The Cambias Digression

On July 7 we packed up our clothes, had a final breakfast at the Chateau Bellevue hotel, and drove back to Bordeaux. After a little hunting around in the neighborhood south of the railway station, we found the rental agency office and handed in our Corsa, then dragged our bags into the Gare St. Jean…

We spent a relaxed morning hanging about Cazaubon, doing laundry at the local Intermarché supermarket, which has coin-op washing machines right in the parking lot, so everyone in town can evaluate the condition of your underwear. (To get change I had to make some purchases, and discovered that, at Intermarché anyway, beer is cheaper than…

About 3 a.m. on July 3, Diane started feeling bad. Her abdomen hurt, she threw up several times, she couldn't urinate, and nothing we did made her feel better. At about 6:30 I asked the hotel manager where the nearest emergency room was. She told me: Hopital Landye in Mont-de-Marsan. Oh, and the French word…

A note on the photos: I didn't even take a camera on this trip, and if I relied on the pictures Diane took these posts would have nothing but pictures of bones and beetles. The world is well-documented, so I've been using freely-available pictures rather than our own snapshots. Welcome to the new millennium. On…

After a final breakfast at Le Boutique Hotel in Bordeaux (and a brief look at the Public Garden nearby), we packed up and took a cab to pick up our rental car. But there was a small problem: the rental agency was no longer at the address on the confirmation sheet we printed out. The…

  We had a full day in Bordeaux between our travel day and when we were to pick up the rental car and start touring Gascony. Diane and I spent that day doing one of the things we both enjoy: walking around a city. In the morning we breakfasted at our hotel, put on some…

Diane and I set out on the morning of June 28 on a trip to France to celebrate 25 years of marriage. Our first stop was the town of Byfield, Massachusetts, in the coastal marshes near Newburyport and Rowley, north of Boston. That's right: we dropped our son off at summer camp in Innsmouth. Actually…