Tag Archives: Traveling

#19 Home again, home again, jiggidy, jig!

4 Aug

After several weeks of walking and driving through France, I have to admit it’s nice to come home.  “Re-entry” is going rather well, as our house is still in relatively good shape, the animals are alive and loving us, and I even lost some weight due to the healthy eating and exercising we did while on the road.  Ahhhhhhhh…..life is good.

But wait, what’s this?  Chores? Chores are required again??? Do these things NEVER stop???  Groceries, cooking, cleaning, laundry, dog walking, flat tire fixing, cob web chasing, weed pulling, fence mending -  yep, this one got our attention while on the road.  The guests staying in our house emailed us a few weeks into our stay in France about “a funny thing” happening to our fence.  My initial thoughts while reading this email was, “Really?  I never thought of my fence as funny, but hey, I’ll bite.”  “…just a small fire” they said, “…caused by a cigarette smoldering at the base of our fence.”  OMG!  My immediate reaction was not even remotely close to “Ha, ha, that was funny.”  Call me crazy but somehow that kind of news just doesn’t seem to fall into the ‘funny’ realm for me.  Not even a little giggle came to mind.  I’m just sayin’……

Anyway, coming home from a perfectly lovely long vacation in a part of the world that is just stunning and filled with all kinds of things to delight one’s senses can be disappointing in some ways.  But when one is coming home to San Francisco, which is stunning in its own way, it makes it much easier to adjust, I have to admit.  The trick I have been using recently for tackling those mundane, everyday life chores again is to think I am still in France, driving through small 11th, 12th, and 13th century villages looking for our daily croissants and baguettes. I understand Costco is a far cry from 12th century France but hey, one’s imagination can make anything look better if you just try a little.

Butch Wife Tip #19

Take time to get back into your life when you’ve been away from it for a while.  Treat yourself to some nights out and don’t just jump at those required chores right away.  Let the calming of your vacation stay with you as long as possible because those damn chores will still be there no matter what!  So give yourself and your wife a break and ignore them for a few days.  Makes re-entry a whole lot easier….trust me.

Butch Wife Extraordinaire-in-Training

#18 Journey Proud

25 Jun

This Butch wife and her Femme wife are headed out into the world over the next month, so the blog will be on vacation for a while.  I did want to talk a bit about preparing for such a trip.  Packing can be tense.  What to take?  How much to take?  Predicting the weather at the places we plan to visit well beyond what any official forecasters are willing to do can be exhausting.  Do you need two tubes of toothpaste or will you be sharing with others?  Do you lay your clothes flat in a suitcase, neatly folded or rolled?  I’m a roller, myself, as it seems to keep the wrinkles down better.

I read a Ricky Steves travel guide-book once that recommended the ideal amount of ‘stuff’ to take on a trip.  It broke down something like this:  2 pair of pants, five shirts, five pair of underwear and socks, a sweater and jacket, a swimsuit just in case, maybe a hat if you’re a hat person, and your toiletries.  Seemed sensible.  After all, you can always go to a laundromat and wash things each week.  And since you really don’t tend to see the same people all the time, repeating your daily garb won’t be apparent to anyone you run into the next day except you and your wife.  However with my wife, color coordination and a theme are essential to appropriate packing.  I won’t go into the details about this, but suffice to say, if everything you take doesn’t mix and match, you are forever banned from stepping onto foreign soil. (I keep it simple with blacks and whites as these go with anything.)

Do you notice a general tension before you take off on a trip? I do.  My housekeeper from growing up used to call this being ”journey proud.”  Great term isn’t it? Journey Proud.  Being excited about going to a place – even in our case where we don’t speak the language well, are not sure how to order our food easily, can’t read the road signs, and have absolutely no idea where ANYTHING really is.  Now that’s journey proud.

Being journey proud doesn’t stay with you.  We’ve always found once we are out in the world and away from our home country, the journey pride tension disappears almost immediately.  Our desire to experience different cultures takes over, and getting lost is a general state of being for us while on the road.  Eventually we do find ourselves with enough maps, but the stories we get into while lost have always been fun.

So to my loyal followers out there, thank you so much for encouraging me to keep writing.  Please ask your friends if they would like to follow the blog as well.  We will, however, be offline for a month.   We do a travelogue while on the road for friends and family and will continue that during this trip.  For all others, please be patient and I will get back into the blog in August.   Until then, bon voyage, y’all!  (Do you think the French will mind the colloquialism?  Probably.)

Butch Wife Tip #18

When getting ready for a trip, be easy on one another.   And if you are journeying to another country, check out the gay laws before you go because some places will shoot you for being gay.  Those places I would recommend you avoid.

Julie  Butch Wife Extraordinaire-in-Training

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 34 other followers

%d bloggers like this: