11 Sunday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Sentiments
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Look carefully and you’ll see the crowd outside the church
As I write this, sympathizers all over the Western world are holding gatherings in honor of the seventeen victims of last week’s terrorist attacks on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo and the ensuing carnage.
10 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
Portland at Seven
Martizay at Seven
I stand on the balcony in the dark and listen: A rooster crows. Faintly, church bells. Other than that, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s as dark as despair, as still as a trance. If the moon made sounds I’d hear that too. It’s waning, only a few days distant from full, and the trees cast moonshadow.
This is morning in Martizay. My breaths on the balcony are the first breaths of the day.
07 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
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We are in our very French kitchen, having breakfast after a whirlwind orientation from the delightful John and Jackie Fisher, our British hosts who are bravely entrusting their house and critters to us.
05 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
We have arrived in the tiny town of Martizay, France. It’s a whirlwind of activity here, both for our hosts Jackie and John—who are preparing to depart tomorrow morning for the UK where they will stay until late March—and for us, as we unpack our bags, shed clothes we have been wearing for four days, and learn all there is to keep up the farm while it’s under our stewardship.
03 Saturday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
We made it! As far as Paris, anyway. After ten hours en route, one of them racing through the Amsterdam airport, we found ourselves checking in at the Hotel Paris-France, which looks really good from the outside, and has an easy name to remember to tell the taxi driver should there be too much absinthe.
01 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Travel
Tom, Louise, and our daughter Sybil at our bon voyage lunch yesterday. Today is liftoff. Paris tonight!
24 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Accommodations
Is she shy? Louise?
No. Not Louise. If a male rhino were charging her, she’d smile and ask him if he would like to sit down and talk about it. Definitely not shy.
She’s also an indefatigable shopper, a lover of all things French, and an unrestrained Parisian fangirl. So why hasn’t she written a post about our stay there? We’ll be there in a week, after all.
12 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Silly stuff
We went to the Columbia outlet store the other day. Columbia makes outdoor apparel and Louise wanted a pair of boots—mud-certified, tromp-around-the-back-forty, muck-up-to-your-knees boots. She is convinced that our upcoming three months in France will be essentially an immersion in ooze, punctuated by emancipating forays to the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Parisian shoes she has plenty of. Mud boots, not so many.
05 Friday Dec 2014
Posted in Accommodations
1908 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost Shooting Brake
“We have a thirteen-year-old Peugeot shooting brake, which you’re welcome to use.” That was John, of Jackie and John, the people in France with the homestead we’re looking after starting next month.
I didn’t want to appear too dense (especially when the man was offering the use of what seemed to be his car), so I responded, “That’s great! We’ll take good care of it!”
Whatever it is.
03 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Travel
In our last episode (and it WAS an episode), we revealed that our two-month winter rental in Mexico had fallen through, taking our winter vacation rental money with it. We also said we were applying as housesitters to mind three goats, five chickens, and a cat at a farmhouse in Central France. The menagerie needed tending for three months.
The Expat Almanac 