Well, somehow October is already half over. So far, I’m enjoying October a heck of a lot more than I enjoyed September, though. Are we finally finding some sort of rhythm, perhaps? Or have the occasionally cooler temperatures simply mellowed me a bit? Hard to say.
I continue to walk daily, as part of Elisabeth’sCBWC challenge. Near daily, I suppose is more accurate. Let’s take a look at the second week of walks. Several of my walks took place out of state. Here’s a teaser photo – can you guess where I was?
A truly riveting photo, for sure. “WHY are you taking a picture of THAT?” Carla demanded with disdain when I stopped to snap this shot. Why indeed, Carla.
October 8:
I started the day with a lovely three mile walk, accompanied by my friend and writing partner. After the previous day’s drenching rain, today was freshly scrubbed and shiny. I grabbed a photo of a wooly bear although it’s not the most flattering portrait; I find it slightly embarrassing to ask my friend to stop so I can paparazz a caterpillar. She rolled with it, though.
Perhaps not his best side, but he was a cutie.
October 9:
A quick one-miler today. This is where Elisabeth’s walking challenge really comes in clutch; I don’t know if I would have forced myself out of whatever stupor I’d been in to go for a walk if it wasn’t for her. As usual, though, I felt much better once I got my rear in gear and enjoyed some fresh air. I also ended up moving all of my vegetable pots – my tomatoes, basil, jalapenos, and zucchini are still producing – in anticipation of some landscaping work we’re having done.
Now THIS is what fall should look like.
October 10:
Today, my husband and I loaded Carla into the car, drove to the airport, and flew to Boston for a long weekend! My husband and I have each been to Boston several times, but this was a first for Carla. We checked into our lovely hotel in the Back Bay and took a duck boat tour. Then we spent the rest of the day wandering around Newbury Street. Even though we walked for hours, we only got in seven miles. It felt like more.
October 11:
If you guessed from my teaser photo that we were walking the Freedom Trail, you were right! We took a ferry to the USS Constitution, which was closed to visitors due to the government shutdown, and then did the Freedom Trail in reverse, reading about each stop online as we went. My biggest surprise takeaway was that neither the battle of Bunker Hill nor the Bunker Hill monument took place on Bunker Hill. They were named for where the battle was supposed to take place, but the real battle and monument were on Breed’s Hill. Our day included 9.6 miles of walking and ended in Cambridge. At dinner, my husband ordered a lobster roll, which he deemed delicious. (I prefer my lobster unadulterated by anything but gallons of melted butter.) (I had yummy, yummy halibut.) After dinner, we found ourselves at Carla’s favorite ice cream shop for dessert. She got the same combination (chocolate and raspberry) that she’d fallen in love with during our Paris vacation. We took the subway back to our hotel and I was out like a light.
October 12:
The Nor’easter that the weather people were warning about started spitting on us on Sunday, but we took a train to Salem anyway. I would not recommend visiting Salem in October, unless you love crowds and lines. Everything had a line: coffee shops, bathrooms, kitschy tourist shops. Any attraction available had endless lines and “sold out” signs on the doors. Luckily, my husband – trip planner extraordinaire – had reserved us a walking tour weeks ago. The tour was fun and appropriately spooky, and then our tour guide told us where to eat lunch. The tavern was slightly off the beaten path, and turned out to be a perfect suggestion because not only did we get in immediately, but the food was delicious. My biggest surprise takeaway from our tour was that the Salem Witch Trials lasted a mere thirteen months. Two hundred people were accused, but only (“only”) twenty people were tried and murdered as witches, nineteen by hanging and one by pressing. That minuscule moment in history sure gets a lot of hype! We walked around Salem for 7.8 miles, admiring the creepy sites and shuddering at the crowds, then hopped back on the train to Boston. After a brief stop at Levain Bakery – where we saw the inspiration for my favorite fall cookiein the wild! – we decided we were tired of the rain and weary of walking, so we ate dinner at the Irish pub in our hotel.
October 13:
I did not do a dedicated walk on Monday, but I will count our pre-dawn hike to the bus stop in pouring rain. No, it was not more than a five-minute slosh from our hotel, but STILL. Despite the growing panic about the storm, our flight was unaffected and we got home around noon. The cat was extremely glad that we’d come home. Apparently the twice-daily visits from the cat sitter AND long daily visits with my parents weren’t enough to convince him he hadn’t been abandoned.
