This journey was born of two happily coinciding catalysts during the winter and early spring of 2006--a dark time of year when it’s easy to get lost in fantasies of travel. One was my seduction by the ‘Slow Travel’ website, with passionate, educated and generously helpful travelers who favor living like locals at destinations over frenzied squeezing of as many locations into a trip as you possibly can because you’re afraid you’ll never be able to return. The main site and forums of Slow Travel offer bountiful information on every aspect of travel from location specific talk, to tech issues on cameras and computers and phones, to lodging and transport options, to clothing, to shopping, to just about any aspect of travel you could need to know something about. I spent endless hours browsing, learning, and mostly getting inspired to return to France and Italy.
Meanwhile, my delightful French friend, Gisele Augier, who some of you may have learned about from my 2000 journey’s travelogue, was due to quit her ten year stint running the B&B, St. Jean, in Seguret (Provence), in November, and I wanted to see her there one last time before she began her new life with George in an old farmhouse he’s refurbishing for them, only a mile from where St. Jean is. Thus, I had a perfect excuse to plan a return trip.
Gisele and George
Well, being the original ‘Too-Much-Is Not-Enough-For-Me’ girl, I let the passions of the Italy forum at Slow Talk suck me in to extending the trip to yikes, over a month in Italy, along with a village hopping stint through central France, a week stay in the Yonne department of Burgundy, and sixteen nights in an apartment on rue Cler in Paris.
I’d originally planned to blog on this trip (for those not into such things, that means doing a daily journal online which friends can follow), much like I wrote my pre-blog-days Travelogue on the 2000 Joy In Beauty tour. As it turned out, I just didn’t feel like writing this time like I did then. The dynamics were different--having just escaped a lethal cancer motivated me to keep in touch more; looking like a cancer survivor brought me into more interesting contact with people everywhere; and I just felt more pithy and verbally observational then.
On the other hand, the photography end of the equation was upended by the increasing ease of digital photography. In 2000, the digital video cam I took turned out to have dreadful resolution and yielded no usable still shots on return. My good photos were taken on a now seemingly antique Canon APS Elf film camera. This trip I obsessed a long time over a camera and ended up with a fairly obscure but dandy Ricoh Caplio R4 I’d read about on Digital Photography Review. I was sold by it’s wide(er) angle lens. Thus armed, my relative caution over wasting film in 2000 was supplanted by ridiculously prolific photo shooting. The albums on this site attest to this lack of control on my part.
Many albums contain some written notes about location, routes, experiences and the like. Some do not. Please feel free to offer feedback and suggestions by clicking on ‘Comments?’ on any page.
To join me on my journeys, click on ‘Photo Albums’ above.
Love to all,
Karen
