We said goodbye to the owners of our little hotel in Veyrier du Lac and caught the bus for the six kilometers around the lake to the village of Valloires, which has been called ‘the most romantic village in France’. The easy fifteen-minute bus trip, cost only 4.20 Euros for the two of us–so much greener and cheaper than that taxi the first day in Annecy, which cost twenty euros.

Landon’s friend met us at the bus and drove us to his hand built home overlooking the lake and the village. From our perch up on the hillside, we marveled at the breathtaking views, watching the lake change from blue to green to gray as rain clouds danced across the sky.

One of the advantages of staying with ‘locals’ is discovering jewels that you could never find on your own. That was the case when the next day, our friend drove us up into the hills, on rough and windy roads that required four-wheel-drive, up past fat cows wearing giant cow bells, till we ended up at a tiny chalet and farm, for lunch.

The menu of the restaurant centered around the Reblochon and Tomes cheeses, specialties of the region. Normally in the summer, we would have eaten outside, looking out over the spectacular view to the lake below. On this rainy and misty day, we crowded into the tiny wood-beamed bar, cozy and warmed by a woodstove.

The family run farm, which produces the special cheeses, has practiced their farming methods for generations—in this case, since the early twentieth century. The robust cows are milked twice a day, then graze in the hills on all of the rich herbes covering the landscape giving the cheese a ‘terroir’ flavor, similar to the concept of ‘terroir’ in wine.

The cows that produce the rich milk that becomes the delicious cheese, all grazed nearby or mooed from the milking barn, adjacent to the restaurant. Their huge cow bells clanged from around their necks as they mosied along; a collection of cow bells decorated the outside of the barn.

For lunch, we chose between bubbling fondues, tartiflettes (a casserole made with potatoes, onions, cheese and bacon), and omelettes, all enriched by the aromatic cheeses. When our omelette, salad and bread arrived, the omelette was as puffy and high as a soufflé. As a grande finale, we ordered hand made raspberry and blueberry tarts.

Ooh, la la and a good thing we’d been biking all week!

As we drove back down the hill, we spotted people ‘paragliding’ off the cliffs, drifting and circling through the sky down toward the lake. It’s possible to take a week-long course to learn to do the sport ‘solo’ or to do a jump ‘tandem’ with an experienced paraglider. I made a vow to try that next time. Even though I know I’ll have butterflies, it looks peaceful and amazing to sail through the sky like a bird, catching updrafts above the sparkling lake and next to the granite cliffs.

The village of Thalloires centers around the ‘plage’ or beach at the lake. Set up for family summer fun, the large grassy area includes a swimming ‘pool’ area along the edge of the lake, a diving board, slide and even ping-pong tables.

From our friend’s home, I could walk down for an early morning swim in the clear, clean water, and be the only person swimming in the lake. Then stop at the boulangerie for fresh warm bread and pain au chocolate on the way back up the hill.

At the end of our three-night stay, we caught the bus for the fifteen-minute return trip to Annecy to connect with the TGV train to Paris. The bus station is right across the street from the ‘gare’ or train station, making it easy.

Now we’re settled into our comfy seats, gliding across France, watching the green landscape pass by. My computer is plugged in as I write and we’re about to enjoy our picnic at the table between us. It feels like a magic carpet ride. So much better than driving!

Next stop, Paris, for one night, then back to the USA. Stay tuned for adventures in the Latin Quater, 5th Arrondissement of Paris.

The sun sparkles on the lake beyond the little terrace of our balcony. We’re resting after a day of biking and then will head out to take a boat ride around the lake.

Yesterday it rained all day but then cleared up in the late afternoon, so we took off on a bike ride. I tried going up a hill with Landon and it was lovely–green fields and cows and little chalets. Then Landon’s bike broke down and a wonderful guy with a van stopped and gave us a ride to the main road, called the bike shop and we waited there to be rescued.

Back at the shop, he got another bike and we upgraded me to a better bike too–lighter for going up the hills. I’d been using a sort of granny bike with a bell on it that was fine for flat.

