It’s funny how life comes full circle sometimes, isn’t it? Back in the summer of 2000, right before Chad and I got married, I spent six weeks studying abroad in France. Now, 25 years later, our oldest daughter is spending a semester studying in the French Riviera.

The girl in the pictures below had no idea that one day her daughter would follow in her footsteps and she’d be traveling with her family to France to visit her!

Well, the day finally came. We had been planning this trip for over seven months, and we couldn’t believe it was finally here! We were soon going to be in France all together! This was something we never thought we’d be able to do. For more on how we were able to manage it, check out my last post.

As much as I love to travel, I don’t necessarily love the actual “travel” part. I get motion sickness easily and have to load up on Dramamine. Traveling is tiring anyways, so having drug-induced drowsiness on top of that isn’t necessarily fun. Thankfully our flight didn’t leave our local airport until noon, so we didn’t have to get up too early. My nephew was able to drive us to the airport, so we didn’t have to deal with airport parking, which was nice and saved us some money.

We flew from Des Moines to Minneapolis where we had a 3.5 hour layover. The kids were missing nine days of school for this trip, so they took advantage of this time to get some schoolwork done.

We ended up being on the same plane as John Malkovich, so that was pretty cool.

Okay, so it wasn’t actually him, but doesn’t he look a lot like him?!

Our overseas flight was pretty comfortable, and the food was pretty good for airline food. Tate and I opted for the manicotti which we thought was decent. We weren’t big fans of the corn and red pepper salad, so we let Chad have that. The little cheese and crackers and brownies were a nice treat. The picture on the right was our breakfast – a bread pocket filled with eggs, spinach, and bacon. We enjoyed the huge selection of movies and shows to watch, although we mostly tried to sleep, which none of us was very successful at unfortunately.

After an eight hour flight, we landed in London around 7:00 am, where we had an hour and a half to navigate the gigantic Heathrow airport and connect to our last flight in a different terminal. Thankfully, Heathrow, although huge, is pretty easy to get around. Everything was marked well and we made it with a little time to spare before boarding.

We were ready for our final two hour flight to Nice!

After traveling for 17 hours, we were ready to get to our final destination – and finally see Addie!

However, once we got to Nice and got through customs (which, by the way, in Nice was extremely easy – they didn’t even ask us why we were there, and we had even rehearsed our answers! lol), we still had to hop on a train and make our way to Antibes. Thankfully there was a free shuttle from the airport to the train station, but once we got to the station, we didn’t really know how to get tickets. Thankfully Chad figured out which app to download (SNCF – if you plan to travel to France, you may want to download this app ahead of time) and bought our tickets, and we were ready to hop on the train and see Addie!

Here we are waiting on the platform for our train that will take us to Addie. It was probably only a 20 minute wait, but it felt like forever!

Terrible picture, but I wanted to show our first of several train rides during this trip. This was a packed train, plus we had all of our luggage, so standing room only for us. Thankfully it was a quick train with no stops ’til Antibes, so we were only on it for about 12 minutes. Once we got to the Antibes station, Addie was there waiting for us! Such a sweet reunion! It was so good to finally be all together again!

Addie looks refreshed, but you can tell the rest of us are a bit tired and disheveled from our long journey.

The walk from the train station into “Vieilles Antibes” was beautiful. Although we were a little noisy with our roller luggage on the bumpy cobblestone streets. Antibes is a seaside town in the French Riviera filled with lots of amazing history. The stone wall around the old town is just one of its cool historical aspects. I’ll be sharing many more pictures of this amazing town in this and future posts, as it is so unique and our favorite of all the places we visited.

Our AirBnb wasn’t quite ready since we got to Antibes before check-in, so we went straight to Addie’s apartment to drop off our luggage for a bit.

I’ll show a few more pics of Addie’s neighborhood later in this post, but her apartment is nestled in the rampart walls of the old town. She has a beautiful view of some of the colorful buildings that Antibes is known for.

At this point, we were starving since we hadn’t eaten since before we landed in London, so we headed down the street from Addie’s apartment and spied some sandwiches in a boulangerie window that we couldn’t resist.

Then it was finally time to check in to our apartment, so we grabbed our luggage from Addie’s and walked the short four minute walk to our place.

This is the AirBnb we stayed in and absolutely loved it. It was a two-story apartment that gave us plenty of room to spread out, and had the character and charm of a typical old French apartment, which was exactly what we wanted. One of our favorite parts was the rooftop terrace where we had a cool view of the old rooftops and even the mountains in the distance. In this picture, it was too cloudy to see the snow covered peaks of the French Alps, but on a clear day, we could see the mountain peaks!

We decided we needed some groceries in the apartment, so we rounded up Addie’s roomie Abbi (one of her besties from back home), and us girls took a walk to the store. The boys were beat (especially Tate – since he was recovering from influenza A that he’d been diagnosed with just 5 days before our trip), so they stayed back so he could go to bed early.

Above is one of the town squares where they hold flea markets on certain days. Most of the old town is pedestrian only due to the narrow cobblestone streets, so you see lots of people out walking around. We ended up being there during a holiday for French schools, so there were a lot of tourists there with us.

The girls here are posing right outside our apartment door on our cute little street.

That night we made some pasta for dinner. Tate was already fast asleep, but thankfully by the next day, he was feeling rested and much better!

That night we walked back to the girls’ apartment to pick up Addie’s stuff so she could spend the night with us. In the picture below you can see the rampart walls on the left. Inside of those walls is the girls’ apartment.

Their apartment is just through that archway and down a little street. So cool that they get to live in such a unique place!

When we returned to our place that night, an overwhelming wave of gratitude washed over me as I sank into our bed, ready to surrender to sleep. So thankful that God would allow me to return to France after 25 years and get to share the adventure with my husband and kids. I couldn’t wait for the memories we would make together over the next ten days!