Until I met Nicole at age 42, I was never much of a traveler.
Vacations nearly always meant visiting family, although there were a couple of short trips in 1977 when I was living in Austria with my first wife. We did two weeks with a Eurail pass in the summer and a week in London at Christmas.
Aside from that, though, the only trip was our Save The Marriage jaunt to Montreal, Boston and New York in August 1979.
It didn’t.
Save the marriage, that is.
Through the 1980s, all my travels were either for work or to visit family.
But once I met Nicole and fell in love with her, travel became a big part of my life. She was a world-renowned scientist who had at least one international conference a year, and while I couldn’t go along every time, I saw some places I never thought I would ever see.
I spent a week in Oxford one summer and 10 days in Venice a few years later.
The last conference I attended with Nicole was in 2011 in Noordwijk in the Netherlands. It was a little more eventful than we would have preferred and it was the last overseas trip we took.
Our trip two years earlier was one of the nicer ones. It started with. three or four days in London for a conference. We went from there to Nice, the first and so far only time in my life I flew Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline.
Our trip to Nice was so we could see our son Virgile complete his first Ironman Triathlon — a 2.4 mile swim in open water, a 112-mile bicycle ride in the mountains and a 26.2 mile run.
It isn’t just a question of speed or endurance. I would be willing to bet nine people out of 10 couldn’t swim 2.4 miles no matter how long it took.
I know I couldn’t.
The third part of our 2009 trip was very pleasant. Toulouse is where Nicole was born and raised and where both of our children were born. It was late spring on that 2009 visit and the weather was very nice. On our final Friday,, we went into the countryside to a little mountain commune called Saint-Cirq-Lapopie.
There are only 198 residents, but there is a truly wonderful restaurant called Le Gourmet Quercynois that served us a memorable lunch.
Twelve years later, I don’t remember what it was we had, but I will always remember that at least a half dozen of the best meals I ever ate were in France. In fact, the only other meal that would rank so high on my last was in 2006 in Morro Bay, California, when I had an incredible dinner of Chilean Sea Bass.
In fact, I would love to see Morro Bay again. It isn’t San Francisco or Yosemite or Disneyland, but it was a very nice place to visit and a very special weekend.
I haven’t been back to California since we moved east in 2010 and I haven’t been back to Europe since 2011.
Perception is strange. I was going to say that I hadn’t traveled outside the country since 2011, but then I realized we have actually made four different foreign trips — two to Jamaica and two to Guatemala.
Yes, they are foreign countries.
And next year, we will probably go to Africa and stop in Toulouse on the way back.
We’ve still got some travel left in us.