If three weeks in Europe on twelve trains to seven French cities with me didn’t reveal to Carol why she should hit LAX running and just keep running, I should probably conclude we’re a good match. There would be precedent. After all, I’d spent five years with Carolyn fully expecting to hear her crying out in a dream, “the horror, the horror!” That never happened, so I guess I should feel pretty good about Carol and I as a couple. I do, but it’s not because I at all believe I bring any special gifts or skills to any relationship, let alone this one. The grounds for success, I truly believe, were, as they say, pre-existing conditions for Carol and I to become a team.

Three weeks on the road should have revealed one of us to have been completely incompatible with the other. I’m talking about me, of course. For three weeks we rode trains from one French city to another with no real itinerary or objective in mind. We stayed in hotels of my personal choosing, which is a euphemism for “surprisingly habitable.” We walked everywhere, with everywhere serving as our primary sightseeing objective. In short, our three weeks of companion travel came very close to the response of “nothing” that I gave to Carol the time she’d asked me what I was looking for when I traveled. And she remarked several times she was having the time of her life. For someone more accustomed to hearing that phrase uttered more in a context of “doing time” rather than having it, I was relieved. I’m also encouraged, which may or may not be a good thing. Probably not.

Our apartment was on the second floor (third floor in American nomenclature), a sharply angled and narrow creaking wooden stairway leading up to it. At the landing, the manager opened both doors of the opposing rooms and bid us enter.

   Carol and I have been talking about our next train trip to Europe, and we’ve already agreed it would be Italy: Her to visit a friend in Tuscany, and me to continue my pursuit of the Best Lasagna in the World.

   And so comes National Geographic Books’ Tasting Italy, A Culinary Journey,  a gorgeously illustrated (no surprise there) volume that may have booksellers scratching their heads whether to display the book in their travel department or their cookbook section. (My suggestion: stack ‘em in both.)

The 12:04 to Strasbourg

   One of the traits that I first saw in Carol was how firmly her two feet were planted on the ground. With me, my life reads more like my feet are firmly planted in mid-air. So from the beginning I thought we’d make a good match. Then came Lyon, and I’m no longer sure where our feet are firmly planted, if they’re firmly planted or if they’re even our feet

   Worse than sightseeing, for me anyway, is sightseeing with a group. And the worst of all is sightseeing with a group on a wine tour. As Carol and I walked to the pickup point in downtown Lyon for our group tour of a Beaujolais winery, my stomach knotted over the thought of listening to a bunch pseudo experts extolling the virtues of a young pinot noir “with notes of eucalyptus and bok choy,” and the ever-present “soupcon of asparagus.” I only wanted to know one thing: how do you get red wine from white grape juice.

   Carol’s smile had that special illumination that appears whenever she is walking along a beach. I noticed it first when we walked the Pacific beaches near our new home in southern California. And it was out in force here along the French Riviera, where for me my beaming grin came from how the citizens of Nice handle the sand.

   Carol and I have been traveling together for two weeks now, and we’ve been having as wonderful a time as I’d expected. It’s when I think that everything is going great that I normally start to worry that something is about to reveal itself as terribly wrong. Carol calls it Reid being Reid.

   “I’m having a wonderful time,” Carol said to me, as we waited for our train to Nice. “I love these train rides.”

 I have reacted to bananas going from ripe to rotten in just a couple of days within a bowl of fruit, so I felt I had a pretty good emotional feel for the painter Paul Cezanne’s better-known subjects even before Carol and I arrived in Aix-en-Provence.

   The apartment here in Avignon was perfect: A spacious bedroom/dining area, adequate shower and functional kitchen. There were even enough outlets for our chargers. The complex itself was gated, with an inexpensive laundry and key entry for both the building and the apartment where we’d call home for the next six days. There were three grocery stores, well stocked with vins du pays within a minute’s walk. And one featured everything we’d need for dinners at home. The only luxury we lacked was a private patio. Since we were on the ground floor, Carol and I simply set about the task of creating one.