A BELGIAN ODYSSEY

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A suburban American housewife, Patty LaPlante, finds herself transplanted to a little town in Belgium-a result of her husband's corporate transfer. Her lifelong dream of travel is finally coming to pass, but the adjustment is hard for their three children, who are reluctant to leave everything they know. Given her propensity to attract trouble (think Lucy Ricardo!), her naivete lands Patty into many comic misadventures, such as introducing the Mexican ambassador to a roomful of people by the wrong name, accepting a lift on a lonely road in Spain from a man who thought she was a street-walker, and dealing in diamonds in a shady part of Antwerp. As her husband states, "Every time she walks out the door, I wonder if I'll ever see her again." But there are poignant and heartrending moments as well. There is the day at the Luxembourg War Memorial Cemetery when she finds herself standing on General George S. Patton's grave, as well as touring East Berlin during the German blockade and seeing both sides of the infamous Wall. At the end of her husband's assignment, however, Patty had grown through her experiences and become more street-smart and worldly-wise. With the lessons she learned, she knows she can never return to the past, nor remain the person she used to be. Patrice LaPlante was born in New York City and lived there until the age of thirteen, when her family made a post-World War II move to a small town in the most northern reaches of New York State-a stone's throw to nowhere, she always thought. After graduation, she was anxious to leave the remoteness of the area and high-tailed it to Washington where she landed a job with the U.S. Geological Survey-a branch of the Department of Interior. It was the height of the Cold War era, and after being cleared for confidential work, she transposed Eastern bloc countries aerial photographs into map form. This is where her interest in world travel became a passion, and she wondered if she would ever get to see all of the places she was dreaming and drawing about. Then came marriage, and with it a move to an island in northern New York State. While her husband was traveling world-wide for the company (when is it going to be my turn, for heavens' sake?) she continued to can corn, pull weeds and play bridge-lots of bridge. Times were wildly unfulfilling. When her husband received an overseas transfer-a eureka moment in her life-the family moved to a little town outside of Antwerp, Belgium. Their 44-month odyssey gave rise to a memoir, A Belgian Odyssey. Patty is a member of the Authors Guild, and when not traveling, she lives in Danbury, Connecticut with her husband, two cats, and a shefflera plant.