See Me Now

Our return trip threatened to undo the well-being we had achieved on vacation, but we arrived home in good spirits. The train to Marseille airport, COVID tests, and night at the Best Western all went according to plan.   But our flight from Marseille to Amsterdam was delayed over an hour; after an attempted mad dash (during which we ran mistakenly through forbidden doors and ended up outside the secure area without having gone through passport control), we missed our connecting flight. Damn! Delta re-booked us on an alternate route -- but on the following day.   I’ve been a fan of Delta airlines since 2018 when they so kindly handled re-bookings and refunds after a family death disrupted my travel plans. I remain a fan. For this situation, Delta gave us vouchers for food at the Schiphol airport, and for a night + dinner and breakfast at the nearby Hilton hotel.   Although we didn’t love the delay, it worked out in a good way. For starters, the Hilton was ups...

The other day, I flashed on a bit of family lore: as a teen, my brother gave up on the French language upon learning that after the number sixty-nine, the French re-package prior numbers’ words in order to keep counting.   Seventy , for example, is soixante-dix (sixty-ten), Eighty is quatre-vingts (four twenties) and Ninety is quatre-vingt-dix (four twenties and ten).   Any language that can’t be bothered to come up with sufficent numbers-words, he concluded, isn’t worthy of further study. Then I also remembered one of Steve Martin’s bits – the one where he pokes fun at Americans expecting everything to be ‘their way’ when traveling abroad Which is to say that there remains a fundamental disconnect between how the French and American brains operate. To be direct, the French can be infuriating to travelers accustomed to American (or Irish) style service. Having understood that the French appreciate even feable attempts at speaking their language, I tried deploy...

  I’m writing this while on the train traveling back to the Marseille airport to get COVID tested. If all goes well, we’ll board our flight(s) home tomorrow after spending the night at a good ol’ Best Western hotel adjacent to the airport. In the event anyone was pining for blog updates, well, sorry to keep you waiting but we had dismal hotel WiFis, especially the last one.  I think I have lots to spill by now so I’ll split this update into several parts or posts so readers can pick and choose. Locales : After leaving the tiny town of Les Baux, we rode to the almost-as-tiny town of Fontaine de Vaucluse , where we stayed for three nights at the Hotel du Poete .   Although that hotel name caught my attention months ago, I had neglected to read up on it. As it turns out, it is named in honor of the poet Petrarch (yes! of sonnet fame ) who apparently fell in love with a woman in Avignon, disliked Avignon itself, and eventually decamped to Fontaine de Vaucluse which he r...