Our Story

2010

I leave Paris after two years for Lyon to continue studying in engineering school and start my first job as an apprentice engineer for three years. I meet a lot of people at that time that will become strong friendships, and will lead me to stay in Lyon permanently.

2016

I moved to Lyon in 2016, after finishing my master’s degree in French at the University of Virginia.  The French department there had an exchange with a university in Lyon (Lyon 2), so I decided to go teach English in Lyon for a year.

2017

Early that year, I decided to quit a job that required three hours of commute per day and was draining a lot of my energy. At the same time, I looked for ways to meet new people, as student life was fading away and people’s life went on. I found out that the Lyon’s subreddit group was having meet ups going on every month or so. I joined at some point for a board game night, met extremely kind and welcoming people, and kept going more or less at every event. The group quickly grew, and the events became more frequent, especially with a trivia night in Kelly’s pub that was happening every Monday.

Another new regular of these meetings was a cute American girl named Hannah. We talked a few times, that became texting a lot, then I asked her out for a date in a beer garden in the city, the Malting Pot. She had told me that she was considering doing her PhD on a French WWII related subject, and I told her that I was going to that French WWII related museum the same day, which might both have half-truth, but it was added to our first date anyway!

That first date went well, as you can imagine, as well as the next ones. Unfortunately, it was very short because of the calendar. Hannah had to leave for the US for a month and a half, and I was going on a road trip in Croatia for two weeks as soon as she’d get back. That didn’t stop us, and we were happy to meet again after that.

2017

Nearing the end of the 2016-17 school year, I decided to stay another year in Lyon. This was in part because I liked it so much, but also because I was supposed to be coming up with a subject for my doctoral dissertation and had exactly zero ideas, so figured another year would do me good. But, many of the other English teachers I had become friends with were leaving, and I decided that if I was going to stay another year, it might be good to try to make friends with some actual French people. So finally, after working up the courage for several weeks, I forced myself to show up to a meetup of the Lyon subreddit (a website with forums for people who live in Lyon to discuss various things) for a bar trivia night at the Kelly’s Irish Pub on May 15, 2017. I noted that there was a cute boy at the end of the table (there were about a dozen people there) but didn’t really talk much more than that as we weren’t sitting near each other. Over the next couple weeks, we got to chat a bit more as the pub quiz event took place every Monday.

Then on June 17th, our group of Reddit friends met up for a picnic at a local park. During the picnic, there had been discussion of going to a very vaguely described “Greek Night” at an address that no one seemed to be able to actually find on Google Maps. Nevertheless, after we left the picnic, Arthur and I messaged each other on the Reddit website to try to organize a post-picnic-evening, and Arthur quickly proposed that we exchange phone numbers as that would make communication much easier. We never did make it to the Greek Night (if it ever truly existed) but did meet up with folks for drinks, and continued to text each other in the following days.

Sometime that week, after several days of near-constant texting and getting to know each other, Arthur messaged me, “ça te dirait qu’on aille se boire un verre en fin de semaine?” My French being fine, but not perfect, I immediately started freaking out about if this was a date or not (I hoped it was!). I apparently took several hours to reply, because I was checking with multiple people if this constituted “asking me out” or not (the consensus was “yes”) so finally texted him back “yes!” in what I hoped was a casual way. We had our first date on June 24, 2017: The Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation, followed by drinks at a beer garden. We went out again the next weekend (visited the Prison de Montluc to continue the WWII theme, followed by dinner out) and that was pretty much it!

I had already planned to go home for the summer, but we talked every day, and picked right up again when I got back in the fall.

2018

We kept dating and had a lot of fun during the first half of that year, but all good things must come to an end, Hannah had to leave France permanently during the summer. She did not want to stay there indefinitely, and I did not want to move to the US for various reasons at that point.

Then two things happened. First, the separation was harder than expected. Then I got a good job opportunity in Toronto, Canada. It didn’t work out, but I thought that if I was eventually willing to move to Canada, I might as well move to the US. So we quickly got back together one ocean away from each other, and decided to work toward that.

