It’s been nearly a month since our last post, but it’s been an important one for us as we evaluated our first year of retirement and made some decisions about what the future holds for us. As you may remember from our early posts, we had planned to spend this first year of retirement in
It’s hard not to love a city with big outdoor art, like this butterfly made of flowers along a pedestrian street in Murcia, Spain. There was also a traveling street art show display nearby with images and historical descriptions of famous Renaissance paintings that are currently housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. We
We’ve been waiting more than six months to receive the message above from the French government which translates to “Congratulations, you have obtained your driving license.” You may remember that we wrote about this in a January post, “Favorable” !!!, that detailed our initial efforts to pass the written driving test in French. In the
Turin (or “Torino” if you’re Italian) was our favorite city on this trip. I guess we saved the best for last! It’s a large city, about one million people, but it felt approachable and welcoming to us the moment we arrived. One of the treats we enjoyed was this coffee specialty of Turin: the Bicerin
We have loved the gorgeous cathedrals we’ve seen across France, from the simple to the ornate, but France doesn’t have the market cornered on them. We’ve looked at so many stunning cathedrals across Italy during this trip. The one above is in Verona, where we spent several days. See also the one below: Verona has
Winter weather has been pretty extreme just about everywhere this year. Western Europe has had tons of rain and as such, a lot of flooding. Angers has experienced flooding conditions that apparently rival the floods of 1995. In the picture above, the water you see is covering a street which has been impassable for 2-3
We just returned from a 10-day visit to the U.S. to visit family. After enjoying the slower pace of France the past nine months, the U.S. feels rather overwhelming to us now. From the 24-hour news cycle reminding us constantly how bad things are to the insane number of commercials on television all hawking things
We took a field trip out the the countryside, just 20 minutes from home, to the little village of Grez-Neuville. Really, it’s a village made up of two smaller villages: Grez and Neuville, which are separated by the Mayenne River. A lovely bridge connects the two. This photo was taken standing on the Neuville side,
The New Year has arrived and with it, a chance to look back at the exciting Christmas week holiday we spent with one of our children who came to visit us in Angers. It was a fun week and we kept busy, despite it being bitterly cold and each of us getting mildly sick with
The holidays look a lot different this year and we’re not entirely sure how to feel about it. In the past, we’ve cut down our Christmas tree and decorated it with ornaments that we’ve collected over decades. We decorate the house. We make mountains of cookies and share them with our friends and family. We