1990s photos and memories

Yesterday, as I was organizing and filing away some photos on my main desktop PC up in the loft, I came across a treasure trove of old photos that I didn't know I had on a hard disk. I know I have them all on CDs and DVDs, but it's a lot of trouble, and very time-consuming, to pull out old disks and go through them one at a time. I guess that at some point I decided to do just that, though, because there were all those photos in one big folder containing almost 60,000 files (31 GB).

I'm very late posting today because I've been sitting here for three hours or more this morning trying to figure out what to do with all these pictures. I've been looking at them and remembering places where we lived and traveled in the 1990s. We lived in California and we traveled to France once or twice a year between 1988 and our big move to France in 2003. We also traveled to a lot of other places. Here are some photos we took in France back then.

In 1996, I spent a week in Ireland on a work trip, with a side trip to Paris just for fun. Some California friends were in Paris at the same time. It was in April and the weather was fine. A North Carolina friend that I first met in California was there and we spent a day together walking around the city, including a stop in this café for a refreshing beverage.

Walt probably took this pre-digital photo on one of our trips to the southwestern part of France. I don't know if it was in 1989 or in 1995. It's the town of Cahors, on the Lot river. We were on high ground on the opposite side of the river, taking in the views. Cahors is famous for it's dark red wines, made from Malbec grapes.

In October 1995, we flew into CDG airport, rented a car, and headed south toward Cahors and the Lot valley, where we had reserved a gîte. We were pretty tired after the flight from San Francisco, so when we got to Bourges, not far from Saint-Aignan, we stopped and found a hotel room for the night. We had discovered Bourges and its cathedral in 1993. Again, it was probably Walt who took this photo out of our hotel window.

I think this photo dates back to 1989, when we went on a driving trip from Grenoble, where I had attended a conference, to Nîmes, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Poitiers, Chartres, and Paris. Walt flew in to CDG and took the train down to Grenoble as the conference ended. The next day we started driving and sightseeing. We didn't have reservations anywhere. Each day we would find a hotel toward the end of the afternoon, book a room, and then go out to dinner in a restaurant. We would shop in markets most mornings, buy salads, sandwiches, or pâtés, and then have a picnic lunch wherever we were at noontime. That was a great trip.

I believe this photo dates back to 1989, too, but I'm not sure. It''s the town of Albi, not very far from Carcassonne, Castelnaudary, and Toulouse. We spent the night in a hotel in Castelnaudary, in a hotel that turned out to have a very nice restaurant. We ate a memorable cassoulet — it was probably the best meal of that 10-day trip. We had great weather except some rain toward the end, as we got to Chartres and then Paris.

In 1995, we stayed for 10 days in a gîte that was in the town of Puy-l'Évêque, just west of Cahors. CHM had told us about a medieval château called Bonaguil that was nearby. That's it above. When we went there, a school group was being shown around by a guide or a teacher who really knew the history of the place. I followed them around, listening to the commentary, and enjoyed it greatly. I think we had a picnic lunch at Bonaguil that day. Again, I'm sure Walt took the picture. I wasn't so into photography at the time.