Larry here...

Just so he could say it was “our” blog, Larry has decided to add an entry. Here it is…


Larry here – finally wrestled the keyboard away from Dot so I could get a word in here. Actually, she has been doing a really great job blogging and I think we will enjoy the memories here for years to come. By the way, for any of you “would be bloggers” out there, it is not easy – Dot is blessed with a good writing style but it was still a lot of work.

Since Dot has done a very thorough job of describing the sights, I’d thought I would provide some of the “behind the scenes” happenings that reminded us that we were “not in Kansas anymore”. Some seem quite comical now (in hindsight), but were quite confusing/frustrating/exciting at the time.

We arrived in Nice (France) pretty much on time a little after 8 AM, knowing we would have to wait until noon for the France exchangers to arrive from Provence and meet us at the airport restaurant. It was a long four hours, and by noon we were looking at each new arrival as our potential exchangers. It was even more intense by 1PM – recall that we had parked our car at the Boston airport and were to meet these people and exchange car keys, directions, etc., and at present we had nothing!! Finally Dot approached a lady sitting next to us to see if we could pay to use her cell phone to call our exchangers. But the lady did not speak English, only Italian and French, so Dot’s fine French came through for us and we contacted our exchangers to learn that they were severely delayed in traffic and should be there around 1:30. By 2PM we were beginning to discuss alternatives when they arrived and all was well !!

I couldn’t begin to describe our initial road navigation attempts in France !! Ironically, after we finally got the hang of it (and realized that signs at a 45 degree angle meant to go straight), we came to realize that the roads were indeed very well marked. However, there was an implicit assumption that you knew French geography because everything was marked with a city along the route, but it could be some really remote city (LYONS), or the next small town along the road, so sometimes that would make us scramble – that’s why we came to love the traffic circles – you can go around a few times while the navigator figures our where these various cities are located.

Parking in France could get an entire book – suffice it to say that Dot’s dad would have been very proud of how well he taught her parallel parking – she got into spaces that were about the same size as the car! The other sometimes scary driving issue was being able to see your destination in the city (in fact being able to drive by it several times) but never figuring out how to get into it !

After spending months trying to learn Spanish, I arrived in Valencia (SPAIN) only to discover that everyone speaks a local language (that they are trying to keep alive). Even the various signs are in the local language, which was just enough like Spanish to really confuse me. By the time I got to Madrid (where they do speak Spanish on the streets), I was too confused (except perhaps after a few drinks) !

Gibraltar was great – we parked on the Spain side and walked across the border. Trying to feed the parking machine there as an experience. It only took coins (no problem we had plenty) and we needed just 5 Euros, so we started putting them in. Hmm, it doesn’t take the 2 Euro coin, but we have two ones and “tons” of shrapnel, so no problem. Opps, it also doesn’t take 50 cent coins, now we are putting in 20 and 10 and 5 coins (about half of which is rejects for unknown reasons. We finally get to 4.90 (after what seemed like 50 coins) and we notice we still have several left, so we are in. The next coin in causes the entire set of coins to be rejected with a “too many coins” notice!! I then (reluctantly) followed Dot’s original suggestion and went to get change for a 5 Euro note. It took 5 one Euros coins with no problem.

After two months traveling around Europe, I think I might finally be at the point of realizing that the retirement thing is pretty darn good !!