Another French Immersion Weekend

We got together for the twenty-fifth immersion weekend in beautiful Manchester, Michigan. The weather was picture perfect, it was totally amazing. Get this, 25 years ago, a trio of french teachers decided that they would take the responsability for providing a place where teachers could go for a weekend and converse in french with other adults. To talk about classroom activities and trips taken. These three women wanted to have a place where meals and laughter could be shared and enjoyed. They found the perfect host in Dainava, a Lithuanian camp located just outside Manchester. The facilities are clean and useful, but not so comfortable that the teachers stay in their rooms alone, eveyone loiters in the great room or the kitchen and everyone speaks french - all weekend long. It was neat.

As a person given the gift of foreign language (having grown up in a bi-lingual household, I never had to work at learning french, it was given to me) I took it for granted. When I see these people taking time from their lives, using their own money, to come and spend a weekend just for the pleasure of speaking french, it really blows my mind. How totally cool is that? I would love to be able to give each of these teachers some sort of recognition, even though that is the farthest thing from their mind when they sign up for, and come to this weekend.

So in these very unsettling times for our country, it certainly feels good to have certain things that I can rely on, like finding these incredible people every autumn. I am very lucky indeed to have this in my life.

Now we start the busy time. I am headed up north with my husband to help him in a trade show and next week we begin our journey by going to Columbus for my neices wedding and then we get to spend four days in Chicago. My mother is coming along for the fun so I won't have to spend my days alone, and can get out and about with company. We come back Thursday because that same night there is another wine dinner here (there is one the night before we leave as well!). We are only in October for goodness sakes, it gets way busier in November, then the sales take off for the first part of December. Hopefully we are exhausted by that time because that would mean that we have had a successful season.

The harvest is still on-going and we can't get any information from them other than generic terms because there is some sort of superstition about giving opinions prior to everything being in the cellars. We should know more soon.