Most of you know that Suzie and I (and the boys) lost our beautiful home in the Wikiup Hills due to the Tubbs Fire, shortly after the last blog post here, in early October. Now part two: Soon after we moved into our replacement apartment in Santa Rosa, I began feeling pain and numbness in my left leg. I assumed it was from pulling a muscle while moving furniture into […]
When Suzie and I travel, we love to just poke around, sometimes going to places that aren’t perhaps on the top of the tourist to-do list, just to see what we might find there. Today was one of those poke-around days; we ended up in a place we’d never heard of when we started the day. The first stop was, in truth, on the tourist list: the Château de Flaugergues, a […]
This little village of about 300 people has been around since the founding of a church on the site in the 800s. We had lunch at a tiny place (the building was constructed in the 1000s) and learned about a path that went out into the country, among terraced olive orchards between two high mountain ridges. Beautiful.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a visit to the Clamouse cave about an hour outside of Monpellier. Located on the side of a gorge cut by the River Heurault, the cave consists of a number of enormous interlocking chambers containing truly unbelievable geologic formations. Alien, stunning, totally unexpected, awe-inspiring. Click on the first picture to start a slideshow.
The pictures from yesterday, in a much more user-friendly gallery format. Click on the first picture to start the slideshow. Enjoy!
Trump on ABC News last night: “You never saw heads chopped off until a few years ago.” Tell that to Medusa: Or to John the Baptist: Or Louis XVI: What a moron.
As a moderate centrist who despises the loutishness, lies, disrespectfulness, and authoritarian bent of Donald Trump and his gang of incompetent megalomaniacs, I found myself of two minds about the widespread marches last weekend. Part of me cheered them, especially the one in Washington, D.C. following the inauguration: An enormous reminder that most Americans aren’t on board with the Trump program. But particularly with respect to the local marches here […]
We’re back from Paris, not particularly happy, moderately jetlagged. A nice flight somewhat ruined at the end by the failure of the jetway operator at SFO to come back from his break on time, resulting in us all standing on the plane after an 11-hour flight for an additional 30 minutes until a replacement jetway operator could be found (something that I could see happening at 2 a.m. but not […]
Paris, France I’m happy not to be in the United States this Inauguration Day. How did it come to pass that my country elected as its President a lout and a buffoon; someone with no understanding, appreciation, or respect for our history and institutions; a bluffer with the mindset of an adolescent male; a man with no executive or political experience; a sideshow barker, a small-minded Daddy’s Boy driven by […]
We love France, we really do. But there are aspects that are, shall we say, less robust than in the U.S. One of these is the quality of service personnel in non-retail contexts. (The service personnel in shops, stores, and restaurants, in contrast, are fabulous — almost always helpful and friendly and efficient.) The worst, in our experience, are banks, and we had yet another example the past two days. […]