All of it, so far

Calvi is a small town on northwest Corsica, a mountainous island between Italy and France. So of course, it's hosted a great deal of invaders over the millennia. If you've ever heard of Corsica, you might because it's known as the "murder capital of Europe," thanks to mobsters and separatists but what the heck. We were first lured to Calvi in September 2011 by our friends Jim and Kirsten Delara who, after years of lengthy vacations there, finally took root before the pandemic

We didn't mean to, but we arrived in Paris the day before The Pope. So said the taxi driver en route to our hotel from Gare du Nord to explain the nuttier than usual traffic; not that we knew otherwise. He said the city expected up to a million more people, but assured us we'd be spared the influx since the hotel Aunt Fifi recommended was in the Latin Quarter; far from the crowd but close to the train station from which we'd depart in the morning for Marseilles. Notre Dame fr

We disembarked the Queen Mary 2 around 7am on September 19th and stayed one night in the shabby-chic Elizabeth House Hotel in Southampton before we caught two trains to Cambridge, blessedly drama-free. Funny, when we asked both the cab driver and the hotel concierge in Southampton, "What do you recommend we see while we're here?" and they both told us to take the bus an hour away to Winchester. Since two hours on a bus sounded like a drag, we strolled a residential area, foun

Queen Mary 2 as presented by Cunard About sixty years ago, Steve's family crossed the Atlantic aboard a ship to visit his mother's sister (Hi Fifi & Ian! 👋😉) who'd moved to England. I remembered this fun fact while we were contemplating the launch of the next phase of our lives and decided to see if such a voyage was still a thing. Indeed it is! And tickets are sold at a discount if purchased within 90 days of sailing. Ho! How tantalizing! A seven-day voyage vs an upteen-ho

For those of you who don't know, Steve and I are on extended leave from Seattle to catch up with a few far-flung friends and family and to discover what kind of promise France may hold for us. Because I abandoned social media years ago, I converted The Limber Yard's briefly-lived website (designed by my talented friend and former co-worker Eli Brownell) into this here travel blog. My goal with this little online project is to share photos of our adventures in case you want to