February, 2010

Two scenes of 'Isle de Brehat' (Brehat Island)

A spectacular Thousand Island look-alike a half hour from our door

No cars are permitted as it is a 'zone for feet' only

Show and tell!

Show and tell is so much fun! I feel like a kid being potty trained, bragging about his self control while dragging his parents to the bathroom to proudly display his achievement. They cheer, they applaud and he thinks he is just the cat’s meow.

First off we finished part of our kitchen renovation. I say 'part 'because we still plan to tear down the ceiling and install 'old world' beams with textured drywall in between. I have been hand hewing the beams with an adz in my spare time but we may get lazy and do part two of the actual renovation next year. When I left off last month I had just started by smashing the kitchen counter, sink and cabinet. This is only part of the kitchen mind you as this is not a typical American styled set-up.

Before...

Here, Janice has nothing fancy, just a large farm styled work table in her kitchen, an old French buffet styled piece of furniture to store cooking implements in as well as a long bench for someone visiting to sit and swill wine while she is cooking.

During....

Still, the changes required replacing the old part vinyl / part press board counter top with a butcher block counter top, building a pull out trash cabinet and ‘French-ing’ up the slide out storage areas. In addition, of course, I replaced the million year old ceramic sink with a stainless double sink complete with food disposer and R/O water filtration system…all of which we packed in suitcases and flew over from California over the past couple of years. Why? Simple. Price, availability and, believe it or not, ease in bringing them over.

...and after
(Click on any pic for an enlargement)

This is not anything like a typical American kitchen, but my bride wanted a French traditional styled look and that is what she got. The center section baskets are fixed so the shelves slide out. The left side cabinet door is a false front concealing a slide out trash receptacle.

It would not surprise many to know that the plumbing sizes in the US and here are quite different. I was quite meticulous in preparing for this project, trying to anticipate all eventualities, problems, issues and unintended consequences, so I brought gobs of extra everything.

Still, it was a little daunting knowing that I have never done any plumbing without having to go back to the hardware store for extra bits and bobs for whatever plumbing job I was doing and that I had not anticipated that I would need. The problem was that in this case, the closest hardware store that would have the parts in the sizes I would need would be 3000 miles (4800 Km) away.

The long and the short of it was that it required my doing the one thing that I will never do to Janice’s airplane---jury rig things to make them work. Still, it is a real nice improvement.

Next on our agenda were having our master bedroom / dressing room in the loft carpeted, new bed drug up the 2 flights and Janice putting her personal decorating imprint on the whole shebang. This is one of those projects that seemed a little anticlimactic since it has been unfolding in slow motion as it rose higher on the to-do list and as we could afford to move forward on it over the past 7 years.

Our bedroom loft, 2002

It may seem ridiculous to take so long to finish a stupid bedroom; after all, this is not rocket science. Remember though that we are only here part of each year and we can’t have work interfering with having too much fun. Besides, this area occupies the whole 3rd floor and is the same size as all 3 second floor bedrooms combined. We had the windows installed the first year and drug up all of the drywall to the 3rd story.

Doing my thing

A friend inspecting the new windows
Stack of drywall board on floor yet to be installed

Subsequent years saw the electrical work done, framing, building closets, insulation, drywall, refinishing the ceiling beams, paint and texturing. In the end what matters is that we have what we set out to do. We should be good to go for a while as we now have 4 bedrooms and 2 ½ baths for 2 of us. Won’t someone please come and visit?

Same angle, same view as above

...and part of the dressing room beyond

It has been a bit of a push for the past two months and there is still a couple of weeks of odds and ends to do before we wrap up our building projects for the season. I have been making serious deposits in my brides love bank so that I can relax when it's time to get back to doing really important stuff in June, like finishing building her airplane...

As much as it may seem, life around here is not all work and no play. Having regained the use of our kitchen and living room, we have started another round of dinner parties.

Chatty news

We have lined up our usual home exchanges for our upcoming European road trip but we were pleased that we were also able to make a few available for our daughter Kami as well. This is the second one of our kids who has cottoned to this whole scheme and is fast becoming an enthusiastic proponent.

Some time ago, she asked if it would be possible for us to find a place for her in New York City to stay in order to see the Tennis Open. We came up with a possibility or two but in the end she chose not to go.

Recently though, she asked if we could possibly find a place in Vancouver, British Columbia during the winter Olympics this month as no accommodations remained available. Within hours we had two excellent homes for her and her girlfriends to choose from, so obviously she chose a real nice condo near the events and they flew there this morning.

