highjinks58

Road trip!

I was supposed to join a group of friends in Ireland, but that tour has been postponed. In the meantime, I decided to take a road trip to a region I’ve long wanted to visit, the Aveyron.

The first part of the trip will be with friends Maryse and Claude, and we will set out early on Tuesday morning. After a few days together, we’ll split up and go our separate ways. With the blog, I thought I’d try something a little different for this trip, and do a short post every day. Be sure to keep checking in and follow along!

Two fine days

Two different sets of people, two different days, in the same region two hours northeast of Bize. It added up to a lot of time in the car, but it was well worth it.

On the first day, I traveled with Isabelle and Anthony to see the Viaduc de Millau, and later to have a tour of the cheese caves of Roquefort, with a refreshing picnic between the two.

Street Art in Paris

I’m a big fan of street art, and the place I know best is the city where I first discovered just how great street art can be: Paris, bien sûr! Come along with me to visit my own piece of Parisian street art, and to see some art I photographed this past June.

Above: a gorgeous, larger-than-life bison wall mural in the 12th arrondissement. I had trouble finding the artist’s name, but my friend Dan found it: he is Ruben Carrasco.

June in Paris

In April, after months of lockdowns and curfews, France was a-buzz with chatter about reopening. The government began to announce the slow and deliberate steps that would begin to ease us back to some semblance of a “normal” life, always with the caveat that increasing covid numbers could lead to a retraction. There was a rising sense of hopefulness, perfectly timed to coincide with spring. Thus it was that a few of us hatched a scheme to visit Paris in June.

Seeing Dots: the Tour de France

The grocery store chain Leclerc sponsors the polka dot jersey for the Tour de France. This is the jersey that is awarded to the rider who is the best climber in the mountains. The Leclerc truck pulled into town and handed out masses of polka dot T-shirts, guaranteeing that we’d all be seeing dots for the day.

I was coming home from some errands when I saw the sign posted at the edge of the big roundabout outside of town. On July 9, the road to Aigues-Vives would be closed due to the Tour de France.

Well, here was an interesting piece of information! I knew I had to figure out how to see it. I did a little asking around and checked in with friends; web sites were searched to determine the exact route through our corner of France. We ended up being a group of five who drove a few miles up the road to Aigues-Vives to watch Stage 13 of the 2021 Tour de France.

Spring wrap-up

Going to the birds

I never paid much attention to birds until we moved to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. There, living in a smaller town surrounded by nature, I fell in love with the amazing breadth of avian life, and a pair of binoculars had a permanent home in the kitchen window. When I sold the house, I wrote up several pages of notes about it for the new owners; at least half was about the birds.

Moving to another country on another continent has plenty of challenges, and it took me a while to realize the effect of not knowing the local birds. I’ve struggled to put this feeling into words. Suffice it to say that I’ve been walking around here for nearly four years with a vague sense of unease, of not fully belonging, in part because I don’t know who the birds are.