In this photo from the cat sitter, Leo/Lenny looks like he is on the verge of giving up on life. He has been purring pretty much nonstop since we returned.
October 14:
Back to normal, and I got in a mid-afternoon 1.6 mile walk around the neighborhood. The leaves are finally starting to don their October finery. I found a tree that matches my nail polish!
Blue skies, gorgeous leaves, and fun fall fingernails!
And that’s another week of fall and another week of walks in the books.
Have you ever been to Salem? Did you, like me, go through A Witchy Phase (mine occurred in middle school, but I still enjoy witchy things)? What is the most crowded tourist attraction you’ve ever visited?
Oh hi. Yes, we did go to Paris several weeks ago and I am only just now getting around to posting about it. We had a terrific trip and I am still basking in the glow of what really couldn’t have been a more perfect vacation.
If you are looking for gorgeous photos of Paris sites, please refer to Elisabeth’s blog; she was in Paris right before we arrived, and in fact overlapped with us for one day, during which I got to meet her and her family in person!!!! (As with every blogger I’ve had the luck to meet in person or via zoom, she is both exactly like she is on her blog and also somehow more delightful and more beautiful offline.)
If you’re looking for some hot tips about what was good and what wasn’t good about our visit, you are in the right place. Below, I’ve lined up my landslides and letdowns.
Woot! Woot!s
My husband. Oh my goodness, my husband is a ROCKSTAR. He planned the entire trip, securing our plane, train, and Metro tickets; finding a hotel; researching when and how to obtain entry to the sites we wanted to see; planning day trips and booking travel to and from each city; creating an itinerary that hit all our must-sees without overloading us; securing tickets at the ideal times on the ideal days for each site; figuring out what to do about cell phone service while we were in Europe; and then getting us to each place in the most efficient and pleasant way possible each day. It was so much work and I did none of it. All I had to do during the planning stages was occasionally weigh in on things, suggest potential activities, and offer moral support. All I had to do during the trip itself was show up. It was fabulous. I don’t think I could ever have come up with such a well-planned vacation on my own. Oh also: his French is leaps and bounds ahead of mine, and at one restaurant, the server asked us where we were from. (I find this a difficult question to answer, by the way. I feel like we wear our Americanness like a glaring red-white-and-blue baseball jersey. I always want to respond with the name of our state, but my husband always simply says, “We’re from the United States.” That does seem to do the trick.) When he told this server we were from the States, she shook her head in disbelief and said, “But your French is so good! Your pronunciation is excellent.” Way to go, husband!
On the train!
Carla. You guys, Carla was a superstar traveler. From the instant we left the house to the moment we returned to the States, she was excited, curious, eager, and game for anything. She loved all the museums we visited. She enthusiastically listened to a (quite long and somewhat boring) audio tour of Chateau de Fontainebleau. She put in 7 to 10 miles of walking, from about 7:00 am to 10:00 pm (on average), for eight consecutive days. She ate (some of the) food. She went into every church and cathedral I wanted to peek inside. We had occasional mother/daughter conflicts, but beyond that, she did not whine or complain at all and in fact seemed delighted by and interested in everything we saw. (With the possible exception of the churches. She was into them when we were inside, but when we expressed interest in yet another church, she voted against going in.) I want to go on all the trips with her. (She has suggested Australia as our next big vacation; my husband and I are less enthusiastic, simply because of the lengthy plane ride.)
AirFrance. We flew AirFrance to and from Paris, and it was a fabulous airline. My husband found a ridiculously good deal on premium economy seats, and I was all set for American-style premium economy, as in, economy seating with slightly more leg room. But no! AirFrance premium economy is just a step below Business Class! We got to hang out in the AirFrance lounge before our flight. We got priority access to the security line and priority boarding. We got pillows and blankets and cute little dopp kits each way, we got Champagne just after each takeoff. We had nice roomy seats that lay back. It was one of the best flying experiences I’ve ever had.
Our Louvre Tour Guide. We decided that we wanted a tour guide for the Louvre, because a) it’s so big and overwhelming, and b) we wanted to skip the line. My husband found a tour company online (don’t ask me how; he did a ton of research) who offered a three hour “Louvre highlights” tour with a maximum of six people. Our guide was so sweet and knowledgeable. He showed us a great mix of the heavy hitters (the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory, the Venus de Milo, and others) and less popular but still impressive paintings and sculptures. Then Carla wanted to explore more of the Egyptian wing, which we’d glimpsed at the beginning of the tour, and we found a few other things my husband and I were interested in seeing, and then we were done. We got to skip the long lines to get into the museum, we got to see a nice mix of artwork, and we didn’t get overwhelmed or lost. I would totally do a guided tour again.
