2022 was the first time since the pandemic that I was able to travel as I had planned. I retired in 2021, but wasn’t able to go too many places due to the restrictions.
I regularly visit Florida to enjoy warm weather and cycle while visiting my friend and getting some respite from the harsh Canadian winters, but I also plan to travel other places while I’m still young and healthy enough to do so.
Last year I visited Iceland for a whole month, and participated in an artist’s residency. While I enjoyed visiting the country, (you can check out my posts from that time complete with photos of that awesome landscape) I wasn’t so much a fan of the residency concept, so my friend and I have decided to plan our own.
Look out Paris…here we come! We’ll be sipping lattés and eating croissants in cafés and going to museums and galleries to soak up the art for a whole month!
And of course, I will be writing. I’m doing some research on artists and paintings for a portal fanstasy idea I’m developing, and I have one last pass to make on my first novel (A Glory All Her Own) before I send it out into the world, hopefully this fall.
I am also planning a collection of folktales that I wrote in Iceland, as well as some others I have done in the past. I’m a student of folklore in general, and so I find it interesting and take inspiriation from folktales for my short stories.
Before Paris, I am taking a short solo side trip to the Loire Valley to check out all of the chateaux. I lived in France back in my teens, but we mostly left to visit other parts of Europe back then, so there’s still a lot of France I haven’t seen.
And guess what? I speak the language! I grew up in Montreal and attended French immersion programs during much of my schooling, and of course, there was the whole year in France in high school. I also married into a French Canadian family and sent my daughter to a French language school, so manyof my friends from that era are Francophones too. I hope this will make things easier when travelling, though in the past I found people switched immediately to English in spite of my fluent French, or worse, they snickered at my Quebecois (ish) accent.
The Quebec accent, if you don’t know, is more French in many ways than the current way they speak in France. The people who emmigrated to New France back in the 1700s, as my husband’s family did, came from the west coast of France, from Normandy and Brittany, and so the language hails from this old French past, both in accent and in vocabulary. French in France is currently littered with a lot of English words, which the Quebecers skoff at.
Currently I’m blessed with travel priveleges through a family member who works for an airline, so it’s been exciting to fly cheaply and last minute, and on standby. I don’t think I would go at high season but when its less busy it’s nice to be able to just pick up and head out when the fancy takes me. And some places are expensive to go to at full price, so I’m definately going to try some travel farther afield, such as Thailand or Japan while I can.
So wish my luck in my travels and keep an eye on this site for some posts and photos of the places I am going. If you like travelling too, I hope you’re getting to go places too!
