We are going to France to celebrate, among other things, our 25th wedding anniversary. We’ll also visit Belgium to see long-time friends there, and we hope to collect a small sculpture that we bought in Antwerp three years ago and expected to ship home only to find it cost more to ship than it was worth. So it’s been cared for by a friend near Antwerp all these years.
As we’d lived in Belgium and traveled extensively in France, and now having the internet as a tool, it should be easy to plan this trip. Not! Initially the difficulties arise from not being able to decide where to go, as we’d love to return to the Dordogne, but as we were going in October we decide, remembering our first visit to those parts when many hotels and restaurants were closing for the season, that we might be a bit late to visit southwest France. Next year we might try for spring in the Dordogne. We booked our flights on 19 May. (Later Delta made some changes in the schedule; the 11 am flight is gone, and we depart at 8:45, meaning 6:45 at the airport, leave home at 6:15 – and a six-hour layover in Atlanta. And there is probably worse to come as the airlines downsize after Labor Day. At least we will probably make our connecting flight! As there is only one flight each evening, the consequences of not making a flight are quite serious.)