Strasbourg. One of our day trips was to Strasbourg, and oh, what a charming city! We had uncharacteristically sunny warm weather, and had a wonderful time seeing the cathedral and exploring the city via a Rick Steves guided walk. We stopped for an outdoor lunch alongside a canal where I had the most delicious spaetzle with mushrooms paired with a crisp and summery local Riesling.
The Eiffel Tower. My husband and I were happy to take Carla to the Eiffel Tower, because it was her top priority for the trip. But he and I wouldn’t have gone without her. I wasn’t exactly dreading it, but I wasn’t looking forward to it either. (By the way, if you want to skip the big line without paying ridiculously overpriced fees for a “skip the line guide,” you have to get tickets exactly 60 days in advance, at midnight Paris time. I am very grateful to my husband for figuring this out and staying up to get the tickets!) Carla wanted to go all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and I’m not a huge fan of heights, and I already did the Eiffel Tower a million years ago with my high school French class. But oh was it ever worth it! I should have known by now that an experience completely transforms when I see it through Carla’s eyes. She was excited and quite nervous about the height and yet so determined to make it work. We had perfect weather, we had glorious views, and Carla loved it. The Eiffel Tower wowed again when we saw it from the top of the Arc de Triomphe at night. At dusk, the whole tower lights up, but then it also sparkles every hour on the hour for about five minutes. My husband took a video of the instant the sparkle started and he caught Carla’s face when she saw it and it was priceless. One of those moments I think I will remember forever. I hope she remembers it too.
Art!: I have had the immense privilege of visiting the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Pompidou Centre, and many other art museums in Paris and around the world. This trip, we went to the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay and I kind of expected the experience to feel a little “same old, same old.” But it wasn’t. I found the museums so moving. Some of the art we saw was three thousand years old! Can you imagine? That people so separate from us in time and manner and lifestyle felt the same drive to create? That other people saw these creations and deemed them valuable enough to save, over millennia? That still other people erected buildings for the sole purpose of housing these works? That millions of people flock to monuments to art to see these ancient and modern creations to this day? It feels so precious and human, this desire to create, to translate experience and emotion into marble or paint so that someone else might know it too.
Our Hotel. We picked our hotel purely because it had a separate but connected room for Carla. The rooms were massive for Paris, giving us plenty of privacy. We each had a mini fridge that the staff refilled with complementary waters and sodas and juice each day. The beds were comfy, the rooms were pretty quiet. The showers had very decent water pressure, and very minimal temperature issues. The staff were friendly and helpful and the hotel and surrounding neighborhood felt safe. We were within easy walking distance of several Metro stops. The main floor of the hotel doubled as a breakfast restaurant, and we were able to use the tables and microwave in the restaurant space on the evenings we didn’t make it out to dinner. It wasn’t fancy and it wasn’t right in the middle of all the Paris action, but it was comfortable and spacious and suited our needs perfectly.
Paris Fashion. While I was arrayed in stereotypical American Middle Aged Mom Wear, I got to admire all the extremely fashionable Parisiennes strolling around the city. The in-style, insofar as I can tell, is something along the lines of wide-legged jeans paired with an ankle-skimming black trench coat. The coats have belts, but are rarely worn belted. I did not see a specific single type of footwear – there was everything from heels to boots to sneakers. I do think the sneakers were mainly white; I didn’t see a lot of bright colors. Hairstyles, as in the US, seem to veer toward the long and lightly wavy. Everyone was impossibly chic, which I suppose is de rigueur for Paris. I would have gladly sat at an outdoor café all day long, watching all the beautiful people live their lives.
Rick Steves. I would be remiss not to give a shoutout to good ol’ Ricky, who provided many restaurant recommendations, pinpointed bathroom opportunities, suggested multiple points of interest, and created interesting, detailed walks for us to follow.
