This is not my first road trip and it’s not my first marriage either. I know that my hissy fit in Fougeres and our bad luck on the road to Bordeaux does not spell doom for either our love affair or our journey. Love affairs are like road trips, and road trips are like love affairs – from beginning to end the emotions are equally intense, the phases just as predictable. Love and travel. They both have their ups and downs.

There ought to be a word for the Winter form of a tree.

Travel Tip: Relax. It’s not a crime to want to sit in a cafe and not take a walking our of all those historic monuments in your peripheral vision.

To see a tree in Winter is to see it for what it really is. A Winter tree is an object so intricate and so perplexing that if it hadn’t already; been decided that Winter trees were plain and boring, we would be spending hours pondering them, staring at them in astonishment.

Celebrate my heart, at ease or on fire, in my usual featherbrained way.Horace, Roman PoetOde I-6, 23 BCE

The more things change, the more they stay the same. And, that's a whole other story.

The BluesThe BlahsThe Weary DismalsLost in GloomWoesome Me'sThe Eternal 3 AM of the Soul.

Some days 'staying put' might feel the same as Going Nowhere.Make a cup of tea, and wait for that feeling to pass.

POOR MARCHIt is the HOMELIEST month of the year. Most of it is MUD, Every Imaginable Form of MUD, and what isn't MUD in March is ugly late-season SNOW falling onto the ground in filthy muddy heaps that look like PILES of DIRTY LAUNDRY.