Last week I mailed my old passport back as part of my renewal application. For the next two or three months I can’t leave the country if I wanted to. This is different from Covid. Then, travel wasn’t available; now it is but I can’t go anywhere. It doesn’t matter that we hadn’t planned any […]

“Airplane mode”    The disadvantage of booking an airport hotel room the night before your flight home is that being way out from the city, your café and wine shop options will be slim, if they exist at all. I’d taken care of the wine shop issue by packing a leftover bottle of room wine from […]

“Last Tango in Orléans”    At first I thought Carol believed she’d turned a corner with me and sightseeing based on yesterday’s achievements that included a cathedral, an Old Town walk, a fresh food market, a tram ride and a midnight light show. (Whew. Just writing it down sounds like a full week, rather than one […]

Tourist Time    Orléans sports a cathedral, an Old Town, a riverside and a recreation of the house where Joan d’Arc resided during her successful defeat of the English during the Hundred Years War. In other words, strap on the Skechers Relaxed Fits, black socks, cargo shorts, faded XXL T-shirts with “Branson Missouri” emblazoned across the […]

Moving day II: The 12:23 to Orléans    By the time we realized that splitting our two weeks in France between two different small cities was probably a good idea, we were down to our last three days. Still, Carol’s wish to be done with Marrakesh, coupled with an itch to see something new, pointed us […]

July 14th Bastille Day    The heat wave had taken full hold in France by now, plus we’d seen and done most that there was to see and do in Tours. So my suggestion that we just hang out in the apartment until the National Day activities would get underway at 6:00 p.m. that evening was […]

“A day about nothing “ Carol has a word for a particular kind of dilapidated, decrepit or substandard look to a place. The word is “skeevie.” She originally applied it to some of my choices for accommodations on our first overseas trip together. I’d gotten in the habit of procuring accommodations that were thrifty and […]

“Birthday girl” Originally, we planned to leave for France on Carol’s birthday. We pushed the trip up to the 4th, when neither of us felt like being part of a 4th of July celebration that seemed to be celebrating the birth of a MAGA demon child. Even though the France trip was the birthday gift, […]

“Moving day”    Monday marked our first glorious week in the quaintly, bustling yet pastoral, half-timber, medieval town of Tours. It was also moving day to our new air conditioned apartment in advance of expected 100 degree temperatures. It was also laundry day. Living like the locals.    It was also living like the homeless, as we […]

“Pointillist picnic”    Of all the sightseeing I would just as soon avoid, cathedrals are at the bottom of the list. With castles and chateaux, you’re forced to walk through drawing rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, studies with endless displays of tapestries, depicting deer hunts and oil portraits of useless dandies and wretchedly spoiled children. To me they’re […]