Womp Womps
Bruxelles. None of us had ever been to Belgium before, and Brussels is within my range of acceptability for day trips (two hours), so we decided to go. I had no preconceptions, and I’m kind of glad because I fear it would have been a disappointment. On the pros side, our train trip was easy, we had good weather, and the city is beautiful. On the cons side, I have never been to a busier, more crowded place in all my life. There is an adorable main square in the old town and it was crammed with people. CRAMMED. Everywhere was jammed with tourists. Even though our surroundings were lovely, I felt overstimulated and panicky and overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn’t let go of Carla for an instant, or she would be swept away by a tide of tourists. Even when we left the old town to explore some of the area up-hill, there were still crowds and crowds of people. The touristy sites weren’t particularly noteworthy, either. I mean, the Grand Place was impressive, but the Manneken Pis was tiny and dressed in a firefighter costume, the Royal Quarter was under construction, Jeanneke Pis was tucked into the end of a narrow alley full of drunk college students, the Atomium was too far away for us to visit during our quick visit, and the local food was both stressful and disappointing. I’m glad I’ve been there, but I can’t say I enjoyed it very much at all. The best part was probably the random cat we met, hanging out and accepting pets outside a restaurant. I know it was a highlight for Carla. Not just of Brussels, but of the entire trip.
My Skin. The combination of traveling, eating a bunch of restaurant meals, and spending all day walking and sweating was not kind to my face. I had horrible breakouts pretty much every day.
eSIM. My husband and I decided that it made the most sense for him to pay the daily rate ($12, I think?) to maintain his regular phone service while we were in Europe. He had to be available in case of urgent work issues, plus he had all the details of the trip on his phone and he is hands down the better photographer. But we also decided that I would get an eSIM while we were away. It’s hard to remember why, now, because it turned out to be so useless. I think partly because we wanted to have a French phone number for Carla to keep on her person in case she got separated from us. In any event, it sucked. I had horrible service almost the entire time. It kept cutting in and out and even when it worked, websites took forever to load, if they ever did. We did use it twice, to make dinner reservations. (I called a French restaurant and made the reservation myself, in French!) But other than that, it was a waste of money.
WiFi. Our hotel supposedly had WiFi, but it was both patchy and horrible. By this I mean that it was nearly inoperable the entire time I was there – I could not connect to the internet pretty much at all. On the rare occasion when my phone would show a few bars of connectivity, and I would connect to a blog or my email or a news story, it would quickly cut out. Some i-messages worked, but not all; WhatsApp worked occasionally. I could not send photos via text. Between the eSIM and the WiFi, I was usually able to jot out a quick email to my parents about our day, but that was all. I lost my Wordle streak. Oh well. I didn’t really miss my phone, except I would have liked to keep up with everyone’s blogs better. I still feel very behind!
When I weigh the highs against the lows, the highs win by a landslide. It was a wonderful vacation and I feel so grateful that we were able to make it happen, and that everything went so smoothly. (Once again, a major shout out to my husband for ensuring that our experience was so effortless and fun!)
You may notice that I haven’t talked much about the food. Don’t worry (or, perhaps, do?): I am planning a whole post about the food wins and losses of the trip.
The longer you live with someone, the more you discover about how little you know them. At least, this is true for me, when it comes to my husband. I have known this man since 2001, for over half my life, and have lived with him since 2003. And yet I have only recently discovered some things about him that baffle me completely. (Does anyone else recall the time when I learned he does not consider soup to be a meal???)
While I am the primary laundry-doer in our household, I don’t fold everything that I wash. This is not out of laziness, Internet. Well. Not solely out of laziness. My husband is not only the Better Folder of the two of us, he has folding preferences. I am sure I’ve mentioned before that he prefers to fold his own T-shirts. For that I am eternally grateful, because I am horrible at folding, especially when it comes to things that can’t be lined up edge to edge, like a towel or a blanket or a dishrag or another piece of fabric with straight and symmetrical edges. It’s not like I haven’t tried. I have. And yet, despite sometimes extreme effort, my attempts at folding T-shirts result in such lopsidedness and extreme variances in size of end product that frankly boggle the mind. My husband, possibly due to years in his youth spent working in clothing retail, possibly due to being a normal person and not folding challenged like his wife, can fold his T-shirts with seemingly no effort and end up with a stack of perfectly identical little rectangles. This is all to say: my husband prefers to fold his own T-shirts.
