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I recently saw another blogger’s 10-year anniversary news and realized I must be at that point myself. Indeed, I had been notified a few weeks ago, but like everything related to my blog in recent months/years, it went unnoticed and ignored.

What has kept me away? The top reason is certainly a refocusing on what is happening in the real world – the day-to-day life events that have piled up heavily in ways both good and bad. There is also the feeling that writing all about me, me, ME is self-indulgent at best and mind-numbing to others at worst.

Since my last post, we have relocated from Houston, Texas, to Durham, North Carolina. It was a difficult move, occurring days before Christmas and ending with lost and broken items. The moving company was outrageously bad, and it took several months to sort everything out. Too many things in the new house seemed to have problems, and the weather for the subsequent three months was awful – rainy, dreary, and apparently uncharacteristically cold – an unpleasant development after living in a place where the climate suited me perfectly.

The stress of the move, coupled with constant demands to leave our new “home” to tend to other family matters, created a sense of disconnection from my own life and settled deep into my body. For the first time in my life, I struggled to sleep, I fell woefully out of shape, and my physical being kept trying to let me know it was not happy about things. I didn’t have time to care or to try to fix it for many months.

As I write now, I think I have turned a corner. I’ve thought this for days or even a week or so before, only to have things smack me in the face again, so I am a little leery of celebrating quite yet. But the weather has finally turned, our extended family is in a good place (new babies help a lot!), and I have decided to return to working out hard, beginning to train for what is likely to be my steepest physical challenge ever later this year. I’m also convinced the spotty eating I’ve done (both under- and over-indulging in a vicious pendulum swing) has contributed to my troubles, so I’ve kept myself on a steadier course there as well. Best of all, I’ve started planning trips that sound a little like vacations!

In keeping with the nature of the blog, I will veer away from personal agita and document one of those happier times, a very quick little journey we took back in September before all hell broke loose.

The trip involved the wedding of my college roommate’s daughter in the Brittany region of northwest France, and because we would have little control over what we did there, and just a short day and half in Paris at the end, we made no major plans. “No major plans” has become my favorite way to travel these days; there’s less pressure to see everything, more time to roam, and no expectations to be dashed.

We enjoyed every improvised hour we spent in Paris, strolling all over the city, starting in the Latin Quarter where we stayed, stopping in the Marais for falafel, eating a classic brasserie dinner on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, wandering the Tuileries, licking ice cream cones on the Île Saint-Louis, checking out the progress of the Notre-Dame repairs, and ambling through the Luxembourg Gardens with what seemed like half the capital’s population on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.

We paid for nothing but our hotel and simple food, stood in no lines, and took very few photos. We also crammed in a half-day trip to Fontainebleau to see an old blogging friend (so happy to meet Estelea!) for a hike and a drink, a delightful addition to our time in the Paris area.

But it was our three days in Brittany that made this little sojourn a special one in many ways. For one, this region had been one of the first places we ever took our three young children overseas, and our memories were very fond. We had stayed at what was then, and might even remain, one of the nicest hotels I’d ever been in.

I looked it up and found the miraculous news that it had been fully renovated during Covid and was less than half the price we had paid 24 years ago. (What? How?) A good sign for sure; we booked immediately for our first night in Dinard, and it lived up to our very rosy memories.

Free for part of the next day, we took a short ferry ride across the Rance estuary in drizzly morning rain to Saint-Malo, the medieval walled city famous for its role in World War II.

Expecting my usual bad luck with the weather, we set off with rain jackets, hats, and umbrellas, only to see the sprinkles slow and the clouds part as soon as we docked fifteen minutes later.

We spent the sunny morning walking a full circuit on top of the city walls, descending into the warren of quiet, mostly empty streets for more rambling, and eating a lunch of moules frites and eggy, cheesy galettes at a heavenly outdoor café.

By afternoon, we were driving an hour west to Pléneuf-Val-André, the wedding destination, and checked into our less fancy seaside hotel for two more nights. We are known to pack in as much outdoor exercise as possible before weddings (a weird habit, I know), so we left almost immediately for a short, brisk walk to Ilôt du Verdelet to get our bearings before the first evening’s event.

The wedding was as lovely as you might imagine in this ruggedly charming place, with a castle as the backdrop and many pleasurable hours of eating and drinking on a crisp late summer evening.

But before that elegant event, we threw on our trail shoes and snuck away for a very long hike along the coast, a route that reminded us of the Big Sur area in California, with incredible ocean views at every turn.

We passed old stone buildings, a WWII bunker, black sand beaches, and quiet coves. We walked about ten miles round trip, up and down the shoreline path that is part of GR34, Brittany’s long-distance hiking route, filling our heads and lungs with all the fresh air we’d been missing all summer in south Texas.

It was a short little trip, but it was filled with activities that we love that required no special planning or effort. Good food, good movement, good friends – worth the journey to be sure.

Apologies to those whose blogs I have ignored or semi-ignored for a while as I shifted my priorities even more off-line. I can’t say I will reappear as regularly as I used to, but I will try!