Our Story

We go into the world.

We were living as quasi hermits in rural France, in a house we were always working on. We had turned it into a bed and breakfast, but the season was very short. That part of France had long winters and short summers.

It didn’t make enough to pay the mortgage.

When my brother got control of my mother’s estate and canceled my inheritance, we leapt out of the frying pan into the inferno, losing everything. From our present perspective, we can easily see better moves we might have made, but a lethal combination of naivete, panic and ignorance took hold of us.

We had moved to France before the internet age began, but even when it was going strong, our little village couldn’t afford to install WiFi because it was surrounded by precipitous cliffs and mountainous terrain. We finally got an incredibly slow and unreliable dial-up system at the insistence of our son, which turned out to be indispensable for our B&B business.

At first, I couldn’t see why we needed a computer connected to the world wide web, but of course that was just me clinging to the old ways I had grown up with. I’ve learned a little about the internet universe since those days, but I still type slowly with one finger and I’m never going to have the instincts for it our kids and grandkids have.