Okay, fine. But I can at least fold his pants, right? I fold my own jeans and leggings (the extent of my pants collection) and they make nice tidy stacks. I fold them once lengthwise, meeting one corner of the waist band to the other, so they look like a one-legged pant, and then fold them shortwise (what is the opposite of lengthwise? widthwise? I am explaining this very poorly), bringing the hem up to meet the waistband, and then fold them one last time so that the waist band touches the folded portion of the knee area. (This reminds me of that old elementary school exercise where one person has to explain step by step how to make a peanut butter sandwich and the other person has to follow each step literally, as if they have never experienced either peanut butter or jars or sandwiches before. You know: the explainer says, “Put the peanut butter on the bread” and the sandwich maker picks up the jar and puts it on the bag of bread.) What I am trying to say is that I make three folds and the jeans end up in a small square.
Fold 1.Fold 2.Fold 3. I don’t know why the pocket does this but I hate it thanks.
This is how I have folded everyone’s pants since time immemorial, including my husband’s jeans and work pants. Then some years ago I found out that that my husband preferred me to simply fold the pants in half, lengthwise, and leave them at that. Okay, weird, I thought, but whatever. Saves me two folds per pants pair, clearly a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of life. But as the years passed, I wondered why he was so adamant about the single fold. Because, in fact, when he puts his jeans/work pants away in our closet, he stacks them in neat little squares just like I stack my jeans.
It took a long time for this mild curiosity to develop into an actual question, which was, “If the end result is the same, why don’t I just fold your jeans for you?” To which he reluctantly told me that when I fold his jeans, he refolds them, and he feels bad about that, so he wants to relieve me of the initial fold. To which my response was, “WHY.” Which is when he admitted to me that when I fold his jeans/pants, I fold them backwards.
My jeans, folded my way.Still with the pocket issue. I STILL REFUSE TO IRON.My husband’s jeans, folded the opposite way.
This is a very, very long story to say that a) apparently people can fold jeans/pants differently, who knew, and b) apparently that can be bothersome to some people, and c) my husband and I are pants-folding opposites and I only just found out. (How do YOU fold your pants?)
(By the way, I have since been folding his jeans/pants the opposite way – although I still only make the single lengthwise fold – and it is surprisingly difficult to do! My brain has A Certain Way it believes folding should be done, and that is not it.) (It’s a feeling similar to folding your hands together differently than you normally do: if the left thumb normally sits on top of the right thumb, when you try to fold them so the right thumb is on top instead, it’s doable, but it’s weird.)
I have since kept my eyes open for other weird differences in our everyday trivialities and have come up with two others.
One has to do with filing. Picture a filing cabinet, with folders of paperwork for things you keep track of over time – utility bills, insurance statements, tax returns, etc. I think we can all agree that it makes sense to file these sorts of things chronologically, right? And yet, to my SHOCK, there are (at least?) two ways to do this.
When you open one of the folders, what is on top: the most recent bill/statement, or the oldest? Well, I do it one way and my husband does it the other way (the WRONG way) and that is absolutely insane to me. To make matters worse, at one point in our relationship, we maintained separate files, so some of the files use my system and some use my husband’s. I would almost rather transition ALL our files to his (wrong) system than to have two completely opposite filing methods in the same cabinet. MADNESS.
The other way we are opposites is in how we get out of the shower. Yes, I am really writing about this. Day-to-day minutiae is my favorite topic (next to food) and if you are new here, boy are you getting slapped right in the face with household nitty-gritty.
Our shower has a sliding glass door with two panels. You slide one panel over the other – so they overlap – to expose the opening to the shower. My husband slides both panels toward the front/faucet end of the shower to exit; I slide both panels to the back, wall end. I wonder if this has to do with our individual towel placement: my towel hangs just outside the faucet end of the shower; my husband’s is on the wall on the other end of the shower. Would we exit the shower differently if we hung our towels differently? Are there simply Front of Shower Exiters and Rear of Shower Exiters, just like some people are optimists and others are pessimists?
These are some of the very silly, inconsequential differences between us that are as charming (to me, at least) as they are perplexing. All of us are weird in our own weird ways. And I’m delighted to still be learning new things about this man I’ve loved for nearly a quarter century.
There are lots of other ways that he and I are Very Different. Some of them I know and accept: for instance, he is a Laundry Basket guy, and I am a Pile Clothing Into My Arms And Drip Socks All Over The Floor gal. But maybe (probably?) there are things I am yet unaware of. I hope we have time to discover all of them.
