Oh Covid. Aren’t we all sick (no pun intended) of you!?!?!?! We have been traveling, so we’re clearly not in the overly fearful category of Covid-living, but we’re also vaccinated and respect the wishes of those around us. We wear masks on public transportation and in stores (and I don’t mean chin straps), but we also eat in restaurants.

As we prepare to head back to the States, I am confronted with the irrationality of how we’re all coping with this. Everyone has a reason for behaving the way they do in the face of this illness and everyone else thinks the reasons are, well, a little kooky. You wear a chin strap, but use hand sanitizer 100 times a day? OK for you. You won’t go to a restaurant, but you went to your friend’s party, I get it. You won’t fly, but you take the train? Whatever gets you through.

I’m sure many people would say Steven and I are nuts for traveling(amongst other reasons?). My latest confirmation on wacky thinking is the regulation that we need Covid tests to get back into the States when all the places we’ve been have stricter rules (pass sanitaire or an HES tracking code) and lower or similar Covid rates as the U.S. OK, whatever. Now our biggest fear is a false positive!

Anyway, this week we’ve taken it easy. We took the tram uphill to the end of the line (it was rainy) and walked back down the hill (Steven’s idea). We’ve strolled along the beach and up to the cemetery again (the people there were still dead). Speaking of strolls, we switched phones today as an experiment on the whole step-count debacle. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here. So, here are our results:

Notice that we have slightly different step counts, the same stride length and wildly different mileage counts. What’s up with that?

We have been making up for all our walking with … eating! I had socca (a chickpea flour pancake) on the recommendation of my friend (thanks!). Then, we had a delicious Mediterranean (OK, Italian) meal complete with crazy delicious desserts at La Voglia. Steven had a creme caramel that was the size of a bicycle wheel (no he didn’t finish it)(it was about 2cm in diameter) and I had a chocolate, hazelnut, peanut tarte. Yum! Today we had crepes at La Vieille Crepe. We had this bonne idée to have a dessert crepe and then not eat dinner, but we were too full, so we are going to have dessert for dinner instead! Gotta eat like the Nicoise do. I still haven’t had a salad nicoise sandwich, but I am wondering whether I should leave the memory of that perfect meal alone.

I know I have said this before, but everyone has been very accommodating about our very limited French. They will even help us learn new phrases. Today we learned, “Je n’ai pas de place,” or I don’t have room. In other words, non dessert pour moi, merci.

In case you think we’re not gloating enough, here are today’s Mediterranean images. I’ll save the city views for another day. You can thank me later.

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If you’re still reading, just a reminder that we will be in Chicago from Nov. 13-20, soooo we’d love to see you if you have some time. Drop us a line. We really do miss our friends and family.