Empowered by her success, she hesitatingly explored the possibility of our willingness to find a place in Maui (Hawaii). The hesitation was not so much because we had just found her a place for the Olympics but because she would be taking her mother (read my ex-wife) and she feared we would be about as receptive to the idea as a Muslim opening a bikini stall at the Kabul mall.

They just got back from their holiday there two days ago.

As our kids are able to get it together, we expect they will all want to pick their favorite vacation destinations in the world where they will only have to fly there to have their own home waiting for them.

Let's go on an adventure!

Whenever we find ourselves needing a quick island fix, (admittedly, we have a real fetish for these things) we stroll down to one of our local beaches which has a plethora of them. Often, we have gazed up at a small castle on the bluffs across from Lliec Island, home to famed aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1938.

I have often though that I would give your right leg to see the place, but alas, it was not to be. Then again, it was! We have friends in the village who asked us to go for a beach walk with friends of theirs (rubber boots required as we go sloshing about at low tide). We drove to their door and SHAZAM, it was the castle!

It is fascinating to see the inside story of these places when you realize they have been passed down for generations. The interior rooms are filled with antiques and cozy family furnishings, giving an old world ambiance matching the exterior.

The place is quite huge, with additional towers on the main entrance side (this view is the 'back', facing the sea) complete with secondary structures on the property. There is an 9 foot high (3 meter) stone wall that surrounds the property and gardens that I estimate is a half mile (1 Km) long.

It has become common for the owners of these places to occupy only a small portion of the place in the winter as heating is simply prohibitive. And now you know the rest of the story...

January, 2010

Chateau Trecesson

Built in 1440, it remains privately owned

Home away from home

We don't read the local paper so we often find out about local happenings after they have occurred. Recently we heard that the mayor was going to offer his New Years greetings to the village residents at a town hall meeting of sorts so we decided to attend. It is a great way to meet neighbors we don't know well and to catch up on all the big community plans for the coming year.

Our house in the village
The next picture is taken from the top of the church
steeple towards the back of our house and garage

We sat in rapt fascination as he explained how wisely the budget had been spent under his stewardship while displaying slides of the new bus stop adjacent to the village phone booth. More importantly were the photos of other critical capital acquisitions such as a new riding lawn mower and energy saving street light bulbs. No matter that the village street lights are turned off at 10 PM and that our house entry light is the only light on in the entire village after this, we raved about it also. This was made easier by the fact that the entire meeting was conducted with an unlimited amount of champagne for the thirsty constituents.

Its good to know that our French tax dollars are hard at work.

A few observations
on life in France

OK, OK, so I have not been shy about sharing critical observations between the cultures and lifestyles of France and life at home. For anyone who thinks that the only thing that France is good for is smelly cheese and cowardice, I am here to tell you that there is more. Much like FOX news, I try to be objective. I report, you decide.

One of the things that I have come to recognize is the retro lifestyle. Life here is like a page out of a “Leave it to Beaver” or “Father knows best” TV script. (If you are old enough to remember them) There is great security for families raising their kids in an environment free of gangs, drugs and by and large, life in the fast lane. Kids are like 1950 era ‘respectful’ here. They greet you with a handshake, look you in the eye and call you “sir”. Coming from California it’s a little creepy… but quite refreshing!

Store clerks greet you with a handshake. They make Wall Mart greeters look like rank amateurs. I used to think it was all so formal but it is not, it is old world ‘polite’…. life in the slo-o-o-o-w lane.

On the other hand, there have been new developments since our last visit. As of September 1st past, regular incandescent light bulbs are no longer available for sale anywhere in the EU (European Union). This is all about global warming, saving energy, reducing greenhouse gasses, blah, blah, blah.
Europe has really gone bananas over this whole topic, and France has enacted a carbon tax effective January 1st. We purchased 4 of the new energy efficient light bulbs. Advertised to last up to 8000 hours, the first burned out in two weeks. The second takes almost 3 seconds to “turn on” and the last two turn on right away but take a full minute to go from dim to full power.

I frequently enter a room, turn on the light and grope my way in near darkness to get something then leave the room before the bulb warms up. It would seem that the energy savings come from the fact that they hardly ever actually turn on. The bulbs run from $10. to $40. each. Yes, each.

I am not a fan.

Of course with mercury in all of them, there are very few legal places to dispose of a broken or burned out bulb. Our nearest is a 20 mile round trip and with gas at $8.00 a gallon I would love to have Al -“I am a moron”- Gore explain to me just how much my carbon footprint is reduced.

