Somehow, in the course of becoming a travel writer and traveling the world, I have become a person who casually announces that we are going to France.

When I was a kid, our big vacations involved piling into a station wagon, the kids in the way back with no seat belts because seriously, who had heard of seat belts?, and heading to Pensacola, Florida to visit my grandmother. There wasn’t much money for fancy vacations with four kids but we never knew any different and the white sands of the beautiful Gulf Coast were very satisfactory to us.

Years of family picnics on that sugar white sand made indelible memories, so much so that years later we took our children to the same location for vacations.

So, even though we have been steadily traveling to an astonishing variety of amazing places for the last few years, I have not yet become totally jaded.

So, yeah.

We are going to France!!

Strangely enough, we have actually been to France before. We were in Europe a couple of years ago and ended up in Paris for the last few days of our trip. People say things are surreal all the time but this was truly surreal. Were we actually climbing the Eiffel Tower? Eating French pastries in a sidewalk cafe? Cruising on the Seine? Yes, yes, and yes we actually were in Paris.

But Paris is all we have seen of France so we are pretty excited to be cruising with Viking Cruises on their Portraits of Southern France cruise in May. 8 days, 6 guided tours, one country. Oh, yes. We leave from Avignon and arrive in Chalon-Sur-Saone a week later and in the middle we will see castles and palaces and wineries and cathedrals and this is a run on sentence but oh the excitement!

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