Rainy Rouen

Carousel in the rain outside Notre Dame Cathedral, Rouen

This sweet carousel was deserted; buckets of rain would have discouraged even the most determined child. It sits outside the Rouen version of a Notre Dame cathedral. This one contains, we hear, the heart of Richard the Lionhearted, and is beautiful but not off the charts compared to some others we’ve seen.

Rouen was a surprise; lovely in a modest sort of way – even the H&M and Printemps stores were little. The history is profound however, for it was here that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

We have spent a lot of time on this trip with people with strong Catholic faith. Visiting cathedrals and shrines with them has really illuminated the meaning and depth of emotion they communicate. It’s been very moving.

The rest of the day we sailed down the Seine and out into the sea enroute to the Schelde River and Antwerp.

It was stormy and the ship bounced around a bit. Now we’re almost there and the River is calm and wide, giving us time to process all we’ve seen. Half of us leave the cruise in Amsterdam on Monday so we’re also preparing goodbyes to people we’ve come admire and care about. Yet another gift of life on the road (or water, really)

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons. View all posts by Cynthia Samuels