Finally, many if not most customer service departments for corporations here charge you to call them and discuss your problems. They can only be reached by the equivalent of a 900 number, kind of like if you were calling a phone sex service, and charge you by the minute to talk to them. I once used up and entire ‘pay-as-you-go’ allotment on my cell phone card calling customer service trying to get my phone card activated. That was handy…

Aside from the accepted notion that the whole country takes the month of August off, I have just recently realized that a staggering number of manufacturing businesses take two weeks off at Christmas as well. The French work 35 hours per week and by law, get 6 weeks’ vacation per year. The new president Sarkozy fought long and hard to pass a law permitting (not requiring) workers to work 40 hours per week. In exchange, they get paid for the ‘extra’ 5 hours AND get an additional 5 hours of vacation time. Add to this religious holidays, sick time… Life under a socialized system is ‘different’.

Life on Janice's
chain gang

This was a slow quiet month for us. This is the first time in memory where we had none of our kids visiting us for Christmas. We planned to lay low but some of our friends would have none of it and insisted we join them for Christmas Eve, Christmas day, New Years Eve and day. Typical was Christmas Eve dinner which began at 8 PM with cocktails, champagne and 'hors d’oeuvres'. A starter was served, followed by a boneless turkey main dish. Several wine varieties were introduced between courses, followed by cheese platters, salads, 2 deserts, chocolates and coffee. Dinner was over promptly at 2 AM. That was early. New Years eve dinner ended at 3 AM. Man, do these people know how to live!

Since we were not doing any entertaining at home ourselves, in between all the partying we managed to finish our little modification in our dining room. This was something we decided to do 2 years ago but it took a while to find the ‘perfect’ beams as seen in the picture below. As I mentioned last month, they are twisted, warped, partially rotten, gnarly pieces that we got out of an old ‘Manoir’ nearby.

Perfect, huh?

In short, I smashed a 4’X10’X2’ foot hole in our dining room wall, embedded the beams to create a niche and put custom cut mirrors on the recessed walls. The wall was a mixture of stone, mortar, dirt mixed with horse hair and various bits that created so much dust all over the house that Janice threatened to go to a hotel until it was over. The ‘before’ picture below was the intact wall prior to my brides latest great idea was put in motion.

Our dining room before....

During.... (Note my Muslim co-worker)
Oh wait, That's Janice!
The image is fuzzy due to the amount of dust in the air.

It is hardly a secret that she is a great fan of home decorating shows. I have tried repeatedly to cancel those infernal DYI magazines but I suspect that she has told them to disregard any such requests. She keeps coming up with great new ideas and the next thing you know we are at it again…

TA-DA! Finished product.
To see more detail, just click on the picture

Speaking of being at it again, after repainting parts of one of our bedrooms, and building custom bookshelves, we turned our attention from the dining room to the kitchen where I got to smash our crappy kitchen sink, counter and cabinet. (We have so much fun here!)

Over the past 3 years, we have brought parts and pieces over from the US that were either exorbitantly expensive or simply unavailable here. As ridiculous as it sounds, (go on, go on, have a good laugh at my expense) we brought a stainless kitchen sink, a food disposer and a R/O (reverse osmosis water treatment system) over in suitcases.

The time finally came to put it all together and build French styled cabinets and a butcher block counter top. I will save that for next month or I will absolutely nothing to tell you about....

Finally, continuously adding to my skill sets, I was invited by a friend to help bottle his Bordeaux wine. Its a small operation so we only bottle about 100 bottles at a crack and we will begin building a small reserve to age the wine. Next month, we will bottle apple cider form the 1 ton of apples that he pressed in November. Why, this is more fun than hanging out with convicts!

Aircraft assembler, Stone mason, blacksmith
and now bottler and master corker!
Is there anything this man can't do?

As I said earlier, we had a slow and quiet month here.

December 2009

Guess where we are!

Some months the subjects I write about don’t lend themselves to too many pictures. This is not one of them. Below, you will find a plethora of pics as this is a big ‘show and tell’ month.

"The Rock". Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.

Lombard Street: The crookedest street in the world

California native wildlife

When I left off last, we had just arrived in Felton (south of San Francisco) having arrived from the spectacular Big Sur coastline (home to Timothy Leary’s Esalen Institute where you can go to explore your “unrealized human capacities that lie beyond the imagination”. Hey, this is California!)

