portrait of provence: part one

“Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing...

the key to the castle

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t. Bill Nye Last Sunday afternoon my companion and I decided to succumb to wanderlust and drive through the SW French countryside. July is a spectacular month for traveling throughout the départment of the Gers...

letting go in France

“One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.” Edith Wharton Recently some American friends, Bob and Kathy, went on a walking tour of the prehistoric Dordogne region, not far from the caves of Lascaux...

roadmaps

  Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. For no reason, you accept the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go where you want to. Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder that a steady center is holding all else. If...

castles in the air

“To move, to breathe, to fly to float, to gain all while you give.  To roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live.” Hans Christian Anderson Four years ago, while driving through the countryside northeast of my house in Ayzieu, I stopped to...

a backward glance

“I would prefer to be able to say: ‘I am satiated. What is given to taste in this life, I have tasted.’  But I am like someone in a window who draws aside a curtain to look at a feast he does not comprehend.” Czeslaw Milosz While going through...