A few News Items

A few random news items:

Mike and Jen are moving! After a decade or so in Birmingham, Mike has taken a position with a big insurance company in Lynchburg, Va., and they'll be moving over the course of the summer. Mike is an actuary--which means he manipulates numbers in a way that somehow ends up in the creation of insurance products. Really geeky stuff. As much as they love Birmingham, Mike says that the deal was just too good to pass up. Teri and I will miss them, but we'll really miss having our neice and nephew close at hand.

Thanks to Kathy who submitted a couple of links on packing techniques. You can find them added to the list on the right side of this blog. If you come across any links you think might be fun or useful, please pass them on.

On the subject of links, if you haven't looked at the YouTube links that top the list, what are you waiting for? They link to two short (less than 10 minute) and wonderful videos that will give you an idea of what's in store for us.

Last thing on links: Check out the official France tourism website. If you poke around you'll find a link to order brochures for free or close to it. I ordered a couple of the brochures and just received a 2008 France Guide (it's about 100 pages in a glossy magazine format) and we also received a nice map of Paris.

Colleen is planning her work with a special needs children's camp that she supports every year. The camp takes place in June, so she wanted to know exactly when we'll be going on our Marjorie trip. Here's what I told her:

I can't give you exact dates yet because I can't book the flights yet--you have to be something like 300 days out to do that. The only thing I'm positive of is that we get on the boat on June 14th and we get off the boat on June 20th. My idea is to have three days in Paris before we get on the boat and have the boat guys take us directly to the airport to return home. But if airfares are crazy lower one day earlier or one day later on either end or the timing doesn't make sense for them to dump us at the airport for the flight home, I might shuffle things up a bit. But our days on the barge are set and aren't going to change So . . . TENTATIVELY . . . you're looking at leaving the Birmingham around noon on June 10th and landing back in Birmingham around 10 p.m. on the 20th. I'm giving you these dates based on what I want to do and when international flights usually leave for Paris from the US and when they usually get back. Flights to Paris usually leave around 5 p.m. from Atlanta or Houston or New York and arrive in Paris around 7:30 a.m. the next day. On the return side they usually leave early to mid-afternoon and get to the US about an hour or two after they take off (with all the time zone changes). To be safe, I'd block out a window between June 9th and 24th, 2009.

Become an author! Don't forget that you can comment on any item in the blog at the bottom of each post and I've set this thing up so that any of you can create your own posts on the blog. Feel free to step up and author a post any time you like on any subject related to France or travel or whatever.

Hey gang, our group needs a name and I'm wide open to suggestions! You're a creative group. How about some ideas?

Finally, and this really has nothing to do with the trip, but my garden is starting to produce veggies like crazy, and I wanted to brag a little. We've already had the first green peppers, squash, zucchini, green beans and yellow squash. And tonight we'll eat the very first of about a bazillion tomatoes on my vines. I'm a week or so away from picking the first eggplant. My peach tree is pretty much a bust this year (the tree dropped almost all of its fruit not long after it formed this spring), but we'll be picking blackberries, blueberries and figs in the next few weeks.

It's weird how much better fruits and veggies taste when they come from your own garden. Some of it is psychological, I'm sure, but most of it is that truly fresh and ripe veggies just taste better.

I'm sure a lot of what we'll eat on our trip will be acquired at street markets like this one. Every village and town in France has at least one market day every week, and they're a lot of fun to visit. Also, since much of this produce is grown locally, I guarantee it will taste so much better than veggies that have been trucked from hundreds or thousands of miles away.