I am now in a hilly, rural part of France with small towns and villages, working as a HelpX-er (similar to WWOOF except not limited to organic farming, essentially I work 4-5 hours per day in exchange for a room and meals). This is my first experience with HelpX and it is great! My main goal was to try to improve my very poor French through immersion, and it has improved, but so far my skill at playing charades is playing a bigger role than my ability to speak ...

Whew! I've caught the blog up. The last few weeks has been really busy with family and the reunion, but now I'm taking some downtime in Rotterdam to relax and catch up on a bunch of things including this blog (since I've missed 6 countries and several weeks!). I've enjoyed the neat architecture - since Rotterdam was bombed a lot during the war they had the "opportunity" to rebuild much of the old part of the city, which they did using very interesting archite...

We took a train from the Normandy area of France back to Paris, then a high speed train that went 300 kph from Paris to Amsterdam. Amsterdam has changed from when I was there 36 years ago - it still has the beautiful canals and neat houses lining the canals, but the "coffeeshops" and sex shops are much more prevalent. We walked around lots, road bikes out of the city to northern Amsterdam, and took a canal tour. I also was there on the day of the Gay Pride ca...

From Belfast, we flew to Paris. We went up the Eiffel Tower (36 years ago when I backpacked through Europe after University, we couldn't afford to go up, so said "we'll come back", well I actually did come back and made it up this time). Though it wasn't easy - lineups to get tickets, to go through security, to get on the elevator, to buy more tickets, to get on the next elevator to go to the top, and then to get on the elevator to come down. But it was great,...

From the reunion we spent a day in Conwy in northern Wales and saw the old castle, then took the ferry to Dublin. And what do you do in Dublin? You go to the Guinness Storehouse! It was a well done tour, explained how Guinness is made, the history of their advertising, plus one of the largest gift shops I've ever seen. It ends with a free beer in the rooftop bar with a great view of the city. The next day we headed to Belfast where we saw the Giant's Causewa...