Dreaming of France: Washing our cares away


What’s the most time you can spend on vacation before you have to do any laundry? A week? Ten days? A little longer if you can do your ‘fine washables’ in the hotel room sink? Or perhaps you’re well-heeled enough that you can leave your clothing with the cleaning staff to take care of ala Tom Ripley pretending to be Dickie in The Talented Mr. Ripley?

When the hubs Mark, and I went to Europe for a month this past spring we found we needed to do a load about every 10 days. We did laundry three times, in Paris where we were lucky to find a laverie just a block from our hotel on the Rue de Seine where in early May, the temperature still a fairly brisk 55º and we wore multiple layers and our raincoats everywhere to keep off the chill. We did a load in the beach resort town of Rimini in Italy where someone had left a box of detergent in the lavanderia. The temperature had risen to a balmy mid 70's by then and we left our raincoats in the back of the rental car. By the time we did our last load, in the beachside town of Saint-Aygulf on the outskirts of Saint Raphael in the south of France at the end of the month, it was full on summertime in the mediterranean. The day we hit the laverie automatique the outdoor market was in full swing so I took a look around while my hubby stayed with the laundry and Lee Child on his iPad for company. 

You'll notice in the images below the market-goers are all wearing shorts and summer dresses. Back home it was Memorial Day weekend, here in the south of France, it felt it. It also felt like a place I'd like to come back to. Oui, le bucket list is growing!











Connecting with Dreaming of France at An Accidental Blog

Popular posts from this blog

Baker Street Station—Sherlock Holmes was there

Image
Baker Street Station The main thing my husband wanted to see in London was London ... as Sherlock Holmes saw it. So our first move, like any fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation was to take a double decker bus to Baker Street. As it turns out I read the map upside down or sideways or maybe it was backwards but we found ourselves in Putney at the bridge. Very much in the wrong direction. Over half an hour by car, which we didn't have. We wound up taking the tube back in the right direction which delivered us to the Baker Street Station. The station is one of the original stations opened when the Metropolitan Railway—the world's first underground railway—was built in 1863.  While we don't immediately think of Sherlock dashing out on the tube, he very well could have and in fact the rail, train etc is alluded to in several dozen Sherlock stories. The Baker Street station is situated on the very block where Sherlock lived at 221B Baker Street. Or should I say th
Continue Reading »

Bridget Jones Diary. On location in London. #BriFri

Image
I just found British Isles Friday post which I shared over on Chapter1-Take1.com  directly from London when my hubby and I visited in May. I'm not sure what happened, whether I lost my connection or just forgot to share it with my fellow Anglophiles following Joy Weese Moll's British Isles Friday meme. I'm making up for that now, adding some additional photos from Borough Market where Bridget Jones flat was actually above the Globe Tavern. No matter how we felt about the sequels, we all fell in love with Bridget in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary . Most of us saw a bit of ourselves in her, whether it was the overeating, over-imbibing misfit or the plucky lost girl who refused to give up, her honesty about her own flaws and foibles helped us laugh at ourselves. Rene Zellweger with her brave British accent channeled Bridget’s flirty spirit. Hidden under the arches of London Bridge at the Globe Tavern in Borough Market is the flat where Bridget lived. I&#
Continue Reading »

Brad Pitt: I knew him well. (Okay, that’s a lie. But I did know him!)

Image
I only worked on a couple of movies during my short-lived career as a production coordinator. By a couple, I mean two. Literally two. The Favor was one of those movies, a film most of you will have never heard of even though it starred Elizabeth McGovern, Bill Pullman and Brad Pitt.  Brad Pitt was just a beautiful young man back then, only twenty four, with the beginnings of a resume; some small parts in episodic tv, nothing noteworthy. The director cast him based on some footage his agent had sent from LA up to our location production office in downtown Portland. It was from the as yet unreleased Thelma & Louise ; my boss had seen the video clip and trilled that he was delicious. And we all knew that instead of flying up from LA, he’d driven up in the cutest little sports car with Juliette Lewis by his side.  Brad played Elliot, an artist and Elizabeth McGovern's love interest, Emily, who runs an art gallery. The film is called  The Favor  because Emily's friend
Continue Reading »