Sneaking up on Notre-Dame de Paris

I mentioned the other day that a month-long stay in Paris and Normandy in 1997 might have been the time in my life when I realized I needed to get out of Silicon Valley and move my life to France. Well, another trip to France, for three weeks — a week in the Loire Valley, at Vouvray, plus a week in Champagne and Normandy again, as well as a week in Paris — was the moment when I realized, I think, that the Loire Valley might be the best place for me to live. Walt and I both already spoke French well enough to live here without language problems.

I wanted to live in the country and have a big vegetable garden. We had a dog, so moving to the countryside made more sense than moving into an apartment in a big city. I couldn't really afford to live in Paris. I definitely didn't want to live in the Paris suburbs. In 2000, Walt and I weren't yet ready to make the move. However, in 2002, we were both ready for this adventure. It took us only six months to sell our house in San Francisco, buy the house in Saint-Aignan where we've now lived for nearly 16 years.

Here's another slideshow, this one from Paris in October 2000. I'm enjoying seeing these photos again and putting the slideshows together. I took these with my first digital camera, a Kodak DC260, and recorded the show in Windows Movie Maker.

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If you look at this blog regularly, you might wonder how many other people are reading over your shoulder. Bloggerprovides blog authors with a few statistics. Traffic on the blog is measured in "pageviews" — I assume that means how many posts are opened by readers over a certain period of time.

For example, yesterday this blog registered 1,039 pageviews. Last month (the calendar month, January, I assume), Blogger counted 21,497 pageviews for my blog. And over the past 12½ years — I started the blog in October 2005 — the total pageview count is reported as 2,771,525.