Au revoir, La France.

I'm on the plane, flying home after 18 days in France and 12 days since my first (and only) blog. I won't, at this point, try to bring you up to date on all the places I've been or the things I've learned. Many impossibly cute Provençal towns spilling down hillsides from a massive medieval fortress or chateau at the summit. Towns whose narrow little streets evolved through centuries of foot and horse traffic long before I drove up them with my rented car - only to confront another car heading down! I won't tell you about the great wines and cheeses - this is a France and it does not disappoint. I won't try to summarize the great buildings I saw, like the new Museum of European & Mediterranean Culture in Marseilles or the 13th century Palace of the Popes in Avignon (where I really missed the voice of Rhoda). And I can't tell you about the unexpected - like stumbling upon the Au Lapin Agile café in Montmartre, remembering how it had figured prominently in a play that Ruth and I saw and loved, and slowly dissolving in tears of loss and remembrance for her. I will spare you my rants about the inadequate signage system on French roads or the bizarrely French regulation which forbids smoking in a restaurant but allows it at outdoor tables - when 95% of restaurant dining is done at outdoor tables.
 
What I will do is reprint here the guest blog I wrote for Avril's travel blog (her narrative of the trip is at www.travelpod.com/members/avrilabroad ). It was really intended for her friends, not mine, but on rereading it I realize it has lots to says about me as well. So, if you are interested, I offer it below.
 
Traveling with Avril was wonderful. But Ruth was never far away. One evening in Aix-en-Provence Avril said she felt that three of us were at the table, and proposed a toast to our accompanying third. I'll drink to that! Ruth and I were always great travel companions. We still are. But here are some words of introduction about the person who has been taking me further.
 
May your own journeys bring you growth and joy.
 
Avi
 
 
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A&A do B&B
 
Hello, Avril's friends. This blog is being written by Avi, Avril's travel companion on this trip. I thought I'd give you a personal perspective on traveling with her. For those of you who know her, this may seem either predictably familiar or curiously enlightening. For someone who is coming to know her better (in, ahem, various ways), my experiences of her have been as informative and enjoyable as my experiences of France.
 
For one thing, seeing Avril on the road is curiously like seeing myself. When traveling I wander the streets and hillsides with the eye of a photographer (though not necessarily a good photographer!). This constant stopping to catch a rusted staircase through the frame of tree branches, or placing my travel companion right over there, no, maybe a little to the left, at the railing of yet another bridge must have been a constant, bemused frustration to my late wife who suffered my artist soul. But on this trip I took no camera (other than my iPhone and it's default to crappy panorama shots), leaving the artistry entirely to Avril. And sure enough, a walk through some hillside town in Provence was constantly punctuated by stops to capture the light upon the old stone, or to place me there, no, maybe a little to the right, in some narrow winding alley. Ah, so that's what it's like to suffer from perambulus interruptus!
 
But I'm not complaining. For Avril does see colour and shadow in ways I have not. To see through her photographer's eye, often with features pointed out and explained to me, is to experience an art tour of Europe without going into yet another gallery. But it is an interactive gallery, as I often stop to point out shots or discuss the optimal angle or cropping of what we see. And to my great delight, Avril often takes the shots as I call them. It makes me feel like a movie director who has a great cinematographer at his side. Of course, what ends up later on the cutting room floor (or, in this case, the Delete button) may be another matter. But I like to think we see eye-with-eye as the past weeks have shown we often see eye-to-eye.
 
I see myself mirrored in other ways as well. I devour guidebooks so that I walk into a new place knowing what I want to see and dripping with newfound trivia. But so does Avril. And that relieves me of primary responsibility for planning. But, like me, Avril is not bound to her plans. Let's just wander and see where we get to. Let's have some guidebook-recommended restaurants in mind, but let's eat when we see someplace that suits our fancy. Avril, as I already knew and as you probably know too, is good at Improv. (Life, as we are both old enough to know, can't be planned. After all, Avril and I never planned each other. Unexpected joy. And two years ago I watched as all my planning with Ruth was eaten up by radiation and chemo. Unexpected horror. The Yiddish expression "men tracht und Gott lacht" - "people plan and God laughs" - is far too true. So play the hand you're dealt, and take a few risks to make the game interesting.)
 
