OUR BLOG

There we are, walking through a village in Provence at 7:20 on a Sunday morning.  It’s completely still.  Perfectly silent.  There’s no one around.   Magical.

We stop to take a picture of an unusual house front.  A man, an American expat, emerges with his little dog, Rosie.  He’s delightful.  We talk for a few minutes.  He shares about losing his wife of 50 years.  We were touched by that interaction.

Two things are true. 

Wherever you go, people are different.  The faces you see in England are different from the faces that greet you in Portugal.  They speak different languages, enjoy different foods, have different customs.

And wherever you go, people are the same.   They laugh.  They cry.  They try to make a living. They love their families.

Of course, not everyone is a ray of sunshine, as the sign in our tour boat’s office attests.

So many of the villages in Provence are picturesque in an iconically French way.  Just don’t ask me exactly which of our pictures are from which particular town.  They all start to blend together after a while.  This is where the lavender fields are.

And where we had the most elegant “tea”, prepared for us by a very talented artist and chef in her restored house over a shop in the town of Apt.

You meet great people when you travel, like the manager of the Brazilian café in Lisbon or the Tuk Tuk driver we hired to show us around … Paulo.

There’s lots to see in Lisbon.

And an incredible variety of first rate food on offer in individual restaurants, but if you’re ever there, you have to go to the Time Out Market, which is a big hall, filled with dining tables.  Around the perimeter are mini storefronts, like in a US food court, only much classier, featuring the most gourmet dishes from a couple dozen of the best restaurants in Lisbon.  Amazing.  Ya gotta go.

Talked with a very nice English couple while we were eating there.  Got some good tips on our next stop … the Canary Islands.

Tenerife, where we stayed, is very dry.  The views are stunning.  The weather perfect.

The closest island to Tenerife is La Gomera.  Dry as a bone of its western flank and home to a laurel rainforest in the center.  You transition from Arizona-like rubble and scrub to rainforest within maybe a minute’s driving.  It’s crazy, and the forest is amazing.  The trade winds create the microenvironments.

The sunset and night view from our terrace was spectacular.

We highly recommend the Canaries.

The places we went and the sights we saw were unforgettable.  And it’s always the people you meet and the crazy situations you find yourself in that make travel that much more special.

Of course, getting back home and back to the pup was nice too.

Back to regular programming in our next letter.

Thanks for taking the time to “get away” with us for a few moments.  We were thinking of you whenever we’d take a picture.

Love,

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Meet Denise: Denise Hedges is a Business Development Coach and Speaker Coach for small business owners who want to be more comfortable, confident, and successful with their sales and marketing efforts. She specializes in helping them use speaking as a way to dramatically improve their results

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