Est-ce que tu parle Francais?

Welcome from the world of France!

We left this trip on Sunday (versus the usual Saturday, and sometimes Friday), because of a friend's wedding, which was a blast. Her reception was at City Hall in downtown St. Louis, which was a great venue. Steph and I were able to catch up with a bunch of old friends from PwC and had a good time.

On to France; I was not ready to go for this trip. I was ready from a standpoint that I have a really good team, and that it was going to be a good challenge of trying to manage three audits at once. But being that it is my fourth consecutive audit block out of the country, the travel is starting to wear a little thin. But, it will be nice to be home, tentatively, until January 2009 until this trip.

We left on Sunday AM, and it was hard saying goodbye to the girls (Onyx, Goldie, and most importantly, Steph), but I set off. We had our flight cancelled Saturday morning and re-routed through Raleigh; apparently they wanted to restrict air traffic with the Pope making an air appearance at Yankee Stadium. So, we made the typical STL - RALEIGH - LONDON - Lyon. We touched down in Lyon, without luggage. But, luckily for us, later that nite we were flying to Peyrehorade, which is the location of one of our corn seed manufacturing plants, and our luggage arrived just in time to pick it up at the Lyon airport, re-check for our Peyrehorade flight, and set off.

We arrived into Peyrehorade safely and without any hiccups. We are actually working in Peyrehorade and staying on the beach in a town called Biarritz. The hotel is pretty nice, but nothing spectacular. We thought massages were included in our room rate, as this is what our team from last year told us, but that is not accurate for this year. Oh well....they are only open at the Massage Parlor until 6 p.m., and we are not home by then anyway.

Friday, I will be traveling to Geneva, Switzerland, for the weekend. I will then be in Nimes, France, at our Seminis location, for most of the next two weekends (hopping to Lyon for a quick team meeting next Thursday, and next weekend we will be in Amsterdam....mmm, Heineken brewery).

Hope all is well.