One of Lisa’s favorite hashtags when she posts on Instagram about our wanderings is #travelcouple.
That’s because traveling is our hobby.
Every year we go places. And this year, 2024, we haven’t stopped going places!
How we go is worth describing. We take regular road trips between our cottage in Brittany, northwest France, and our flat in Murcia, southeast Spain.
Of course, that’s to follow the sun, but one of Lisa’s and my major projects this year was setting up the flat. We had bought it “furnished,” but much of what was there didn’t suit us, and we spent a lot of time figuring out how to make the space feel like ours. By the end of the year, we had.
We spend much of our time there lounging in the matching Costco Adirondack chairs which adorn the front balcony and face the fourth fairway, a lake and the reliably bright sun. For the two of us, with occasional guests, it’s perfect.
It’s about a 1,000 mile drive each way, depending on the route that we follow, and this year our Dacia wagon drove there and back three times. Dacias are cheap Renaults manufactured in Roumania with many fewer parts than their more expensive French-made brothers, for easy maintenance. We’re not talking a luxury car here.
And we’re not talking flights either. We only ever take cheap flights – that’s how we can travel so much, by never overspending on any one trip – and there are very few destinations from our local airport in Rennes. We do take TGVs to Paris, because the train travels at 180mph and gets there in half the time.
The great advantage of road trips is that we can explore en route. We have been wanting to visit Carcassonne for a while, and on one of our trips to Murcia arranged to pass through it. Stunning! The magnificent walled city, completely encircled by walkable ramparts, combined with a bike ride along the Canal du Midi – we bring our bikes to Spain and back on the back of the car – made for a special overnight. And those special overnights kept coming!
We have these road trips down pat. Foodwise, we reduce the three restaurant meals a day to one, dinner, by carrying typically cheese and crackers, bread and fresh produce in a large Costco cooler on the back seat. The cooler also often stores supermarket sushi, Lisa’s special egg salad, cherry tomatoes, grapes, raspberries and blueberries, as well as cold San Pellegrinos. In other words, we eat better than we would at freeway rest stops. The only real inconvenience is replenishing the ice cubes.
We mix planned stops, like Carcassonne, with other places that catch our eye or that Lisa finds online as we make our way. For example, on the way to Carcassonne she found another beautiful stop on the Camino del Santiago, “la Collégiale St Pierre de la Romieu.” We adjusted our already vague schedule, and drove right to it. Again, quite beautiful.
Then we have our city breaks, featuring this year Madrid (hosted by Lisa’s cousin Erin, Matt and family), Paris (visiting Sally Katz, a law school friend, and exploring Monet’s Giverny), Nantes (visiting Nick, Charlotte and my first grandchild, Eliza), London (taking in Teddy Swims in concert, the Tate Modern and Selfridges), Granada (for the Alhambra and a stirring flamenco performance), Valencia (Charlie and Gaby’s wedding), and Paris again (taking Lisa’s mum and dad to visit Chartres cathedral and attend the 2024 Olympics!).
Take a deep breath; the list goes on!
We visited my home town, Marlow (for the 400th birthday dinner of my grammar school, Sir William Borlase’s), Paris again (to see Flogging Molly at the Bataclan, and visit Karim Medjad, a dear friend who is a law professor in Paris), Dublin (to hang out with Jean Roy, my wonderful US high school exchangee, and her three siblings, and tour the Guinness Storehouse), Malaga (for the well-curated Picasso Museum, and to walk the Caminito del Rey) and Rome (to tour the Colosseum and Sistine Chapel, and watch Gladiator II in English at the Julius Ceasar cinema!).
That’s the great thing about living in Europe, having so many great cities and scintillating sites reachable by car. We only flew three times this year, to each of Dublin and Rome from Paris, and to London from Murcia, cheap flights all. Rather than fly to GB, which remains an island, we prefer to take a car ferry.
And we have more trips planned before the end of the year, to Paris, London and Marlow!
I get tired even writing it all down.
And travel is tiring, more so as we get older, but also so stimulating. It’s the latter that we need. There are the sometimes strange thoughts that we each have prompted by the stimuli of how things work in a different culture; finding your footing in a new country is always a challenge. There are the several languages that we are exposed to regularly. Whether or not we actively try to master them – and I must confess to being much lazier than I used to be in that regard – our brains automatically work on trying to understand what’s around us.
And last but not least are the people we bump into so often away from home. People are never as open to others as when they are travelling. That is central to how rich an experience travel is, and applies to us as much as to those we meet. Lisa is more of an introvert than I, but both of us enjoy our open discussions with complete strangers. For some reason, many people seem to want to know how we met! And we love to tell them our stories.
Travel is the best remedy for the brain’s inevitable tendency to slow down with age. You can’t cure that slowing down, at least not for very long, but you can put the brakes on it. With a few visits to great cities and scintillating sites.
We maybe did a little too much this year. Unpacking after one trip started to blend into packing for the next! I remember feeling flat preparing for our November trip to Rome, with a long drive and a flight and a taxi ride to get there, and the same to return, not forgetting an overnight in Paris because the return plane landed late at Orly.
But then, two days later, we were walking from Vatican City across Rome to the Colosseum!
