Little personal awarenesses and visual confrontations . . .

We started in Madrid, flew to Lisbon, trained to and from Coimbra and Porto, flew from Lisbon to Paris, and trained to Limoges, and now we’re on the way back to Paris.

We are retired and tired of the daily tensions at home, so we’re taking an extended break, exploring the possibilities of a small Fortress of Solitude in a more slowly-paced land.  

Before we met, we had each been abroad for extended periods.  I spent two years ashore in Rota, Spain with the Navy, followed by two more in Naples, Italy.  Both those military installations have subsided into the local architecture and economy.  Kathryn spent a semester in Paris on a cello scholarship, a season in the Puerto Rico Symphony, and a chamber music tour to Orvieto, Italy.  

Traveling after children and career is a completely different thing if you are rolling without the constraints of an organized tour.  It’s especially trying if you are casting about for a new place to “tie up your caravan” and breathe different air.  

If you are just seeing new places, you still have tent stakes down back at “the old place,” and you aren’t even aware of it.  If you’ve pulled up those stakes, when you get to your first interim destination, you’re “still good.”  The third or fourth time you jam everything back into the suitcases, though, you realize “this is what I’ve got,” and the constant movement starts to abrade a little, like beach sand in your sandals.  You’re not sure why.

This is the beginning of our eighth week.  We need a place to empty out the suitcases, the same place to wash our laundry for at lease a month or to, a steady place to walk to a kitchen and cook comfort food without having to translate this week’s menu with last week’s rudimentary language skills.

Yes; it -is- exciting.  Till it isn’t.

We have met so many sweet, smart, happy, involved, educated, people on this trip.  We’re not even trying.  They just show up.  And conversations start, often, like Lewis and Clark, involving finger-pointing and head-nodding and shoulder-shrugging and smiling.  There is lots of smiling everywhere and experimental sounding-out of English or Spanish or Portuguese or French.  But, like in the Christmas story, there is “peace among people of good will.”

So, we have eleven days in Paris coming up before we have to bail out of the Schengen Area.  We’re looking at something small and snug and unpretentious in the UK, probably a London far-out suburb.  Still new, still unexplored, still peopled by paperback novel characters, but fixed in time and space.  Somewhere we can grow for a bit before being repotted.  

OK; if I had a glass of Molson’s in front of me, I would have finished weeping into it, wiped up the ring, and rinsed out the glass, but I don’t, so I’ll just share these fun photos I have snagged in the last two weeks.

“Puxe” is pronounced “push.”  It means “pull.”  I enjoy the juxtaposition of this one.

I love the grab handle in the restroom on the Portuguese train.  It’s much more effective than the handles we had in the heads of the squadron aircraft when I was in the Navy.

I haven’t yet translated the sign above the laundry folding table in Lisbon, but I can get a pretty good sense of it.

In the States, there are these teeny-tiny labels adhered to the fruits and vegetables to tell you whence they came, as if somehow the store were ashamed of the biologic origin. I am amazed and delighted to see the signs in the Aldi in Limoges.  Absolutely delighted.

The last time I dealt with a “bombsight” toilet was when I was a sailor on leave, camping in Andorra la Vela.  There was a button on the wall to push for the flush.  There was a handle on a chain right there at the same level.  I could see the chain led to a reservoir higher on the wall so I tugged it.  Did you know the toilet stall can double as a shower?  Do you know the water in Andorra comes right straight off the glacier.  I will -always- check the plumbing handles in that situation again.  Always.

And, finally, the restroom doors in a gas station north of Limoges are graphically accurate.