Daedalian Adventures

The road ahead is rarely straight…

By Lynelle Barrett

Flat Stanley Goes to Europe

Over the last couple of months, my past has found me on Facebook. My high school clique of friends has gotten back together, but without the early 80’s haircuts and fluorescent plaid preppie clothes (although they are now sending me virtual “Crappy 80’s Gifts” and “Gifts from South Florida’s Past”). I have hooked up with my two best friends from college and a group of friends from my New Orleans years have turned up out of the blue.

A couple of weeks ago, one of these old friends contacted me through Facebook to ask if her 6-year old daughter, Riley, could send me a “Flat Stanley”.  Uhhhmm…sure…why not? By the way, what IS a Flat Stanley? (I hope it’s not like a noogie or a wedgie.) It turns out that Flat Stanley is a character in a book who started out as a regular kid but was flattened by a falling bulletin board. In his flattened state, he could be mailed to friends to have adventures. Riley’s class was doing a project involving the kids mailing Flat Stanleys out to see the world or to visit celebrities. When all the Stanleys return home, the kids will share their travel tales and hopefully learn a bit about the world. My friend said that, of all her friends, I lived the farthest away from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So my husband and I agreed to receive Stanley as our guest for a week.

Stanley had impeccable timing. He arrived two hours before we left for a weekend trip to Paris. So Stanley came with us to Paris to see the sights and meet REAL French people. He started out making friends on the Thalys Hispeed train while I took pictures of him in his seat. When we arrived in Paris, he took a ride on the metro (and made some more friends). Then he met my friends Nathalie and Marc, who were enthusiastic about Stanley’s visit. We took Stanley on a tour of Versailles, where he got to ride around the gardens in a golf cart. He visited the Eiffel tower. We’ve been there before but we made a special visit just for Stanley. He got to try Marc’s Canard a l’orange (He liked it.) and sampled French wine. He had lunch in a cafe, bought baguettes and took a walk in the Park near Cité Universitaire. Everywhere he went, he made friends. Being flat has obviously not affected Stanley’s joie de vivre.

When we returned to Holland, I took Stanley for a walk around Leiden. He got to see the difference between French and Dutch architecture. He also saw canals and windmills and lots of people riding bicycles. He saw the Stadhuis (City Hall) and the Nieuwe Rijn (part of the Rhine River). He even saw the Molen de Put, the windmill that was owned by Rembrandt’s father. When he was ready to travel home in his envelope, he took some souvenirs including a paper diorama of the gardens at Versailles and a book on the windmills of Holland.

We certainly enjoyed Stanley’s visit and were a bit sorry to see him leave. For just a 2-D guy, he brought another dimension to our trip to Paris. When Riley and her classmates grow up, I hope they are inspired to do some of the fun things that the Stanleys did, even though it is much harder to travel when you are 3-D.

Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley

The Official Flat Stanley Project

http://www.flatstanley.com/

Facebook

www.facebook.com

Lynelle Barrett lives in the Netherlands and wishes that more of her friends were flat so they could mail themselves for a visit. Check out photos of her adventures on her website at: http://lynelleinholland.spaces.live.com