If there is anything nicer than seeing your kid with a big grin on her face, then I would have to say it’s seeing your kid with a big grin on her face as she leans out the window of a 200-year-old French farmhouse.

Add that to my wishlist: 200-year-old French farmhouse.

Of all the lousy little gin joints in all the lousy little towns around the world where she could have ended up when she decided to be an exchange student for half a year, after all the horror stories we heard from friends (stuck with paranoid religious fundamentalists in Canada, arrested and jailed in South America…) Beta ends up with a charming family in the above-mentioned house in the hills just north of the South of France, with a room of her own with a view of mountains and forest out her window. Down the road is the Isere valley, where she goes rowing twice a week.

Since arriving, Beta had sent us quiet, little email messages, nothing gushy. We had no idea it was that nice. Unlike her father, Beta tends towards understatement.

When Alpha and I drove there this weekend to deliver her harp, we were dreading the long trip. We needn’t have worried. We hadn’t even arrived yet and had vowed to have more adventures like this. Check the oil, gas and tire pressure, fill the windshield fluid container up so you can wash off the bugs and just drive off into the blue.

I would say Beta is a lucky person, but to some extent we make our own luck. It was her idea to enroll in the exchange program. It was she who insisted on France. Etc.

It was good to see her happy and in such a positive setting. It was good to see her enjoying herself and integrated and not homesick.

And the house. You know the old French farmhouses in the design and architecture and lifestyle books? They really exist. The village has a single movie theater: it’s in their cellar. With real movie seats and Dolby sound. They gave us a tour.

We walked around the village with her host parents and their big, friendly, stupid menace of a dog. He had welcomed me by licking my arm and trying to chew off my watch. Host dad threw a plastic bucket lid (“le Frisbee”) for him. They showed us a field that had been turned into lots and sold and que terrible now houses were being built there. I asked them what the price of land was. They told me.

“Wow! We could sell our house in Austria and build a huge house here for that price,” I said. “We should move here, Alpha. I could teach English at the school.”

“And I could teach Japanese,” she said.

“Oui,” the host mother said. “But the winter is very long and very cold here.”

“Hm,” we said. “Still, look at that wonderful view.”

“And in April? It is raining all the time.”

It was fun winding her up.

As we walked, enjoying the sunset, the dog loped ahead and disappeared through the gate of a nice, old home with a high wall around it. We heard a small child scream and a few seconds later the dog reemerged with a red ball in its mouth.

It was a warm day. We met various friends and relatives in the neighborhood. We met the grandparents. We loved it. They were all very nice and spoke English and German to us after we proved we could not speak French. We said, we heard the French were snotty, but you’re all so nice. Paris is not France, they said.

They ate a lot of food but they were all slim. I don’t know how they do that. Lots of walks with the dog, maybe. There’s a book out in Austria right now, “Why are Frenchwomen so slim?” would be an approximate translation of the title. The theory is that they take time to eat, they enjoy eating, the portions aren’t huge and no between-meal snacks. Nothing we saw while we were there would contradict that. But we were there only an afternoon. We slept in a spare room that night and left the next morning at 4.

We drove about 1,500 km, there and back. We would have driven a lot more, but we took the train through Austria. On the way there we took the night train. You can drive your car onto the train, see. Like a ferry. And we booked a room on the train, to sleep, so we’d arrive fresh the next morning. The room was small (roughly the dimensions of an airliner toilet, only with bunk beds) but clean and what do you want, it’s a train? Coming back we took a day train and just dozed in regular seats. We had a compartment all to ourselves. We arrived back in Vienna exhausted, but not as wiped out as if we had driven the entire way. We were first off the train because the Dobl