One Saturday night earlier this year I waited backstage muttering “l’allodola” under my breath, while a young jazz musician with a bright white satin tie covered in musical notation chatted to me, clearly trying to cheer me up. “I’m really English,” he said in Italian, “aren’t you impressed by my Italian?” Applause drifted back stage …more

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When I first moved to Paris, it was all rainbows and unicorns. Or maybe more specifically, red potted geraniums and French wrought iron balconies. My rose-tinted vision of the City of Light was hopelessly romantic, the stuff that dreams were made of. That was almost two years ago.   Sometimes that moment feels like a …more

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10 years ago we bought an apartment in Bagni di Lucca. We did almost no research. An Italian friend suggested Lucca as a suitable place to buy. We loved Lucca, but a home there was a bit out our price range so we headed north to Bagni di Lucca, a collection of villages in the …more

You do not hear much about the country of El Salvador in the United States, and if you do it is usually bad news – the violence, drugs or the gangs. Yes, El Salvador has these things but so does every other country in the world including the United States, just pick up today’s paper …more

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Retirement can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To my wife and I retirement meant leaving our sticks and bricks house behind to hit the road. When we first began contemplating retirement we considered several options. We could stay where we were living in Texas or we could buy a retirement …more

Last weekend as Beatriz and I left our apartment at about 11 AM we both stopped, looked at each other and agreed that we were astonished once again by the beauty of the place and the wonderful weather. When I taught meteorology at the university in the States we gave a definition of Weather as …more

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There are some nights when I wake up in a cold sweat, terrified that I have made the wrong decision with my life and it’s all going to turn to custard. Then I review what is the worst that can happen, and I roll over, check the alarm clock, yep 1:30am, roll back and return …more

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Don turned 65 in October 2007 and thoughts of wanting to retire and travel more began to take precedence over his former enthusiasm for his work as a private-practice neuropsychologist. However, because of some very poor financial decisions we’d made a couple of years earlier he was not in a position to retire, so he …more

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