Elise Detterbeck

Bienvenue! We are delighted to welcome you (or welcome you back!) to our blog that used to be about summers in the south in France! Last summer was our "last hurrah" with this scheme, deciding mid-summer that it was time to reboot our summer lives.

Since Covid, our summers in France had changed. We used to enjoy wonderful classical music concerts, & a multitude of interesting & captivating art exhibitions that were no longer happening. We'd visited all the European countries on our bucket list, & successfully done geneology visits where we needed to fill in some gaps. We were getting tired of bullfights & wine tastings in our area, & weren't thrilled with 4 new villas built across the street & the increasing presence of people & their cars. But really it was climate change that pulled the trigger: it's been super HOT for the last 3 years. Our beautiful multi-layered garden turned crunchy & wilted. The lavender we'd planted 7 years ago was timing out, & gray by late June. Time to reboot! How do we really want to spend our summers? We decided one hot evening to put the house on the market. We sold it in a week, with the furniture & furnishings inside it.

We love our real iife in Charleston, SC, where we both have hectic schedules. Both of us are determined to be "productive seniors", & love contributing what we can to our community. I work with children in an art museum & in Charleston schools, & Les works in wealth management, which, thankfully, he was able to do from here remotely in the summers. But we wanted to spend more time with our families, & we had a few things on our bucket list that were America-based, rather than Europe-based.

So we packed up what few things we couldn't live without, & with a few nostalgic tears, said goodbye to our terrace. Maybe we should rename this blog to "A view from...wherever we are next". Because we have things we want to do on that bucket list. We've just done one of those things, & we are so happy we did!

Please join us for our recent trip blog from Morocco: "View from the Riads, Rooftops, & Mountaintops of Morocco".

Hopefully, we'll be back again soon with our next adventure of Off Exploring.

Wishing you a wonderful summer!

Elise & Les