On the other hand, there are her ways that are so different from mine. Flavour taste for example. Me, give me bold but conventional tastes - citrus, cinnamon, chocolate, etc. Avril seeks out these weird herbal subtle things. "Smell this," she says, shoving some local soap under my nose and treating me to some vague perceptions of burnt crow feathers. And she's ecstatic! "Try this," as we dip tasting sticks into some locally made jam - toe jam, perhaps. Now I'll admit that the local honey is more interesting when infused with lavender (this is, after all, Provence where absolutely everything seems to have a lavender variant - lavender liqueur anyone? Or how about some lavender-infused salmon pâté?) but the rosemary jellies and the sage & sassafras ice cream are really debasements of a good original concept!
 
Speaking of ice cream, this is Avril's compelling passion. OK, I get it that a stroll through a town on a hot day requires at least one visit to the local designer ice cream shop. But when I found myself behind the wheel of our car, driving 15 kilometers down some winding Provençal roads, with wrong turns into sleepy villages only to head back for the twisty road that began at the kind of crossroads where you sell your soul to the Devil and then rutted its way up a hill face to come out at some ice cream emporium with a dozen fancy tables overlooking a valley and two dozen fancy cars parked under the trees and a twenty minute wait just to get the waiters attention to peruse the menu of excessively decadent sundaes and 8-flavour towers topped with whipped cream and paper dragons, well, I felt that I had found the gathering place of the followers of The Grateful Dairy.
 
Perhaps one reason for the Ice Cream Odyssey is the fact that it's gluten-free. I've never before experienced the world through the eyes of a celiac (or, more accurately, the stomach) but it's hell out there. Want a quick lunch on your way to the museum? All the fast options involve pizza or pitta or something. Go for sushi? There is wheat in the soy sauce. It's there again as a thickener in the chic garlic/rosemary/kumquat dressing the chef has used to simmer tonight's special. Being a celiac, as Avril has told me perhaps more than twice, is trying to get the world to understand that you are not allergic to flavour. Gluten-free is not the same as bland. And requesting it is not the same as requesting vegetarian. A dripping hunk of rare meat is gluten-free. An organic eggplant Parmesan might not be. But sherbets and ice cream are safe. So it is with great self-sacrifice that I force myself to eat the cone while Avril uses that dinky plastic spoon.
 
Yes, being with Avril has certainly given me fresh perspectives. Such as the need to factor a half hour out of every day into getting her hair ready! Sheesh! Would it be so terrible to simply run a pick through your hair and be out the door sooner? But, of course, Avril will never be out the door as soon as me. I say this not from pride, but from the learned experience of our differences. For me it doesn't really matter how neat our Airbnb apartment looks when we're out of it. It's not as if we're expecting company! But Avril makes sure the bed is absolutely neatly made before she can even eat breakfast. And as for Avi's "let's leave the dishes until we come back"? - no way! I don't mean to complain. It's kind of nice having all the plates and cutlery in their ordered places. As it's nice to have my t-shirts and underwear all neatly folded after we've done the laundry (and before I fling them into a corner of my suitcase). And it's even kind of entertaining coming into a new B&B and watching Avril carefully unpack every single item and put it on a hanger or folded in a drawer. Which means, at the other end, allowing lots of time on leaving the B&B for the suitcase to be meticulously packed again.
 
But this eye for order certainly has it's benefits - for me. Reading the above you might not be surprised to hear that I have a slight tendency to misplace things. "Er, Avril, did you happen to notice what I did with the car keys?" And, of course, who comes to my rescue? Again and again. When I told Avril I might write a blog about her, she suggested the title "Travels With My Personal Dowsing Rod". So I won't go into the details of how we took a 20 km bike ride, with a picnic by a stream at the turnaround point, only to have me realize on our return that I had left one (!) hearing aid by the stream, and how, after we drove back to the spot....
 
All of this is somewhat baffling, given her complex approach to spatial location. As we drove the back roads and front plazas of rural Provence, I was behind the wheel and Avril was the navigator, maps spilling off her lap, fingers constantly rezooming the on-board navigation. And she was great, giving me constant predictions of what lay ahead and strategies for extricating ourselves from the rat mazes into which we strayed. Some might call it creative problem solving - others might simply recognize it as deliberately driving the wrong way on a one-way street. And once all we could do was laugh hysterically as we found ourselves slowly ploughing through a crowd of wedding guests at a street-level reception. Perhaps it was her skills as a graphic recorder and meeting planner, but Avril was terrific in applying map to reality and leading us forward. But......take the map out of her hand and watch her get completely disoriented. And watch I did, in amazement, as time and again she would exit a building, glance around and head off at 180 degrees wrong! If she were a goose, she'd fly north for the winter.
 
We'll see where she takes me if we travel again.
 
A.