Far as I am concerned, first thing you do when visiting Barcelona is go to the northeast corner of the city and see how things are coming with the construction of the basilica known as the Sagrada Familia. Yes, even before making the pilgrimage over to the city’s great earthly structure, the football club’s Camp […]

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So, it’s warm in the Languedoc … let’s give the Mediterranean a try. It’s what all tourists from the northern regions of France do, in July and August, when they decamp to the southern half of the country. We can consider that a hearty recommendation, no? Well, we could. But that would not keep the […]

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I’m not sure a little camera will do justice to how interesting this particular sunset was, here in France. We sometimes talk about the “European sky” and it is different from what you see elsewhere in the world. It just is. Fantastical and malleable, likely to filter the light in odd and wonderful ways, ready […]

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We returned from Paris to the Languedoc yesterday, and I remarked on how crowded the TGV was. It seemed as if the train had more people than seats; several travelers seemed to spend hours standing in the small spaces between cars. I was informed that the Saturday following Bastille Day — and this is what […]

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Over the previous few weeks, France seemed to have resumed being its old mostly carefree self, the horror of several terror attacks, including two in Paris, not forgotten but perhaps compartmentalized. Some could dare to hope a corner had been turned. France had hosted the 31-day European Championship of soccer, which attracted hundreds of thousands […]

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The 20th-century dictator Benito Mussolini was famously credited (deserving or otherwise) with “making the trains run on time” in Italy. About now, France could stand more than a little improvement in its trains’ on-time performance. That’s four consecutive French trains now, that I have met or ridden, that failed to arrive on schedule. None of […]

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This is a bit embarrassing, but it shows what happens when you make assumptions about a place new to you. One enormous blunder. One not as ridiculous. But each could have been avoided had I asked around before I hit “publish”.

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Six months ago, I had never heard of Clermont-Ferrand. Which probably left me in the overwhelming majority of people living in Europe. But the notion of it began to grow on me, and today we spent six hours in a car to drive the 190 miles or so to Clermont-Ferrand and back. Our first major […]

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It was a teeny bit like the Retired Anglophones French Chateau Languedocienne Woodstock. Music, alcohol, cars parked on every spot not previously occupied by a vine … essentially a farm with no neighbors to complain about the noise … and lots and of gray-white-and-blue hair. It was quite the success as hundreds of people seemed […]

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It was more of a working vacation, in Southern California, clearing out an apartment for sale, which is always more work than a person anticipates. Some visits with family, with whom we did a sort of relay of bedroom-crashing. Thanks to all of them for their wonderful hospitality. Got a baseball game in, the Angels […]

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