Embedded Files
It was during the cold war -and I do so remember it (mostly) - that someone suggested that every national-level politician must send their children to a foreign country to be educated, and that foreign country should be one that was unfriendly to the kid's country. The thinking was that no one would advocate going to war and dropping bombs on a place where they had family. It sounded good on the surface, but of course embassies close down and nationals are repatriated long before hostilities reach bomb-dropping stage. Still, it had and still has much to recommend it.
Young people in a politically-oriented family would learn another language and culture and that's always a good thing. There would be a group coming of age who would be geographically, and likely historically, aware. Insulating the next generation of politicians and voters from that kind of knowledge can never be a good thing.
I know someone who entered a public high school from a Christian school who told me how embarrassed she was the first day in a geography class when she was asked to come up to a globe and put her finger on China. Locating Bethlehem on a small map in a bible was no problem; finding a modern geopolitical giant, not so good.
Of course Canadians (and Brits and lots of others) delight in telling stories about Yanks who couldn't find any place on a map, or name any foreign political figure. Not universally true, of course, and the citizens of the US whom I have met on my own travels have been very conscious of world affairs and the geography of our planet. They were the travellers though; they already had a demonstrated commitment, as travellers do, to learning about such things. And they had the openess, even humility, to engage with the residents of those countries.
"I am a part of all that I have met" said Tennyson's Ulysses and he spoke for everyone then and still today. We go other places to absorb some of that otherness, and we are always the better for it. I particularly enjoy absorbing parts of France.
We travelled recently and France, specifically Paris where Beverly had registered for a sculpting workshop, was the primary destination but there were these other places to visit or revisit where the food was just as good. A few years back we had planned to cross the country after a tour in Germany, and a French instructor said, "Oh but you must go to Dijon. I was born in Dijon."
Well, she said it in French and so it was much more enthusiastic and I had to ask, "Qu'est que on peut trouver en Dijon?" or words to that effect.
"Un musée de moutard et des moutardieres!"
OK I needed a translation too – it was all about mustard. Of course. Very absorbing. We did it. We didn't mix it with the croissants with which I really wanted to engage, but it was still educational, and the baguettes and charcuteries are still a part of me. The volcano was next.
Clermont-Ferrand is a double-barrelled town where you can make a right turn on the high-speed rail from Dijon and zip north to Paris. And why, as an aside, has it taken so long for North America to even start on high-speed rail lines? I'll save the discussion for the next time I'm in a ranting mood.
That pivotal town had a landmark atop an ancient (4000 BC) volcanic dome or "Puy de Dôme" and you got there by city bus, a short hike and a funicular railway. You could get down via para-glider, but we didn't choose that mode of descent. The scenery from those gliding parachutes must have been impressive, but we settled for the more pedestrian point of view.
We turned left physically and philosophically, instead of right on our departure from C-F and arrived in Carcassone from whence a friend and former high school colleague drove us to her adopted hamlet of Alet-les-Bains. This was in the heart of the Pays Cathare, the historic land of the Cathars, a benevolent culture of Christians living their beliefs in what they saw as the values of early Christianity with overtones of Zoroastrianism (duality of light/dark good/evil) and Buddhism and reincarnation. The sect was exterminated by the early 14th century with a papal crusade and the proceedings of the Inquisition – as nasty a business as any by those forces and described by some historians as a "cultural genocide". Check it out.
Alet-les-Bains lies just off the highway across a bridge that takes you back to gentler times, although the ruins of the 16th century cathedral attest to past religious war. We enjoyed the "gentilesse" of friends and quiet walks and a celebratory fête with banquet and bands and dancing in a town square.
The climate was as kind to us as the people with none of the excessive heat and smoke of wildfires that plagued so much of Europe this summer past. That was soon to change and I did it.
You can take a train from Carcassone to Narbonne and thence south to Barcelona, our last stop before flying home to Victoria. You can do that if you check the departures board carefully and get on the correct train at the correct time. I didn't.
Fortunately, the agent at Toulouse directed me to the proper platform and we returned safely to Carcassone an hour or two later. Unfortunately, we could get to Narbonne but would have a 7-hour wait for the next train to Barcelona. Narbonne did not have an air-conditioned station. It did have 30+ degree heat. It was the beginning of my "How soon can we go home?" feelings.
We got to Barcelona and Ubered our way in to our hotel on the Ramblas, or main drag. I say "hotel' but that term is a slippery one. Have you ever wondered how a venue can get those attractive photographs of a hotel room for their web page that look nothing like the actual scene that greets you on opening the door? Me too.
The building actally had three "hotels" in it with ours occupying the fourth floor. The owners of our hotel had remodelled the fourth level of an old building into suites and I'm guessing that they had squeezed the maximum number of rooms into the space that city bylaws allowed. We squeezed down a narrow corridor and into a very narrow room and turned on the air conditioner. The fact that it worked and we could drop onto a bed that we could scarcely walk around was the best part of the day – that and a functioning shower.
Barcelona really is an amazing city with its iconic (overdone word,I know but it fits) Sagrada Familia basilica and other examples of buildings designed by Antoni Gaudi. We had toured the sites on an earlier trip, but still took a tour bus around the city. The bus offered one of the roomiest places to view the city as the sidewalks were almost impassibly (new meaning, I know) crowded and the streets seemed all to be undergoing reconstruction. It was just like Victoria but hotter. We tolerated things for three days with the assistance of cold beer at a sidewalk café, AC in our little suite and letters home.
It takes a day and a half to get from Barcelona to Victoria, but because we were chasing the sun, it all got done in one. It was just before midnight that we turned the key at our apartment, dropped bags and crashed. And we'll stay crashed through the rest of 2026.
We had planned a Rick Steves tour of the Adriatic with friends for the two weeks bridging September into October, but we cancelled it. The walking three blocks in Paris every day from hotel to sculpting venue was difficult, with Beverly's back pain a constant reminder of progressing spinal disintegration and the constant querying of where we were and what was happening a reminder that we are also on another journey of disintegration. The tour costs however, were non-refundable at this point.
I checked our trip cancellation portion of the travel insurance included with our credit card and then phoned the office of the insurer. They asked two questions:
When did you make your first payment for the trip?
When did you receive the medical diagnosis of Alzheimer's Diasease?
The answers I had were April 14, 2025 and Jan 22nd, 2026.
"You're fine. Proceed with the claim."
I think I'll have another drink.
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