. She needed to go home, and I was off to London. To say I was scared is an understatement. But I was determined.

She dropped me at the train station, and I took my first train, by myself, to Calais. From there, I took the ferry from Calais to Dover and then a bus to London. The English Channel was not forgiving for this first-time ferry rider. In fact, they were handing out barf bags to massagers as the waves crashed over the windows of the ferry. It was quite nerve-racking. I made it across and boarded a bus to London.

Once I got to London, not only was I on my own, but I had absolutely no plans. I wandered around sightseeing and eventually decided to go to a youth hostel. I met some people there and talked, but was extremely uncomfortable. I decided to get a hotel. It was not the greatest, but it was clean and offered privacy. It became the first hotel I stayed in by myself. I was racking up quite the list of firsts on this trip.

I eventually went back to my sisters and travelled home. I was forever changed. The travel bug had definitely bitten hard! In fact, I had made my husband promise me that when we retire we can live in France for 3 months.