2018

We kept dating throughout the start of 2018, but knew that a scary crossroads was heading our way.  We knew that neither of us wanted, at that point, to live in the other person’s country forever, so in July 2018, I made the excruciatingly difficult decision to fly back to the US alone to try to get a job and start a new life by myself.  Arthur brought me to the airport in Lyon, my stuff was way too heavy for the baggage limit but the nice lady let it through anyway, we stood in front of the line for security for as long as we could without me missing my plane, and then I went through the little automatic gate and left Arthur behind.  I was a disaster. I sobbed all the way to Ireland pretty much–the security man in Lyon asked me what was wrong madame, and a lady in line behind me told me that if my boyfriend and I were meant to be together, fate would find a way. A nice little boy in the Dublin airport offered me a kleenex. The flight to the US was awful; I was in a middle seat and the headphone jack didn’t work. I texted Arthur when I arrived safely (if not soundly) in Philadelphia, and discovered that my suitcase was lost.  It was a very, very terrible day on pretty much every count.

April 2019

First visit to the US, in New York City. It was a trip with my father’s family for his 50th birthday. I stayed longer to spend time with Hannah. I briefly met my soon-to-be brother and parents-in-law, then we spent a week in Washington, DC. It was a short but very successful trip overall!

2019

Fortunately, it only took a few months to walk that right back, and to figure out that “being broken up” was really not going to work for us.  Arthur realized that moving to the US actually didn’t sound too bad, and I stopped looking for a dream job in an East Coast Big City and contacted my old boss at Lyon 2 to ask for my old job back, which she graciously offered (thanks, Erica!)  I took a few summer jobs in Delaware to tide me over until I moved back to France that fall, and late August 2019, touched down in Lyon for what turned out to be an adventure I never could have imagined.

2020

In April/May, my attempts to emigrate via a work visa failed again, and would require trying again a year later with no better chance of success. In addition, Hannah’s residence permit linked to her job at Lyon 2 University is about to end.

We then decide to take another path, and to get married. We are in the middle of COVID, the whole of France is confined, so we are organizing this quickly and discreetly, almost secretly, in the village of Azay-le-Ferron, at my mother’s house. But we are doing this with the promise of having another more festive wedding ceremony with all of our loved ones when the situation is better and we are in the United States.

2020

March 2020 saw the start of Covid, and we didn’t decide that we hated each other despite spending pretty much 24 hours, all days, all the time together.  In May we contacted an immigration attorney to talk about the process of getting Arthur a “K1 fiancé visa” (what they have in 90 Day Fiancé), with the idea of moving to the US soon after that and getting town-hall married quickly upon arrival.  The lawyer told us that if we were planning on getting married anyway, that the more efficient route would be to simply get married in France, and then apply for a CR1 “spouse visa,” aka Green Card, from France. We hung up from that call, looked at each other, and pretty much went “welp, here we go then.”  We weren’t technically even “engaged” at that point, but set about immediately planning the quickest wedding we could.

The town hall in Lyon was backed up for marriage ceremonies through October.  In France, you can get married either in your town of residence, or the town of residence of your parents, so we contacted the town hall in Azay-le-Ferron, the teeny country village where Arthur’s mom lives. After a lot of PITA paperwork, they managed to schedule us for a marriage on August 8th.  After spending the night beforehand hand-hemming my dress and Arthur’s pants on the living room floor of our apartment, we took a 7 hour-long bus ride to Azay on August 7th, and I married Arthur Hoareau on August 8th, in the town hall of Azay-le-Ferron, in 100 degree heat and a green dress from Amazon, surrounded by his mom’s side of the family in real life, and my family on Zoom.

August 8, 2020

Officially married in Azay-le-Ferron, France.

2021

After getting derailed for a few months, and also it taking eternity and a day to get the documents together for the first step of the green card application process, in March, we finally UPS-ed an enormous stack of papers to the USCIS processing center in Texas.  And then we waited.

On June 24th, the 4-year anniversary of our first date, Arthur surprised me with the most amazing, personalized, handcrafted scavenger hunt across Lyon that I could ever have imagined.  We spent the afternoon following clues (well, I followed the clues that he wrote for me, and he helped me when I got stuck) and basking in the beauty of the city that we shared, and ended up at sunset on the top of the hill of Fourvière, looking out over the best view of Lyon.  The final clue in the puzzle spelled out “Will you marry me?” and…well, I couldn’t really very well say no. :)  We went and ate our body weight in Brazilian food and went home full of grilled meats and manioc chips, and also, officially engaged.

In September, we got an email saying that our box full of paper had been accepted!  So we set about putting together the next set of documents, which was thankfully submittable online.

