All Adventures Must Come to an End

     We’ve often been asked by our friends and family in Canada if we miss home and are coming back soon.  For the longest time, we would answer that, of course, we missed home but we weren’t quite ready to end the adventure.  We considered our move to England, six years ago, to be just that, a great adventure.  As long as we were still enjoying ourselves whilst discovering new places, people and so much history, we were going to stick around. 

     Our intention, at the beginning, was to be in England for no more than a couple of years before we hopefully moved into continental Europe. We wanted to visit as many countries as possible and it would be easier to do this on the mainland than from an island. But things didn’t quite work out that way and we stayed a little longer and started to get restless.  It turns out that even though countries are much smaller in Europe (compared to Canada, anyways), you still need money to travel.

     So Mauri’s company finally made the leap into Europe and about a year and a half ago, we moved to France. A country we were quite excited to move to until we got here.  Don’t get me wrong, the country is beautiful, the area we live in is spectacular, the people are lovely and we have incredible neighbours but the bureaucracy has been hellish and the language barrier has been an even bigger problem.  We have not been able to assimilate into French culture as easily as British culture.

     Therefore, we’ve decided that at the end of 2013, our grand adventure will come to an end.  We will be returning to Canada, in the Barrie area, since Mauri’s head office has moved there.  Alex seems to have made the decision that he would like to attend highschool, so we’re working hard to try and get him caught up in the subjects in which we’ve fallen behind. And, I will be returning to work, somewhere.  We’re all getting excited about the move but we will definitely miss the wonderful people we’ve met along the way and the great friendships we’ve created.  But we could look at it as a whole new adventure; rediscovering Canada and the Americas.

     Until then, we’ve been planning what we want to see and do before we go. A trip to Versailles, the Chateau de Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas’ home), Giverny (to see Monet’s gardens) and then to the Netherlands to see the tulips in the spring and then another trip in the summer that will hopefully take us through the Black Forest in Germany to see Neuschwanstein Castle, another view of the Swiss Alps, Austria and Northern Italy with a little side trip through Lichtenstein.  There are other places we would have loved to visit but I guess it will have to wait for another time.

     So stay tuned for the rest of the adventure!

  

Julie