Sue Aran

Old French Mail slot

A Lost Art

“To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere, without moving anything but your heart.” Phyllis Grissim-Theroux – The other day I waited in my parked car outside the post office in a nearby village waiting for it to open. Adjacent to me was a truck loading mail. Just as the truck driver …

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Une Gersoise

Gersois Charm

  Imagine traveling to the most rural, least industrialized corner of southwest France with the purest air and longest-living people, isolated from main highways and train lines. Include in this picture white clouds floating in deep blue skies, rolling green hills tufted with flocks of sheep, and herds of blonde Aquitaine cows surrounded by myriad …

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Romeo & Juliet

Obsessive Love

Of Music and Muses: Hector Berlioz’s Obsessive Love It can often be said that love has no limits or boundaries, but obsession does. This is no more true than in the relationship between the French composer, Hector Berlioz, and the Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson. In the years following the French Revolution (1789), a new movement …

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Waiting for a convivial lunch in Gascony to begin.

French Bounty

“I think food, culture, people and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.” Anthony Bourdain The lure of France has never dimmed, nor has the lure of French cuisine. In Gascony, the Pays Basque, Occitanie and Provence in particular (where I currently lead slow travel tours) good food, carefully prepared with first rate ingredients is not a …

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Abbaye Senanque Lavender

Going South

“As soon as we leave the urban condition behind us, we confront newness and the profoundly unfamiliar. “   Rem Koolhaas As I drove home from the end of my first women’s only slow travel tour this year, I thought to myself that youth is not a prerequisite for adventure. Originally, this tour was sold out, …

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