2021

Even though it’s been on for a while, I feel like 2021 was really the COVID year for us. We were then both working remotely from home, and went from confinements, to curfews, to forced closed businesses. So it feels like we didn’t do much during that year, yet I enjoyed every moment Hannah and I spent together in our small apartment. It is also the year we started doing sport together!

During this year, in June, I made my official marriage proposal through a day of scavenger hunt across a city. I enjoyed preparing it, we had a lot of fun during that day, and she said yes (too late for no anyway, but still)!

The first step of our immigration process was also finally approved in September.

2022

In February, we got our final round of documents submitted online. Incredibly, we only had to wait a few months before we received an email in April saying that we were “DQ’d” or “Documentarily Qualified” and that all that remained for Arthur to do was to go to Paris for a very expensive, very basic medical exam, and then return to Paris at a later date for an interview that had yet to be scheduled. He went for his doctor’s appointment in May, and then a few weeks later returned to go to the US embassy for his final interview.

I went with him to Paris for that trip, we went to a delicious brasserie the night before, slept in an overpriced AirBnB with what sounded like constant partying outside on a Tuesday night, and the next morning we made our way to the embassy. He realized that he didn’t have new enough ID photos, so we ran throughout a few different metro stations trying to find a Photomaton for him to take pictures. That morning is memorialized in his 10-year Green Card photo. We got to the embassy and waited in line across the street with all the other people who had visa appointments. He couldn’t take anything electronic inside, so we loaded his laptop, Kindle, everything into my backpack outside the security tent and I said goodbye and good luck. I went off on a 2 hour walking tour of Paris, guided by an online “treasure hunt routes by Paris neighborhood” website I had found, and walked to the Louvre and back, through the jardins des Tuileries, trying not to be anxious about how his interview might be going. I got back and waited outside for only about 15 minutes before he emerged, tired, but victorious! We went to lunch at a Réunnionais restaurant and he told me how everything went. He would get his visa in the mail just a few days later.

With the administration part FINALLY COMPLETE, we headed off to see our friends Anna and Sam in London, came back and had Arthur’s siblings over for his birthday weekend in the end of July, then celebrated my birthday a week later, and a few days later headed off for several weeks of visiting family and friends in the west of France. We got back in the end of August, and then were able to host my sister for the first time ever! The end of her visit however marked the obligatory start of actual packing.

We had worked over the summer to sell bits and pieces from our closets and apartment online, so had chipped away at a fair amount, but September saw a whirlwind of intense messaging and meetings with strangers as we tried to sell and give away as much of our stuff as possible. What we decided to keep, we packed into 12 large boxes and 4 suitcases, shipped the boxes off to my parents’ house, and re-packed the suitcases a million times to make sure they were all in the weight limits.

We got an AirBnb right down the block from our apartment for the last few days of cleaning and moving, and after we turned in our keys on our final day, breathed a sigh of relief: one more thing checked off the list.

We had had an amazing leaving party with many of our closest friends at the Kelly’s–the bar where we met–a few weeks before we left, but we now took advantage of the last day in Lyon to enjoy the city just for ourselves. We walked across the river while the sun set over the city, and had our final evening at my favorite bar, the Hopstore, where we had spent many good nights over the past years. We had burgers and beer outside on the patio, and then went home to get our last good night’s sleep before the end of the longest journey ever.

The next day, we turned in the keys for the AirBnB and went for a final lunch at a favorite spot in our neighborhood, Siam Bistrot. We managed to transport our 4 massive suitcases up to Paris and to our airport hotel, which was Star Wars themed, and where we spent the night. The next morning we hauled our stuff up to the check-in, all went surprisingly smoothly, and off we were.

2022

On the opposite, 2022 seems to have been a race against time. Our immigration file was finally approved after two trips to Paris, including one to the American embassy. We did a little tour of France to visit as many people as possible before the big departure. We went to London. We made the most of Lyon, which we both love.

And above all, we prepared the move to Lynchburg, which was not an easy task. We took with us some boxes and suitcases, but for many things it was not possible or too expensive. We made the choice not to throw anything away, so we spent a lot of time and energy selling and donating all the stuff we had accumulated over the years.

October 5, 2022

Arrival on American soil. Arthur is officially an American permanent resident. We are tired from the trip, jet lag and the intense weeks leading up to the move, but also relieved: everything went well.

We are greeted at the Raleigh-Durham airport by all the family and flags 🇫🇷 🇺🇸!