Back in Europe?
No, this is San Francisco's
Palace of Fine Arts

California Redwood trees

Burned out interior of Redwood tree.
Some are big enough that we have driven our car right through

We walked through the giant Redwoods in Big Basin, spent a day in Carmel with a lunch stop at Clint Eastwood’s restaurant “The Hogs Breath Inn”. Spending a couple of days in San Francisco revisiting old haunts on the Presidio where I spent 3 years as an MP (Military Police), we headed south and drove by our old theater in Buelton (the theater was built specifically for the stage show I performed there for a couple of years in the mid 90’s)

Patrolling the Presidio in 1976

Clint Eastwood's 'Hog's Breath Inn"

For our second week, we stayed in Newport Beach in a lovely cottage where I am writing this sitting at the desk in our bedroom on the second floor facing the crashing waves of the sea. We were joined for the week by our daughter Kami who does ‘set dressing’ for the movie industry, while she was on a break from a TV show she has been working on for the past couple of months.

California surfers

She is particularly difficult to get to visit as she is often working 12-14 hours a day on set and we plan our arrival and departure to Los Angeles as much as 11 months ahead while her schedule is determined as little as a week in advance.

Kami with us in Newport Beach

We also drove out to Hemet where my mother lives and brought her back to ‘our place’ for a few days. Kami had been planning Thanksgiving dinner for some time and cooked up a storm for days in preparation. We were also joined by a couple of her friends for dinner.

"Our" home in Newport Beach.
Janice and Kami on upper
bedroom deck

Newport Beach is a real upscale beachfront community with multimillion dollar homes facing the Pacific Ocean on one side and a large bay where they can dock their yachts at their private docks on the other. Having had our fill of life in the fast lane, we turned our rented car in and flew to Paris.

Bonjour mes amis

French dinner parties, where the wine
and laughter flow in equal amounts.
Well, almost equal amounts.

Having had an uneventful flight over, we rented a car and drove the 6 hours across France to our house. As always, we spent the first week on sleeping pills getting our bodies back into the zone, as in the ‘time zone’. Still, in the first 10 days we re-stocked the house, put our Christmas tree up, had 2 dinner parties and were invited to two others. There is a real sense of having to ‘catch up’ on the social scene when we arrive.

Chateau on Island in
background at nearby beach.

Just to get the season off right, I cut a hole in the tile floor by our front door and recessed a commercial entry carpet to stop us all from walking in with wet shoes. It is often wet here during the winter and since our front door does not have a threshold it always caught on the floor mat.

First cut a hole in the floor...


Next, dig it out,
lay some cement,
frame it in stainless steel
add commercial floor mat
and TA-DA!

Within minutes of our second dinner guest’s departure, we began one of the principal projects planned during our stay here by smashing a 4 'X 10' (1.3M X 3.20M) hole in our dining room wall. It's a recessed area actually, where I will install some twisted, gnarly and warped beams to enhance the old world look of our dining room area. I know, I know... you just have to be here to appreciate this kind of stuff. Just reserve judgment until you see the finished product, OK?

Cobbler making wooden shoes

Speaking of old world, we dropped in on a cobbler who was making wooden shoes. I know I have mentioned that we are in the back hinterlands of beyond in France, with some homes in our village still having dirt floors. This is old world France, the real deal. It is quite a juxtaposition that we can have high speed trains, DSL internet and... neighbors with dirt floors. I was not BULL...eh...'fooling' you.

Finally, just so I don’t get bored, I started hand forging a set of fireplace doors to take back to the Island. I will make sure it falls just below 50 pounds (23 K) so that I can fly it back with us in May. I am here to tell you that this is one miserable place to be if you’re lazy! We have several more projects to do in the next few months and need to get cracking as we have friends visiting from Canada later during our stay and we will be traveling around the continent for a month in the Spring ourselves.

Au revoir.

November 2009

The 2009 Fall road show

This fall’s transition was a little more involved than in the past. We flew from the Island to Los Angeles and spent the night as we always do at our friends Ed and Marilyn. Twice a year like clockwork, they graciously open their home to us as we breeze in and out of town.

The following day we flew to Seattle Washington and caught up with daughter Amy and husband Vance to visit the grand kids. Then, a few days later we drove to Sandpoint Idaho to stay with son Wesley.

Grandson Alex

I couldn't see him either

Moving on, we drove to Rainier Oregon to visit daughter Cassie and celebrate granddaughter Kayla’s first birthday with Janice finally succumbing to a bad case of the flu. Fearing the H1N1 hysteria, a doctor diagnosed her as having Bronchitis and sequestered her to a local motel for a week to prevent infecting the kids.

Cassie with Kayla heading out for Halloween

Returning our rental car in Seattle, we flew back to Los Angeles, rented yet another car and drove up the coast to our home in Arroyo Grande where we spent a week visiting Janice’s mom and husband Vern, catching up with friends and doing maintenance on our house. I finally finished sealing our driveway. With 600 feet (200 meters) of it to do, plus over 3200 sq ft (300 sq meters) of parking area I did a third of it last November, a third last May and finished the rest this week. Whew!

