Sept 2024 - Alors! I had about three weeks of paid "vacances" time to use up and I'd never been to France and had some long-desired things I wanted to investigate in the realm of haunted castles, as well as generally getting a better knowledge of a new country and Europe, so I booked a car and a bunch of hotels in different towns and on August 31st flew out of northern California to do it all. And of course stick the whole thing in a big website for the record. A lot of this may not line up with the romantic tourist info-emails the airlines and others send out these days to keep people flying but like Claudius I will tell everything, the good, the funny, and the stupid (I never expected some of it to get that stupid). Seasoned Europe/France travelers may find a lot of this old hat and "duh" but for Europe/France babes-in-the-woods like me it won't be, and I hope it is as educational for them as it was for me. Anymore I find travel, and especially international travel, to be work along with the fun, and it's good to be braced for a certain dose of whiplash.

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I'm dedicating the memories of this trip to the memory of my angel of a mother, who died at 90 years old two days before I took this trip.  The shadow of that was there off and on but she would have wanted me to go and would have laughed at a lot of it and wherever she is I hope she does. She would have said: "Honey, even at 68 going on 23, it's never too late to go adventuring and maybe make a fool of yourself at the same time, you're a musician after all."

 

(background image: mine, Fort du Antoine, Monaco