Welcome to my blog!

I have taken up a new pastime in retirement: writing about my travels, inspired and accompanied by photographs.  I suppose that my love of travel is rooted in my growing up in an Army family, moving frequently and seeing a lot of the United States and Europe.  I hated being constantly uprooted, but I liked experiencing new places.

In addition to travel, my interests include my family, reading, walking & hiking, art, movies, food & cooking.  

The travel writing began in 2011, when I promised friends that I would send a photo a day from France, via email.  I added a few words about the photo-du-jour, and then the emails expanded, as more photos and more commentary flowed into each post.  It turned out that I enjoy writing about subjects which spring from my photographs.  As I only began taking photos in 2011, on a tiny point-and-shoot camera, this has all been an interesting learning experience.  The latest challenge is translating my past travelogues — which were sent by email — into blog posts.  It has proved a frustrating endeavor for non-tech-savvy me, but one which I’m savoring.  Bravo for for challenges and learning!

A lot of things I like come together in the photo below.  I saw this painting in a museum in Paris.  The artist was Renoir, and the model was his wife.  As I stood gazing at it, a Frenchman commented, “C’est vous!”  (“That’s you!”)   I did a double-take as what he’d said sunk in, and when I looked back, he was gone.  I realized that the Renoir portrait does look very much like me, and decided to adopt it as my portrait.  C’est moi!

HOW THIS BLOG IS ORGANIZED

The Home page contains all my posts arranged in chronological order, with the newest ones first.  That means it’s a hodgepodge of categories (California, France, Hawaii and other topics, plus some in French).  I don’t much like the mixture, but that’s the way this blog format works.  You can always go to directly to the topic or language which interests you by clicking on the list of categories.

I am new at this, and find myself buffaloed by the challenges of formatting.  Sometimes the posts are partly single-spaced and partly double-spaced, and I can’t figure out how to remedy that, yet.  Sometimes the photos don’t have the best size or placement.  Please have patience with the glitches.  I’m learning.

One thing I learned quickly, and that is that feedback is golden. Hearing from someone who has read one of my posts is the lovely reward for trying to get it right.  I encourage you to to write a comment!  Comments make me happy.  🙂