Anthony Bourdain said, “travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.” I was lucky enough to be able to support the travel opportunity that E and G had this summer, and it was with a similar sentiment in mind that I was grateful that they had the chance to go see another corner of the world.

I am happy to report that the trip was a success in all aspects.

I was not terribly worried about their eating habits. For one thing, I know that organized tours such as the one they were on tend to frequent restaurants that are pretty predictable.

My kids have also been challenged on previous trips to step outside their comfort zones and try new foods. They’ve discovered they enjoy more foods than they don’t like.

However, we didn’t take into account some of the outside influences. On one occasion, they were served duck. To her credit, E tried it, but she said all she could think about were her cute little ducks at home, and she just couldn’t continue eating it, even though it tasted fine.

G reported that it tasted like pheasant and he had no qualms about eating it. “Hey, they were already dead,” was his response.

E was also quick to rat out the fact that her brother had eaten “all of his vegetables” while they were in France.

G is well known for his carnivore tendencies and only when he was afraid of making a bad impression on a friend’s family did he discover that lettuce and tomato on a burger are actually delicious.

When I piled his dinner plate with vegetables at home, including some that he’d grown in his garden, he was quick to slide most of them back onto my plate. “Mom, it’s like reading. I can eat them when I have to, but I just don’t like them enough to eat them all the time.”

I suppose I just have to take the win that he’s well-mannered enough to eat what’s put in front of him most of the time, and his health doesn’t appear to be suffering.

It was also interesting to me how their town and country mouse attitudes also played out.

E was entranced by the Louvre. She wanted to spend days there, examining every painting, sculpture and exhibit. While she enjoyed all of their stops, except when they were seeing yet another church, she definitely wants to go back and explore the distant corners and more remote sites of the city.

G, on the other hand, has been to Paris once and now he never has to go back there again.

However, he has already started plugging for a family vacation to St. Malo, a beachside town, that from the pictures, looks lovely. He was also taken with the gardens at Versailles and couldn’t wait to get home to show me his “latest” plan for livestock and garden expansions.

I was surprised a few days later to hear G talking about potential study abroad opportunities. While A has had his eye on a few different programs overseas, it never came up when G was talking about the different opportunities he could pursue in college.

G is very good at finding adventure in his own backyard, literally, and I’d always just thought of him as more of a homebody than the other two, so this was a surprise to me.

“What changed?” I asked him. “I don’t know. It’s like I always knew that there were other places out there, but now that I’ve been there, I just want to see more,” he said. “Oh, so like a certain je ne sais quois,” I said, trying to tie the whole French thing together. He just rolled his eyes at me. Not everything about him changed.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. I noticed that E appeared to be crying in one picture, taken by a friend on the plane.

There had been turbulence and as it was her first time flying over water for a very long stretch, she had some anxiety.

The two of them are also sure that they’ve acquired lung cancer, since, for the first time in their lives, they were exposed to a lot of people smoking in a lot of public places.

As the smoke from the Canadian wildfires settled on us for a few days, I was informed it smelled “just like France.”

I had simply hoped that my kids would have fun, and maybe learn a few things, but having them come home eager for their next adventure, as well as having a few inside jokes that “you just had to be there for,” was more than I could have hoped for, and made all the sacrifices it took to get them there worth it.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News