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’ve been rereading Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence by reading it aloud to Carol. Movie night with a BBC DVD of the book followed this past weekend, and then we dove right into Mayle’s sequel Toujours Provence. Our longest stay in France will be in the same apartment hotel I stayed in Avignon, when I was reading A Year for the first time to myself. Just about everything Carol and I will be seeing together is well trod ground from Mayle’s books. I, of course, will be seeing all of it for the first time. (I spent five days in Avignon that first time, too.)