I loved trick-or-treating as a kid – who didn’t? – and now I know that a lot of adults love taking part and doling out candy. Unfortunately, I’ve spent most of my adult life living in remote areas or overseas, so I don’t get to experience the adult half of the equation.
So that leaves me with just my sites for spreading Halloween cheer:
Hello visitors! As you can see, I’m terrible about keeping this blog up to date, but here’s a quick update …
Since I live in Guadeloupe, which is part of France, I’ve been in lockdown for over a week. But it makes no real difference to me since I work at home and rarely go out anyway. 🙂
I’m still working away on my sites (French, Spanish, English, veggie).
I do quite a bit of cooking and have a vague notion of maybe doing some videos one of these days. Still waiting for my kitchen floor to be finished before I can even consider doing that safely.
Other than that, I’ve been learning Greek (off and on) for a couple of years, and spend part of the last two summers in Athens, which was incredible. I was planning to return this summer but of course now that looks extremely unlikely.
That’s it for now. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay home!
Wow, it’s been ages since I posted here. I mainly post personal stuff to Facebook now, but even there I go through periods of feast or famine. I’m trying to do better. Continue reading
Last summer, I started writing a series of posts with the highlights of my marathon trip all the way around France. A couple of months in, I decided that I wanted to describe the trip in more detail for my French site, and essentially abandoned this blog, leaving you all stranded at the fourth corner.
Now I’m changing my approach once again.
As much as I love writing about France, bilingual articles are simply too labor intensive. Between researching each place, writing about it in French, and then translating into English, those features required an inordinate amount of time. One of the reasons we moved to Menton was in the hopes that living in a beautiful, tranquil town would inspire me to work on a book that I’ve had in mind for years. Now that we’re settled, the inspiration is there, but the time isn’t, so I’ve decided to compromise. I’ll keep writing in-depth articles about France, but only in English. I’m going to continue from where I left off on the other site, and I’ll update the same map – you can see what I’ve done so far here: Six corners of the Hexagon.
(P.S. I’m not ready to talk about the book yet, but you’ll be the first to know when I am.)
Our next stop was Saint Malo, just a little further west along the coast.
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| Saint Malo © LKL |
We walked all over within and then on top of the walls of the fortified city, before sitting down on a stretch overlooking the vast beach for our picnic. Though we couldn’t see a guard station, every so often an admonishment about bikes on the beach would come over the loudspeaker. We kept half-expecting to be told to get off the wall, but it never happened.
Other entertainment came from watching a photo shoot of a group of 5 men, who we figure must have been some rock group doing an album cover. They started out walking along the beach in nice jackets, then changed into more casual clothes before doing a sort of rugby scrum for photo after photo. Thinking they might be famous, I took a few pics of my own, but I have no way to identify them. I tried Googling things like “rock group photo shoot in Saint Malo in August,” but no luck. One wore a jacket that said “Nickelson,” their van had Dutch plates, and we caught snatches of both American and British English. So here’s today’s challenge: anyone recognize these guys? You can click on the images to see larger ones.
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| © LKL | © LKL |
We spent the night across the river in Dinard, the furthest west into Bretagne I had ever previously been. From here on out, it’s all brand-new!
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Just read a great article about one thing that all Americans can do that really will make a difference: take it out of the big banks (you know, the ones that got bailed out and then gave bonuses to the very people who caused the subprime mortgage disaster and the need for bailouts) and instead put it in small, local banks. I am a firm believer in the power of the dollar – what we choose to buy and where we keep our money has over the course of our lives, in my opinion, a much greater impact than any other voting we might be allowed to do – so I did this years ago, and I’ve been glad every day since.
Arianna Huffington – Move Your Money: A New Year’s Resolution