Why This Trip Is Not Quite as Wonderful as I've Made It Sound

Dear readers who have followed my rapturous posts about the bliss of writing with Rembrandt at the Louvre and with the Impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay, and the joy of wandering gray Parisian streets in a misting rain, it is time for a dose of ruthless honesty. 

This trip is hard. 

It's hard to be all alone in a foreign city in the winter during a global pandemic. 

This is my fifth time traveling to Paris, and four of the five trips have been in the winter, and on one of the other trips I was also completely alone. But on none of the other trips was the whole world consumed with terror over COVID-19, and that has altered everything. 

In wintry weather, one seeks out cheerful, cozy, convivial cafes. Parisian cafes continue to be cheerful, cozy, and convivial, and every person who enters must first scan the bar code on their pass sanitaire, proof of vaccination. In this way, Paris takes COVID much more seriously than we do in the U.S. But that said, once seated at a closely spaced table in these crowded spaces, off come the masks. I just haven't felt like spending endless hours there (but nor do I particularly enjoy spending the entire day every day in a mask - and Paris now has an outdoor mask mandate, too). Yes, the museums have been delightful, but by noon they, too, are uncomfortably jammed with my fellow tourists. Yes, I do love walking in the rain, but a gentle drizzle is different from the kind of rain that soaks the only pair of shoes you brought and dampens the backpack filled with your writing dreams, with occasional gusts of wind that threaten to turn your tiny umbrella inside out.

The title of my blog is "An Hour a Day" because throughout my long writing career, I've always written for just an hour a day. Even on this trip's delicious museum-writing stints, I feel done after sixty minutes, ninety tops.  I did bring books to read, but my room, my refuge, my only mask-free space in this entire city, is SO SMALL. It looks sweet in this picture, but truly, here you pretty much see THE WHOLE ENTIRE ROOM.

Finally, the more I walked past glorious Impressionist landscapes of the French countryside in Paris's art museums, the more I wanted to be NOT in a museum staring at paintings of those landscapes, but entering INTO those paintings, inhabiting the actual landscapes themselves. In fact, here is a poem I wrote when I was in Paris in January 2016:

La Neige à Louveciennes

Wherever they painted, I want to be,
those Impressionists with their loving gaze,
to walk down just that snowy street
by just those laden trees
toward just that muffled church
for just this silent blessing.

Samuel Johnson wrote, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Perhaps when a woman is tired of Paris, she is tired of life - but maybe she just needs a little break from Paris in relentless winter rain during surging Omicron statistics. I don't fly home until Friday (and even then, only if both of my two flights are NOT cancelled and my mandatory COVID test taken within 24 hours of my departure is NOT positive). I realized yesterday, with a sigh, that I was contemplating these remaining days of my precious trip less with eagerness and more with something akin to dread. 

I needed to make A PLAN!

And I did! 

And I love my plan!

The ten titles in my Gus and Grandpa easy reader series, which I published between 1997 and 2004, were illustrated to perfection by Catherine Stock, who spends much of the year in the picturesque village of Rignac in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. Over the past years, whenever I needed cheering, I would go to her website and fantasize about a stay in her rental cottage there or taking one of her summertime plein air watercolor classes. 

Well, although I have never met Catherine in person, even after the Gus and Grandpa series ended, she and I remained connected via Facebook. She saw my first post from this trip and commented that one of these days I should jump on a train from the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris and come down to visit her in Rignac. So yesterday morning, as I was pondering how I would spend the rest of my trip and the rest of my life, I sent her a timid, tentatively worded email. What if... what if... I hopped on the train ... this coming Monday? And she wrote back: YES! So on Monday - tomorrow! - I will board the first of two trains that will take me on a six-hour journey through beautiful French countryside to the Dordogne! I'll spend two nights there and return to Paris on Wednesday, for a last joy-filled, writing-filled Parisian day before I fly home on Friday.

Hooray! 

I'm very proud of myself for being brave enough to alter plans that needed improvement, and to find such a thrilling way of doing this!

Here, from Catherine's website, her watercolor of Rignac...