history – Page 2 – Lo Vedo Life

Road Trip, Day 2

Trying to catch some of the sunlight streaming through a contemporary stained glass window in the Église Saint-Côme-et-Saint-Damien in the village of Saint-Côme.

We awoke to cloudy skies and signs that it had rained during the night; the forecast called for heavy rains in the afternoon, so we wanted to get a good start for the day’s adventures. This was a day for visiting several of the picturesque villages near Saint-Geniez-d’Olt, where we’re staying. Our first stop of the morning was the lovely Sainte-Eulalie-d’Olt, a town of ancient stone buildings, flower baskets bursting with color, art galleries, and a church that dates to 920 AD.

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.

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.

One fine spring day

The village of Vieussan clings to its perch in the foreground. Behind it is the mass of Mont Caroux (the Sleeping Lady) in the Parc Naturel Régional du Haut-Languedoc.

A lovely day in this corner of paradise
Saturday, 3 April was our last day of freedom in France— our third covid lockdown was looming. The weather was fine, and a small group of us decided to have a day trip, driving nearly two hours to begin our adventure in the hamlet of Douch, situated north of us in the sprawling Parc Naturel Régional du Haut-Languedoc.

Before putting our boots on the trail, we were enticed by the hamlet, built entirely of local stone. We spent a happy half-hour strolling past ancient structures, some in perfect condition, others showing the effects of time and gravity with warps and dips and missing stones. Douch is a place right out of a fairy tale.

Pedometer for a year

Much has been written about seeing 2020 fully in the rearview mirror, and I don’t have much new to add, which has left me pondering just what to do with this January blog post.

As the year was lurching to a close, I spent close to six weeks not being able to walk much, and since walking is my primary exercise, I was eager to get my feet back onto the trail. That happened a few weeks ago, and I’ve been racking up the kilometers as much as time and weather permit. On one such walk, it occurred to me that I could tell a story of 2020 through some of my walks of the past year.