Today, we rode up a mountain for 8 miles up. Again so lovely with water falls and streams, huge cows lounging in green meadows and the views of the lake far below. Then Landon took off and went to do another mountain and I cruised down and had lunch at a lovely bistro. The have these ‘menus’ which include everything and I decided to have that. It also inlcuded a ‘quart’ or a 1/4 pitcher of wine.

The trouble was, I still had about 6 miles to go after! But I had a scrumptuous lunch of salad, pasta, dessert, wine and coffee and then wobbled a bit back, but I made it. I was thrilled that I rode 54 kms, or 36 miles, the farthest I’ve ever gone and also my first real climb was included in that.

Landon loved his extra riding and so we’re both happy campers. My new bike made a real difference on the climb, so much lighter and I’m less afraid of the cars now too. People here are respectful of cyclists–maybe the Tour de France inspires that. We usually watch that in the afternoon, but today must be a day off for them. I’m in awe of how far they ride and how difficult their rides are.

Life is good from the perspective of my lovely balcony looking out over the lake.

We’ve settled into a rhythm here in our cozy hotel. We’re doing ‘demi-pension’ which means we eat breakfast and dinner here, very easy and ‘en famille’, like being a part of the family. This is a small, family run hotel.

Yesterday, Landon did a four hour bike ride straight up a mountain–one of the ‘stages’ of the Tour de France from a few years ago. I was happy to do an easy one hour trip on the bike path around the lake, then go to Annecy for the open market and then a spa.

Ooh, la la, I spent 2 1/2 hours being pampered as only the French know how to do it. First a ‘hammam’ or steam room, to relax, then a ‘gommage’ where I was scrubbed with ocean salts, then a ‘bain bouillant’ where I sat in a bubbling bath, then some kind of a massage table that was like a water bed with jets, then a 45 minute massage. I was so relaxed after, I almost didn’t make it back.

We’re across the lake from Annecy, so we can either bike, take a bus or taxi or take a water taxi, which I did yesterday. Totally fun. It was just a little speed boat that a guy takes people back and forth in and we whipped across the lake in no time–about 10 minutes.

It’s fully summer here and France is officially ‘en vacances’ so it’s busy. Today, I rode all the way around the lake–2 hours of riding, and Landon went up another mountain. I’m getting more brave about riding with cars, but I still don’t like it. I sing to myself to give myself courage as the cars whiz past. But still, I think I’m the only female cyclist out there my age, as far as I can tell, so, well, that’s something, I tell myself when I’m trying to be brave.

This afternoon is lunch, swimming, relaxing–we’re really on vacation and it feels wonderful.

A few photos from yesterday: the open market in Annecy and a shot of the lake from the water taxi as we sped along.

Looking out onto the lake in Annecy, France, past ‘le balcon’, the balcony of our little room. So lovely to be here.

On Sunday, we traveled from England under the channel on the ‘chunnel’ train to Paris, then to Normandy to visit with Gilbert’s widow Huguette (for those of you who have read my story, Finding Gilbert. He was the French orphan my father tried to adopt during WWII). Huguette is so lovely and kind. We visited the cemetary above Omaha Beach, always so moving. She coddled us with delicious food. Landon had a cold and she mothered him. What a gift she is.

Yesterday, we sped across France on the TGV, past fields of sunflowers, tidy farms and villages wound around church steeples. Then the majestic mountains and this beautiful lake. The trains are so fantastic here and always such fun. So much better than driving. And we covered the distance from San Francisco to San Diego in three hours while we ate breakfast, talked, snoozed and read! Can’t do that in the car!

Today we rented bikes and will be riding each day for the next week — today it was a trip around the lake together, about 20 miles, then Landon took off for another two hours up mountain roads. I lounged in the room and pedaled up to a Brocante Marche — an antique faire and bought a tiny souvenir for 4 euros.

