Counting down...

Time is getting near. I suspect crossing the date line into September will be pivotal. Priorities for now are getting the house ready for the house sitter. We lucked out on that one. A human to stay at the homestead, feed the cat, water the plants if necessary and turn lights on and off. Works for her; works for us. The cat and the plants we can usually put on autopilot but the security is always an issue. Timers for the lights just don't quite give me the piece of mind I would appreciate. 

Haven't gotten to the suitcase stage yet. Have been collecting all the small accouterments: flashlights, power adapters, alarm clock, documents with copies, minimal first aid kit, enough prescription meds to last the course (even the French don't want to see me off my meds!). We've bought travel guides....more than we can read much less take. We have maps, an international drivers license and a car lined up. The plan for now is to rent a car (Budget) when we arrive in Nice. Keep that for a week to get to La Garde Freinet and settle in. Spend some time checking out the local scene then back to Nice turning in the car and hopping a train for points unknown. During that week, if we can determine that we don't need a car to get from our house to town we may not rerent. Bus and train service is available. Maybe buy/borrow a couple of bikes.

Still have some work to do figuring out this blog. Want to be able to upload pictures and copy/save/print text. I continue on the upward climb of the learning curve.

Blogging 101

So, this blog thing is new to me. As it is apparently for many of you. Y'all may remember several years ago when I wrote travel logs of our trip to Thailand and Nepal and bulk emailed it to assorted friends and family. A little comberson but it worked. Now, I've decided to embrace the technology and blog instead. There is apparently a learning curve for me and as I'm informed for some of y'all. I'm not ready to give up yet and this is yet another self-study exercise in blogging. Rather than going directly to my blog site, I'm typing this up on Mac's TextEdit program and will (hopefully) copy and paste it into my blog for you all to read and experience. And comment on. Which brings me up to an obvious point or two: added comments from viewers are in public domain. That is anyone visiting my blog can read what you folks have to add. Which means I run the risk of receiving for all to see rude, crude, inappropriate, or personal comments and information that Sarah and I might not appreciate. I believe I can set preferences to keep comments hidden but I don't want to do that. There is no reason (yet) that this blog  can't be a forum for information, ideas and just plain fun for us all. So, keep those cards and letters coming. I think I have eliminated the requirement that you need to login in order to comment. Let me know if it ain't so. Also, if you do decide to make contribution be aware that I probably don't know or won't recognize your chosen pseudoname unless you do sign up and make some sort of profile. I don't have a clue who "channelchatters" is! Nor will I know who "fluffy, nightrider, or bigrichard" is!! I believe you can keep it personal by at least using your first name and maybe last intital  (I do know several Paul's you know) Or sign your comments with a name I can recognize.  Help me out here. Of course you can also simply email me or sarah at our usual email address if you want to keep things private.

 

I also know that some of you have had trouble finding our blog. If you google the first part of my and sarah's email addresses connected by "and" as one word, you'll get there. Of course googling "Adventures of Dale and Sarah" will get you there too. I haven't figured out how to browse in this blogspot web site yet. If any of you have had success with this, let me know. Nor have I tried yet to print or save entries so I can save it for all of prosperity and my memoirs. I'll work on that. 

 

Otherwise, our plans are moving along. We still don't have a car rented, we don't have any agenda but we do have our tickets and we do have a hovel to hang out in. We also have "trip insurance" which will work fine if someone gets sick or dies but won't cover anxiety or panic attacks and it won't cover global conflict or war. We'll worry about Russia later, I suppose.

    We are thinking about signing up with IYH, the youth hostel system, so we can have really cool, cheap lodging when we travel around. I'm sure things haven't changed since I hitchiked thru Europe in 1976! Anybody know anything about this now? And, yes, old farts like us can join IYH. 

We are also trying to lean about Skype. Anybody that want's to join in that adventure; sign up. 

The party's over...

Well, I think our anniversary party was a success. We are still married. We had about 60 friends in the back yard eating and drinking and having a general good time. And our lawn survived. With the leftovers I made a nice shrimp and corn chowder that we ate for 3 days and shrimp salad sandwiches for lunch. Not much goes to waste at our place. I do want to thank everyone for coming.

Now we are concentrating on getting our ducks in a row for the France trip. Figuring out the electrical connections, required documents (and copies), bill paying in absentia procedure, Skype setup, and housesitting confirmation. Started my little pile of "important stuff" on the floor that we just have to take. And with this post, I'm practicing my blogging.