By 10:30 on Friday morning, women were arriving at my house dressed for Mallorca, Sicily, Kyoto, Tahiti, Capri, Athens and several other destinations that would have made our shared transportation considerably more complicated.

Fortunately, we were only going to Arnaud’s.

This was the latest installment of our Krewe des Cloches gatherings and when I say truer words were never spoken…

This Day Was Meant For Us!

The luncheon theme was “Flights of Fancy” – and no, I didn’t pay Arnaud’s to agree to that – so how could we fail to be anything but over the top?

I instantly envisioned a tablescape built around the places, people and ideas that make us want to pack a bag—or, at the very least, open a bottle of Champagne and discuss packing one.

But simply choosing a favorite destination seemed far too easy.

So I created an entire publishing house instead.

FOURTEEN WOMEN. FOURTEEN STORIES.

The premise behind Once Upon a Story was deceptively simple: each woman would be given a destination and become the heroine of her own fictional travel book.

Not simply a destination printed on a pretty cover.

A book.

Each had an alluring title. A somewhat scandalous and totally (not) believable plot. A cover designed specifically for its heroine. An excerpt. An author biography. A back cover. And because apparently we know no reasonable stopping point, all fourteen were designed as a cohesive collection that could almost pass for a particularly glamorous shelf at an airport bookstore.

Almost.

The genres were as different as the women themselves.

The collection traveled just about everywhere—and crossed more than a few international and personal boundaries along the way.

There was an assassin loose at the Luxor, an affair unfolding in Mallorca, grapes being stomped in Sicily and something decidedly suspicious happening beneath the blossoms of Kyoto. Manhattan went mid-century. Tahiti whispered. The Mayan sky held its secrets. Capri brought the glamour, Baden-Baden the spa intrigue and Athens, naturally, required a goddess.

The titles alone suggested that several of these women should probably never be left unsupervised abroad.

As for me? I gave myself Italy.

Because if you’re going to write yourself into a somewhat fictional life, you may as well give yourself a grand wardrobe and a 5* plan by land, rail, and sea…and absolutely no interest in restraint.

Some of the books were glamorous. Some were mysterious. A few were slightly scandalous. At least one involved murder.

In other words, everyone had been cast appropriately.

Because that is part of what travel allows us to do, isn’t it?

We can be completely ourselves and still wonder who we might be somewhere else.

THE HEROINES ASSEMBLE

The First Toast began at 10:30, which is perfectly respectable when transportation has been arranged and fourteen women have a book signing to attend.

The women gathered that morning come from different parts of my life. Some friendships stretch back decades. Some grew through travel or the travel industry. Others came through mutual friends, and some are fairly new.

What this particular group shares isn’t a history of having done everything together. It’s a willingness to participate enthusiastically when someone says, “I have an idea. There will be costumes, Champagne and transportation.”

Nobody asks enough questions. They just show up having fully understood the assignment.

And with that, crystal flutes were emptied into roadie cups, our dignity and restraint back-burnered, and our Flight of Fancy officially got underway.

Next stop: Arnaud’s.

FROM PAGE TO TABLE

By the time we arrived at Arnaud’s, the surprise was waiting.

Fourteen books had been staged across the table—one for each woman, complete with her own title, destination and fictional alter ego.

And because apparently fourteen custom books weren’t enough, the rest of the table had gotten the full Flights of Fancy treatment too: French blue, aqua, ivory and gold, a Louis Vuitton train case in the center of the table, clouds, hot-air balloons and personalized journals at each place.

There was no single destination because there wasn’t supposed to be. We had everything from Manhattan and Mallorca to Kyoto, Capri, Tahiti and the Egyptian desert represented around one table.

Basically, we went around the world in style without ever leaving Arnaud’s.

SPEAKING OF ARNAUD’S…

There is something particularly “Only in New Orleans” about taking an objectively ridiculous premise, dressing properly for it, staging props around a themed table at one of the city’s finest restaurants, and proceeding as though all of this is entirely normal.

But for all the fun we have with these lunches, Arnaud’s never lets the spectacle overshadow the reason we love being there in the first place. The food is consistently exceptional, the service is among the best in the city, and no matter what slightly crazy idea we bring through the door, they execute it flawlessly.

There’s a reason we keep coming back.

Once everyone was seated, the fictional plots gave way to the considerably less controllable real ones.

There was lunch. There was Champagne. And Cosmos. And Espresso Martinis. And just about every other libation a self-respecting heroine could conjure up. There were books to sign traveling around the table. And there were fourteen women who had committed with impressive seriousness to something that was never intended to be taken seriously at all.

And somewhere between reading the back covers and deciding which of these imaginary adventures we’d actually take, I realized this may have been my favorite Krewe des Cloches event yet.

What started as one slightly unhinged idea had somehow turned into an entire fictional universe with fourteen leading ladies who bore a suspicious resemblance to the women sitting around the table.

And it was proof that…

Sometimes you don’t actually have to go anywhere to let travel take you somewhere.

IT TAKES A KREWE

From vision board to reality.

Of course, fourteen fictional heroines do not simply materialize at a perfectly set table in the French Quarter without a rather wonderful cast working behind the scenes.

Arnaud’s once again gave us the kind of setting that makes even our more elaborate ideas feel perfectly at home. Dunn & Sonnier helped bring the visual world of Once Upon a Story to life with little bud vases for each heroine, while Vilcy at Specialties by V handled the personalized details that turned an idea into something each guest could take home.

And then there is the team that quite literally keeps Krewe des Cloches moving. Greg and Shatel Chapman (Chapman’s Transportation) have become far more than our ride into town. They are part transportation team tag-teaming in SUVs with Luxury Rides LLC for our limbobus, part setup crew and part willing accomplices. They are the people who arrive early, load the boxes, transport the party participants and somehow find themselves helping me turn a dining room into whatever world I have dreamed up this time, and I am enormously grateful for all of it.

To all of them: thank you for continuing to play along.

CHEERS TO THE DESTINATIONS WE CARRY HOME

Long before we board a plane, most of us have already begun imagining the destination.

It may start with a photograph we save. A movie. A novel. A hotel we cannot stop thinking about. A restaurant someone insists we must try. A friend returning from somewhere fabulous with enough stories to send us directly to Google Flights.

We imagine the place.

And almost inevitably, we imagine ourselves in it.

Travel does that.

But its influence doesn’t end when we come home, either.

It follows us into the books we read and the movies we watch. Into the food we cook, the music we play and the rooms we decorate. It changes the things we notice. It gives us references and ideas. It introduces people who might never otherwise have entered our lives.

And, yes, sometimes it inspires the table we set for lunch.

That has always been the idea behind Filling the Nest, even before I had particularly good words for it.

Travel is part of the story. A very big part.

But so is what we bring home.

The friendships. The inspiration. The curiosity. The confidence to try something new. The desire to gather people around a table and transport them somewhere else for a few hours—even if that table happens to be only a few miles from home.

For Once Upon a Story, we simply made that idea literal.

Fourteen women became fourteen heroines. Fourteen destinations became fourteen fictional lives. And a collection of imaginary Flights of Fancy stories became the excuse for a very fabulous afternoon among friends.

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