We’re staying in a little two star family run hotel about 4 km from Annecy — lovely and sweet and much more reasonable than the ones in downtown Annecy. Tomorrow, I go to a spa — have to include that in my stories about the region!. Ooh, la, la.

Tonight, ‘feux artifices’ — fireworks for Bastille Day.

Good thing we’re riding so much — the pain au chocolate is amazing.

Diane

I guess that’s what I’ve become, hanging out with all these rowers!  It’s a lot of fun though and very exciting.

Landon won his heat yesterday so went into the finals in the men’s skulling today—and won!  He beat the guy who just won the British Nationals a few weeks ago.  It was a very exciting race.  Whew!  I couldn’t breathe those last few seconds–it was close, but Landon pulled it off.  He’s such a champ.

Then he and his doubles partner Henry won their doubles race handily.  Tonight we’ll celebrate!

Tomorrow, travel on trains all day–back to London and then under the channel on the chunnel Eurostar to Paris, then on to Normandy to stay with Huguette, Gilbert’s widow, for three nights.  I’m hoping my ‘French brain’ wakes up!

She doesn’t speak any English but it’s always loads of fun and very touching to see her.

I haven’t been back since Gilbert’s funeral in February 2008, over 3 years.

Attaching some photos from today.

Diane

Well after a rough start of a cancelled flight, 24 hours of travel, lost bags and about everything else that could go wrong, we’re back on track now, in the peaceful river-side village of Henley-on-Thames.  It turned out that our bags didn’t arrive till late on the 2nd, so we had to go out and buy clothes for an important dinner that night.  Whew!  What an experience.  But all’s well that ends well, someone said, and I’ll buy that.

Sunday night, the 3rd, we enjoyed an amazing dinner at Quilon, a one star Michelin Indian restaurant in London.  Very yummy.

Monday morning, July 4th, we took the train to get here to Henley and the country side is lovely–green fields spreading out for miles and pink and yellow wild flowers growing alongside the railroad tracks.  I’m doing an article on ‘packing light for a trip by train’ and we managed just fine with our bags in the tube in London,  then transferring to the train at Paddington station, then walking to our place here.

We’re sharing an apartment with another rower and Landon is racing this weekend in a master’s regatta–all the old guys, as he puts it.  The big and famous rowing regatta that has been going on since 1839 took place last weekend.

Our apartment has big windows that look out on the Thames and we watch boats and ducks and geese float by .  Landon found me a bike, so today I’m going to venture out and explore a bit.  I’ve been writing and doing some editing, very peaceful and great.

After being in a hotel, I love having an apartment where I can make tea and we can do our own meals.  Plus going to the market is just great fun in another country, I think–seeing what foods they have and what they call them and how they are displayed.

Well, lesson learned–only take non-stops to Europe. We got seduced by the low fare–1/2 of the non-stop, but now know why. After we took the red-eye from SFO to Chicago, we were told that our flight from Chicago to London had been cancelled. We were put on two more flights, to Orlando and then to London–we were headed south to then go north again–and 24 hours later, arrived in London–without bags.

Luckily, we’ve kept a sense of humor about it all, especially when my pant leg got caught in the escalator teeth in the rail station and I thought I was going to have to take off my only pair of pants to escape! That made the rest of it rather trivial. But both of us had meetings today, which we had to go to in our traveling clothes. They say we may have bags by tomorrow?

They seem very ordinary.  Those moments that change our lives forever.  Really, it’s that just before them was ordinary.  And then something happened and everything stopped or glowed or vibrated and stood out somehow from the moment before.

And looking back, it is all clear, how life changed in an instant.

Albert Camus said: “A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images, in the presence of which, his heart first opened.”

For me, it wasn’t an image.  It was a sound.  Or rather, sounds.

It was a hot September day, and my sister Sharon and her best friend Holly were huddled close together on Sharon’s bed discussing their first day of high school.  I was still in the 8^th grade, anxious to hear about their new world–of cute senior boys, (I learned the term ‘upper classmen’) upcoming football games and something called ‘pep rallies’.

