A case can now be made that Carol is a slip-and-fall attorney’s dream. Back in Lyon during our first trip together (is that when I should have started thinking about travel insurance?) she had an epic heels-over-head tumble as she left our restaurant and started home in a drizzly French rain that turned those ancient tiled […]

DL 65 to Paris We were walking in the hotel parking lot after checking out when Carol realized she didn’t have her jean jacket. I continued on to our rental and put the luggage in the trunk while she went back to retrieve it. At the rental return we were on the bus to the Delta terminal, when she realized […]

Our upcoming European trip will be different on two fronts. First, we’re going for the longest stretch for one excursion: almost six weeks, give or take. Secondly, “excursion” is a misnomer. For we’re going to spend all this time in a place we’ve already been to and had extended our stay once we got there. This time, we’ll be expanding […]

Day 20 Flamencos and staying up late Carol had been hinting at finding a nightclub featuring Flamenco dancing throughout our whole trip. I’d spent the whole trip hoping to avoid just that. I’d had my fill of the art form in Seville during the Feria. It’s a lot of twirling, arm swinging and stomping around with a rose stem in your […]

Days 16-19 Beach Boy   When Carol and I first got together, I had stated unequivocally my opposition to sand, the reality of it, the very concept of it and the grit of it that manages to find itself into every crevice and moving part of my body – especially  and particularly how it winds […]

Days 12–15 Nothing happening and loving every minute   These blogs are written from a daily journal I keep when Carol and I travel. It’s little more than a tick-tock of the day’s activities, no matter how routine. Nothing of what I record is worth a blog itself; the notes are meant to jog the […]

Days 9-11 Meet the Rotarians   The winds had calmed, which meant our day-trip to Cadiz would be by ferry and not by bus. You might remember that Cadiz had been our original planned destination, but thanks to Carol’s monumental screw up, we wound up in Rota, and as Robert Frost said of the road […]

Days 6-8 Paradise extended   Carol and I had been in Rota for exactly four days, during which it rained on all four. On the fifth, the weather broke. We walked Rota’s Beach and streets without umbrellas and sat out on our rooftop terrace, all for the first time. In spite of the sometime sideways […]

Days 3-5 Devon and the Deep Blue Sea   While the weather remained quite unsettled by wind and rain, we were still able to take advantage of the breaks to make a couple of discoveries that would help define our stay in Rota. The first couple though, not so much.   A friend of Carol’s […]

Grocery Shopping and that’s about it   The sunny skies were a pleasant surprise based on the forecast, but we took advantage of the break to do our weekly food shopping, now that we were native Rotarians. Well, almost. The natives would know of the Carrefour supermarket around the corner from us about a five […]