Currently: July 2024

It’s hard to believe that we’re at the end of July. I started this draft in the airport lounge at CDG. We were on our way home from France after an extraordinary trip. I feel like we’re always getting better when we travel. We had so many extraordinary moments and were able to connect with people on a deeper level. I have all kinds of things percolating in my head that I want to write about over the next few months. Destinations, obviously. Travel trends that need to die. Loyalty. The beaten path. Growth. It was a lovely adventure that surpassed almost anything I could have imagined.

It was not quite the disciplined summer I imagined in June. We didn’t use my Peleton app (but for once during our stay at Hotel de Seze in Paris). Getting 5 miles a day in was challenging when I had a lot of meetings or work to do at home. Or when it was 90 degrees in Paris. I definitely missed our easy days in Mont St Michel that were punctuated with morning and evening bike rides. However, everywhere we traveled was lovely in their own way.

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Home Decorating:

Our trip started and ended in Paris. On our first two days in Paris, we spent a bit of time on the left bank to pick up some groceries to take to our cottage in Mont St Michel and gallery hop. We found a new painting of Place du Vendome at Christmas that we liked. We had seen a similar one by the same artist two years ago. (It sold and we were a bit sad because it captures one of our core Paris holiday memories.) I fell in love with a painting of the Amalfi Coast by Georgieva Vanya, an Italian artist. However, we were pretty early in our trip, we have no connection to Amalfi (yet?), and I have a firm rule about not buying things until I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about them.

Throughout the trip, I did further research on the artist and found that she had a painting of Florence in a similar style. When we returned to Paris at the end of our 5 week trip through France, we went to see the painting of Florence. It was gorgeous, but it was a bit smaller than would work for our space. (We have large walls and very high ceilings.) After much deliberation, we ended up buying the Place du Vendome painting by Olga Novokhatska. We chose it for our formal dining room.

It fills my heart with so much joy to see how Tom has really come around to appreciating art. I love that we are slowly filling our home with the perfect souvenirs from our travels. While our travel-themed Christmas trees also bring so much joy during the holiday season, they aren’t always there… so it’s nice to have the additional daily reminders of our adventures. We’ve been so deliberate about choosing things that make sense to us as a couple, and I love it.

Wellness:

Despite not accomplishing everything I hoped to while we were in France, I did come away with a few things that I want to implement in my life. We spent an extraordinary amount of time outside, and it was great for my soul. Of course, it’s easier to do that when it’s not 100 degrees + humidity outside. But, I need to figure out a balance on how to get outside, even in the summer.

I became acutely aware of how “little” rest I needed even though I was super active. At first I thought it was due to the extraordinarily long day and choosing not to utilize the blackout curtains. But, then I realized that I wasn’t exhausted, even though I was sleeping so much less. I would wake up feeling reinvigorated, which of course is part of the excitement of exploring new places. However, it also shed a lot of light into mental exhaustion I have been experiencing for the last few months. In a lot of ways, I think helped me become aware to a certain level of anxiety and depression that I have felt over the last few months. While I wouldn’t say that I’ve come to terms with the feelings of professional failure I felt this year, I was able to quiet them and make peace with how much I did. I need to get my body moving more regularly.

And, even at the risk of being THAT PERSON, we really have to talk about how terrible I felt once we got home and started eating food in the US again. It really feels so toxic. We drank a lot of wine and ate well for over a month in France. I woke up with energy, even on days when my work calendar was packed. My inflammation felt like it started to subside. Within a week of getting home, I felt sluggish and my hip pain was at an all time high. Maybe it’s stress, maybe it’s food, maybe it’s a little bit of everything… but it isn’t working for me, now that I know there’s an alternative!

Travel Planning:

Next week, we will make a quick trip to the Bay Area for a celebration of life service for one of my family members who passed away earlier this summer. While I am not looking forward to the reason for being there, I am excited to be with my family. I thought a lot about this idea of “weddings and funerals” earlier this summer. Adulting is so hard sometimes, though I had experience with death as a child… I just feel so much more acutely aware of the lack of time that we truly have together when we all live such separate lives. (It’s complicated.)

At the end of August, I have a work trip to Houston. Our anniversary is in September, and we are trying to figure out what we are going to do for that. The older we get, the more important it feels to take the time to celebrate life milestones. The latter part of September will include a lot of cross country work travel for me. I have a work trip to Minnesota at the start of October as well.

Thanksgiving will be family travel with my mom and my sister, as far as I know right now. And, Tom and I are trying to figure out Christmas. We are toying with the idea of spending Christmas in Florence, but we’re not sure if it’s too much since we definitely will be in Florence for New Year’s. I saw that the Teatro alla Scala is performing the Nutcracker in December, but tickets don’t go on sale until October. It would give us the opportunity to stay at the Park Hyatt Milan again, which I don’t hate. We will start 2025 with another stay at Castiglion del Bosco, as that was the perfect place to reset at the start of the year. (I can still remember where I was sitting when I realized the FAFSA was going to be a disaster.)

Photo Editing:

I keep going back and forth if I want to blog our trip in order or jump around. As with anything, I’m sure it will just come down to what I’m feeling. I started editing my photos from our trip to Annecy on the flight home. They are definitely making me happy. I think it’s because I love the moody feeling of the photos of Annecy in the rain.

I’m definitely excited to write more about our trip to the Alsace for Bastille day. We stayed at the hotel that we stayed at on our last trip in 2020, and it was just as perfect as I remembered. (As was the beauty of the town, the restaurants, and the kindness of the people.) We stayed an amazing hotel in Reims and had a lovely, quick trip to the Champagne region. Before we left for our trip, Tom was most excited about visiting Beaune, and I ended up loving it, too.

I suppose what I’m really saying I have no idea what I’m going to write about, and I can’t wait to share. In case you’ve missed it, I’ve shared a few things about the first part of our trip to France already: our vacation rental in Mont St Michel, updates to my review of FirstName Hotel and things to do in Bordeaux, our long weekend in Carcassonne, and our trip to Avignon.