Then there were all their new classes—biology, chemistry, and for Holly, French I.  My sister, Sharon, had to take Latin.  My mother insisted that it was the ‘mother of all languages’ and that we all had to take two years.  Mass was still said in Latin, so that was something, too.  Sharon read from her Latin I Book:  ‘amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis amant’.  ‘I love you’ in Latin.  I was unmoved.

Then Holly began reading from her French I book, words and phrases like ‘chambre meuble’—furnished room.  She tilted her head and made her lips into a kissing shape—‘oui, oui, chamber meuble’.  She and Sharon giggled, seeing some meaning there that I missed, but I was transfixed.

The sounds—it sounded exciting, hypnotic and worldly to be able to make those French sounds.  Holly kept saying words:  ‘Je t’aime’.  ‘I love you’.  How romantic.  I kept listening, my attention riveted on her words and on the sense of excitement I felt hearing them.

I’d heard French words before.  My dad had spent four months in France during the Normandy Invasion of World War II.  He loved to tell stories about his time there, about the warmth and gratitude of the French people at the arrival of the Americans.  And about his efforts to speak French.  Dad learned his French in a country high school in South Dakota, where the teacher, who had never heard French, was reading a lesson ahead to teach it.  We’d giggle when Dad told how ‘s’il vous plait’ came out sounding like ‘silver plate’.  I adored my dad, but his French sounded Midwestern, American, boring.

But this French sounded luscious, sensual, inviting.

That day, that moment, those sounds, may not be something that Sharon or Holly would even remember.  But as I sat there with them, on the pink chenille bedspreads, in the bedroom of my childhood, something changed inside of me, woke up and paid attention.  On that hot September afternoon, my life turned in a new direction and vistas opened up beyond the life I’d known.

I could learn those sounds and words and be a part of that place in the French I textbook, with the side walk cafes where starving artist types sipped strong coffee out of tiny cups.

I didn’t know what starving artists were and I had never tasted coffee, but I knew if I went to this place, where they said ‘chambre meuble’ like that, I could be happy.

I could also be far away from the small town in rural southern California where I’d lived my whole life.  Far away from my mother’s coldness and sometimes cruelty.  It was even a place where my father had already been.  That was important too.

The next year, when I began high school, I suffered through the dreaded Latin I class—‘amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant’.  I was unmoved.

So I begged, pleaded and cajoled my mother into letting me out after only one year.

I could take French, I argued, a language that people still speak.  Didn’t that make more sense?  In one of the rare moments that I can recall when my mother actually listened to me and seemed to care about what I wanted, I prevailed.

The next year, Sharon and I began French I together.  I was a sophomore, she was a junior.  It was a first for us to share a class, since we were in different grades.  We were excited to sit next to each other, and chat before and after class.

But once the bell rang, I was riveted on the French.  That first year, our teacher was an egotistical bore who seemed to enjoy hearing himself speak French (in a pompous voice) more than he cared whether we learned any.  I studied hard anyway. He gave an easy A or B if you were a girl and smiled at him. I did that, but also earned my A+.

The second year, French II, Sharon and I moved into Mr. Maiwald’s class.  He was a short German man with a pointed head and one eye that didn’t move.  He had the reputation of being the hardest teacher in the school, who flunked students regularly.  He was also the German teacher and had taught our brother German.  Next to my dad, he was the smartest person I’d ever come across.

He made it very clear on the first day that he would give hard tests, be a tough grader, but that we would learn French.  I was thrilled.

I became obsessed.  I made flash cards by writing French vocabulary words onto 3×5” index cards and carried them with me wherever I went.  I’d study them on the ½ hour ride to and from school on the school bus.

I’d have them on the ironing board so I could be learning new words when I ironed my starched white gym shirt and dark blue gym shorts each week or the blouses with the big ruffles down the front that were in style in the mid sixties.

I’d stay up late studying and figure out all the tiny nuances of how the verb endings had to agree when you conjugated them, all the different tenses, all the accents and irregular verbs.

