"I have shards of glass in my underwear"

Last weekend, we had a rare opportunity. With both girls playing in a warehouse-sized indoor playland at a birthday party for one of Molly's friends from school, the two parents got a chance to spend a couple hours without children. The party was a long way from home -- on the other side of Orléans from Olivet -- so we decided to drive around and see what that area was like.

We had a great time wandering through a beautiful park/forest near the old village center of Saran (again, the early fall weather was fantastic) and from there we decided to check out some of the parks in Fleury-les-Aubrais, another Orléans suburb.

After we had parked the car at one park, Cricket attempted to roll up her window. Hah! Somehow, it had come off of its track, and despite our coaxing and prodding it only got more stuck the more we messed with it. Finally, when the window would move neither up nor down, one final bit of pressure on the handle resulted in an amazing explosion, sending shards of "safety glass" raining down all over Cricket's side of the car. This was rather stunning to us as well as the group of elderly people walking by on the sidewalk several feet away. Naturally, they stopped and (we think) expressed their concern, while we realized that situations like exploding car windows are difficult to express without a thorough command of a language. I think they eventually realized that (a) we didn't speak French very well and (b) they hadn't just witnessed some violent domestic dispute.

Also, it turns out that it's difficult to photograph a side window that has just exploded, especially using a cell phone.

On the bright side, car insurance in France seems to be sold as a whole bunch of coverage bundled together, with little room for modifications. One of the coverages we had purchased only two weeks prior to the exploding window was for damage to glass, something we might not have done in the US. Woo-hoo! Cricket managed to explain what had happened on the cell phone -- no mean feat -- while Dave did his best to clean up the glass inside the car. While she was at it, she mentioned the small crack that had appeared in the windshield. Then, voilà! Two days later, a couple guys came to our apartment in their big glass-van (shown in picture, with the colored writing on the side) and quickly replaced both windows.

No word yet on whether all of the billing stuff was taken care of completely -- the glass guys seemed to be satisfied when they left -- but we're cautiously optimistic that this was simply part of the insurance we bought. Amazing.

By the way, we're not sure how the shards of glass got in Cricket's underwear, but we're happy to report that she was uninjured.