Having been on our big adventure for the past 5 years, I have been going through serious California withdrawals and was in need of a little face time in our home state. So, we drove the Coast highway (highway 1) from our home to Santa Cruz. It is considerably slower than the freeway (highway 101) but is arguably one of the most picturesque roads in America.

Starting in San Luis Obispo, we waived to the boys in blue as we drove past the prison where I once worked. Driving north through Morro Bay and Cambria (gorgeous little town on the coast that is very similar to Monterey) we meandered up to Ragged point stopping here and there to see the sea lions sunbathing on the beaches. The drive along the rugged coastline on incredibly winding roads perched high above the sea reminded us of a cross between San Francisco’s Lombard Street (renowned as the most crooked street in the world) and the Amalfi coast in Italy.

Sea Lions along the coast

Arriving in Felton which is in the heart of the redwood forest just outside ‘the city’ (how San Francisco is referred to locally) we made our way to the 4 bedroom hilltop home where we had arranged our week long home exchange. A real score, the place was perfect to have our friends Ed and Marilyn join us from Los Angeles. Having just arrived, we have managed to sit in the outdoor Jacuzzi under the stars in the evening and had a picnic in the redwoods during the day. Following this, we will spend another week in Southern California before flying back to Europe.

While it seems that anything to do with the island is way behind us for many months to come its not quite. For the past two summers we have made the island available for rent for a maximum of two weeks while we go traipsing off somewhere on the East coast. In spite of a substantial price increase, we booked one of those weeks for next year the day before we left. If either of two other prospects commit, there will be a 2 year waiting list for any further availability.

Taking a stroll down ...


The retirement:

We celebrated our 5th retirement anniversary a few days ago. Wow, time flies when you are having fun and we are having a ball.

We had known for some time the precise date of the event and we knew exactly what we wanted to do. Under the circumstances, most reasonable people take some time – anywhere from a few weeks to several months- to settle in slowly, get used to the changes and then run off on some trip or whatever.

When I retired, we knew that we wanted to store all our worldly possessions, rent the house out for awhile and spend the winter at our home in France. Then upon our return, we would be spending our first whole summer at the Island in Canada so we decided to drive our car across the country to have it available when we got back. It was also a great excuse to drive up the west coast and visit the kids and grand kids before the big road trip.

About a year before D-day, we began to ponder just when we would leave. We were really excited and couldn’t figure out a reason to wait any longer than we had to. So, in the last 3 months we began to wrap furniture up room by room, paint, shampoo carpets and store things in my workshop in preparation for renting it during our extended departure.

By the final week, the house was empty and we were sleeping on a mattress on the living room floor without a stick of furniture in the entire house. It reminded me of being in college. We were eating out as all our dishes, pots and pans –everything was stored away.

On November 8th 2004, Janice drove to the prison with me and waited in the parking lot as I went in for the last time to officially “sign out”. Our bags were packed in the car and we drove off on our big adventure never having looked back. Talk about being anxious!

We whooped and hollered for a hundred miles “YAHOOOOOOOO!!!! We are done!!!!! We never have to work again. Yippee! Ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!” We kept asking each other “What do you want to do?” and answering “anything we want!” Five years down the road you would think we would have grown up a little, settled down and gotten a grip. You would be wrong.

We still do it on a whim.

The archives

I started writing our little newsletter to our friends and family a month after I retired. Much like sending postcards it was simply a way to keep in touch. That went on monthly for a while until one day I decided to add a picture and all hell broke loose. I got playful and started getting fancy with a pseudo ‘magazine look’, adding pictures, graphics and the like.

Soon my efforts were clogging peoples email boxes and taking them forever to open the darn thing. I tried doing PDF’s with little more success until in January 2007, when I finally figured out how to do this blog. It has solved a lot of problems, especially for folks who are technologically challenged. One click on the link and you’re in.

Recently though, I had a new reader who not only perused our most recent post but read clear back to what he thought was the beginning in the archives. (The archives are on the top of this page on the right side and are listed by year and month. Simply click to open). It occurred to me that this is turning out to be the memoirs of the last days of our lives, and will provide the only record available when Alzheimer’s kicks in.

I decided I should add the first two years (2005-2006) of letters of our travels and experiences to the archives. With no plane to build, this month I did. I am hardly suggesting that anyone would be interested in going back to them but for the record, they are now there.