(From Jach): This week, Enrique and I are off on another travel adventure. We left Wednesday evening from LAX flying to Madrid and then on to Toulouse, France. We will be going on a barge cruise along a river in the south of France. What river? I don’t know. [s] Friends of ours arranged the cruise and invited us to come along. There will be seven of us as passengers on the barge and we will slowly cruise down the river for seven days. Once we disembark, Enrique and I will head back to Madrid for a few days before returning home. From time to time, I’ll “report in” on the progress of our adventure. I don’t think I will have an internet connection while we are cruising the river so I will post a little now and hopefully more once we disembark. Here’s the first entry. BARGE CRUISE IN SOUTHERN FRANCE #1 : I noticed the amber light on the dashboard. We were low on gas. I looked at the range indicator to see how many miles remained. Zero. No, we’re out of gas. Up the driveway with a clear focus on getting to the gas station. Fast. I slipped into neutral and coasted whenever I could. Green lights, rolling stops at the signs, we made it to the Shell station. 16.5 gallons later we were ready to go. Thank God for being out of gas! At the gas station I realized I had loaded up the car and rushed to get out of the house on time. We had handled emails, made business calls, loaded up the dishwasher and started it on Short Wash, ironed a few shirts, packed our bags, showered, and loaded the car in record time. We pulled out of the garage 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Hooray! At the Shell Station, I realized that in the rush, I had left without my shoulder bag, without my wallet and without both our passports. Holy … ! Had we had gas, we would have headed down the road and who knows how far we would have gotten before I realized: No passports. Gassed up. Back to the house. Petted Abbie and told her once again to take care of the house and that we would be back, grabbed my bag and we were finally on our way for real. The drive was smooth. Traffic was uncommonly light. We arrived at Tom Bradley International Terminal a little after 4:00. Easy ticketing, relaxing time in the One World Lounge with a soothing Margarita, and life was good. Gratitude abides. Life is very good. Now we are in the air for the next 11 hours. Madrid our intermediate destination for a change of planes and then we are off to Toulouse in southern France. We should arrive there around 6:30 p.m. local time. That would be 9:30 a.m. PDT. Long day. I love it. I look forward to extra long flights. The quiet time, the solitude, the disconnect from reality and the connect to the between. It’s all very sensual to me. We will de-jetlag (is that a word?) in Toulouse until Saturday. We will take a train to Montouban where we will embark on the barge sometime in the afternoon. Everything is very flexible and very spontaneous. The barge has three cabins. It’s 10 feet wide and 55 feet long. There are seven of us; we know the couple who invited us and we will meet the three other of their friends. We were told they are all fabulous. They probably are. We will slowly move down river for seven nights. Along the way, we can bike ride for a while and relax on the barge watching the countryside pass by. Each evening we will go ashore to walk the village and find a place to have wine and dinner. I don’t know where we will disembark on the following Saturday. I don’t know how we will get back to Toulouse to catch our flight back to Madrid. Right now, I don’t care. Spontaneity. It’s hard for me. After decades of scheduling and planning, I already have our reservations to fly to Bali next June, spontaneity is challenging. But I am up for it. More than that, it sounds fun and it actually is beginning to feel fun. Later . . . Our first white table cloth dinner in France. White cloth napkins too. We are in Toulouse. We are stay here two nights in the central city before embarking on our barge cruise. The charm of our hotel is that we can keep the windows open. We are dining at Chez Jules with a 2010 Bordeaux and duck for Enrique and tartare for me. And then dessert. Oh my . . .
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 22:13:09 +0000
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