Where does adventure start?

Is this it?

Is this all you get in your middle years?

Settle down, pay off the mortgage, prepare for your retirement, do the sensible thing.

All too familiar advice, but is it really the right thing to do?

Only you can answer that question.

But for us the answer became increasingly obvious.

Time to meet us.

Monet's panoramic mural in L'Orangerie, Paris. 
Anna and Paul.

Paul and Anna.

Pretty average couple, except for the fact that we are still madly in love after 40 years of being together.

Why? We’ll cover that later. 

But for now, we are pretty much your average couple. 

Anna is a kindergarten teacher in her mid fifties and Paul is a recovering photographer, currently doing a desk job managing a photographic archive for a major government institution.

So we are just normal people trying to get by on a normal wage but consumed with the concept that there really must be more to life than just getting through each day and living for the weekend.

I have to admit to something at this point in the story.

We have been down this road before.

In 1995 during the depressing years of government restructuring, we were living in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand and it all became too much for us so we put our house on the market, pulled our two daughters out of school, quit our jobs and went sailing for the next three years.

So we have a bit of a track record for cutting and running.

But this time is different. This time we have been captivated by a foreign mistress. 

We want a Menage a trois. 

We are lusting after a passionate affair with an exotic foreign lover.

We are both in love with the same mistress......... France.

Montmartre, December 2010, our introduction to France

How can we go on living without her?

She is passion personified, everything that is beautiful, exotic, ancient, wise and gracious. She really is the answer to dreams that we are yet to have.

So now, you have a hint as to what the problem is.

Take two fairly average people, plodding through their nine to five jobs and throw into the mix a six week trip to France.

Dirty trick, I hear you say. Absolutely!

After six weeks in France, it became increasingly obvious that we could never just settle back in to the comfortable old ways and move gracefully into our retirement.

“There has to be more than this”........ kept running through the conversation for the weeks following our return from the six weeks holiday we spent in France.

It was, indeed, cathartic.

The stunning Notre Dame Cathedral with snow on the roof, also the view from our apartment on the Isle St Louis.

Montmartre and a White Christmas

First temptation, barges in The Bastille marina, Central Paris.

Houseboat barges in the snow along the Seine, Paris.

Old Dutch barges on the Seine.

Winter in Paris but still heavenly.

Classic Parisienne scene

Hotel Regina in Pau, South of France

My favourite sculpture outside the Papal palace in Avignon.

Anna and one of the white horses of the Camargue

The beautiful wetlands of the Camargue, southern France

The amazing Carcassonne Castle

Paul on the ramparts of Carcassonne Castle

Is this prophetic?

Somewhere in the Languedoc region of France

View over the Languedoc countryside from near the village of Aragon

In the Pyrenees, South of France

Bayonne, Atlantic coast river city, the Paris of the South.

San Sebastian Donastia, Spain.

Anna Basquing in the Spanish sunlight

Clinging to the side of a gorge the village of Rocamadour in the Dordogne region of France

On the banks of the Dordogne river a tiny village looking like a postcard scene.

The village of La Roque Gageac.

Up above the Dordogne valley in the village of Domme

The medieval village of Sarlat where we rented an apartment right in the heart of the old town.

The Canal du Midi in winter.

Annecy, canal town in the mountains of France, the Venice of the North.