contd...
That was the most exhausting holiday we ever had - we seemed to spend most of it packing and unpacking and booking into and out of hotels and guest houses!
But in subsequent years our choice of area to visit became fairly random, as we discovered on this first trip that places we had never even heard of, and were not mentioned in the guides, were sometimes just as interesting - plus we felt like we were discovering these places for ourselves, which made little out-of-the-way places just as thrilling as the big attractions.
It was in this way that we zig-zagged our way through France over the years, from the Dordogne via Basque country through the Pyrenées, Languedoc, Burgundy, Alps, Auvergne, Aquitaine, Limousin, Franche-Comté, Normandy Upper and Lower, Loire Valley, Brittany, Champagne, Alsace and Lorraine, the Vexin and others in between. Oh, and Paris for anniversaries and business trips, and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais for "booze cruises"!
As years went by we even managed to revisit some places quite by accident, simply because we'd forgotten where we had been before. It was like bumping into an old friend on the odd occasion when we would turn to each other, driving down some country road and seeing a town or village hove into view, saying, "Does this look at all familiar to you?"
:D