I knew he’d ask those things on the exams.  But it wasn’t that.  I had to learn it all.

French and my dream of going to France became the center of my own private universe.  I was safe from my real life as a teenager, from family problems, from boyfriend woes, from worrying if I was fat.  When I said those sounds, I felt free and alive in a way I couldn’t in my normal life.

I got 100% on all the tests.  It became a sort of silent battle between us, this short stocky German man with one funny eye and this tall, shy, high school junior.   He wanted to see if he could make me stumble.  He never did.

It was exhilarating for me to excel in his class.  But each word I learned, each rule I mastered, each accent egu or accent grave that I correctly placed on a French word became a small victory.

It was another step closer to the day that I would fly across the Atlantic Ocean to France, sit at one of those sidewalk cafes and move my lips like a kiss to speak French.

© Diane Covington 2009

I’m sitting on my couch with a cozy fire crackling and my two kittens in my lap and snuggled close. I got them in July and though Joanna took good care of them, they seem so glad to see me–Mom’s home! They usually run outside in the morning and start chasing bugs and climbing trees and things, but today they are staying close.

I spent Saturday in Aix and opted to stay that last night there and get up at 4am to take a taxi to the airport. The hotel there was so much nicer than a sterile cubicle near the airport would have been. I loved that day in Aix. I went to the coffee and chatted and then to lunch with 12 people. We carried on till 3pm. Then there was time to check email and do some writing and another party at 8pm! That was a typical day in Aix when I lived there. A slower pace and very relaxed. I made some new friends and reconnected with some old ones.

I traveled 24 hours to get home yesterday–very challenging. But I got upgraded to première class and that was super. Only problem was that they had some kind of water dripping problem and it was right over my seat–and that of a few others’. On take-off, I had to hold up my International Herald Tribune and try to stay dry. The woman who came around later wasn’t very nice and suggested I go to ‘economique’ or economy class, but I told her I wasn’t budging–I’d take my chances that it was all done dripping. It was, except for a few random drips and I could live with those. It was great to stretch out and nap and I had a fun seatmate and we chatted.

It was so amazing to look out the window and watch the clouds and land and the giant engines just behind my seat. What a mystery it is to fly like that. I don’t understand it any more than I understand email, but I am grateful that we safely traveled through all that sky and landed again in San Francisco.  Joanna met me and drove me home.

Fall started while I was gone. It is chilly now at night and the trees are beginning to turn. We had a giant rainstorm and that was good–we so needed the rain. I went out this morning and gathered some eggs, cut some flowers and picked some grapes and figs.  So yummy and fresh. The chickens are good and the garden still has tomatoes and we had a huge pumpkin crop this year, so lots of pies!

I know that it will take me weeks to integrate all that I experienced during those 15 days of magic. Thank you so much for sharing it all with me. Writing up the articles helps me to remember all the joy. If you want to check out the blog that I did that I got paid for, you can go to: (HYPERLINK “http://touristtravel.com/blog/”http://touristtravel.com/blog/). I’m not sure if he as all of them up yet and I still have one more to turn in, but it was a different flavor than the one that I sent you–you got the inside scoop!

I hope to go back next winter again, but for now, it is good to be home and to sleep in my cozy bed and enjoy the magic of my farm. Will send some last photos.

Big hugs to all of you,

Diane

'Fall in Provence' 2008

• home at the farm again...
• L'Hôtel Manoir in Aix-en-Provence
• La Bandol, France
• Hello from Bandol on the Mediterranean
• Hello from Lîle de Bendor
• Arles, France
• Aix-en-Provence, part 2
• A sunny day in Aix-en-Provence
• Aix-en-Provence
• Aix-en-Provence
• Sainte Maxime, France
• Provence
• Terre Blanche, Provence, Part 2
• Terre Blanche, Provence
• SFO Airport, Air France Première Class lounge...
• Travel Lodge, SFO Airport,