After travelling to the Netherlands, I knew I really, really wanted to travel. Unfortunately, I had little opportunity until 1975 when I travelled with a friend to San Francisco for 10 days. No pictures survive but we got around and saw Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge while visiting her cousin near Santa Rosa where I bought a cream coloured sweater with attached scarf for the princely sum of $25 USD (the Canadian dollar then worth $1.05 USD) that I still wear as my Spring/Fall go to outerwear. The buttons have been replace and the scarf resewn on but otherwise it looks brand new and keeps me warm on cool days.

Following that trip, I went back to college and graduated as a Registered Nurse when there were very few jobs in Ontario for nurses. I was offered a job in Alpine, Texas and went down during Spring break to look the town and the job over. I found out they wanted me to work straight nights, as charge nurse (only RN) in a 63 bed hospital with ICU, CCU, Labour and Delivery as well as regular beds – that was two hours, by road ambulance, from El Paso where they would send complex patients. I felt that a newly minted RN (me) would definitely lack the experience required for the job and turned it down. Alpine was a lovely town and the Big Bend National Park nearby was impressive. I just was not ready for that kind of challenge. Instead, I joined the part-time “pool” at the hospital where I trained and took a part-time job at a nearby craft store until I got hired full-time at the hospital 6 months later.

Still wanting to travel farther than San Francisco and Texas, I then applied to CUSO for a position as a nurse in Sierra Leone and was well along in the application process when I started dating the man who became my husband. We had known each other since we were small children and attended the same church and schools. I dropped the application and we married three years later. Needless to say, we wanted to travel and, for our honeymoon – which we thought then was our last hurrah as travellers – we went to Paris for a week followed by a week on the Côte d’Azur. Our reason for choosing the Côte d’Azur was a series of books, the Lanny Budd books, by Upton Sinclair that, in large measure took place on the Côte d’Azur.

We had a lovely time exploring Paris on foot and by Metro: visited many museums including the Jeu de Palmes, the Berthe Morrisey museum, the Louvre – including the JMW Turner exhibit where I fell in love with his paintings, Versailles, the Champs-Élysées, restaurants serving moules et frites. As part of booking our trip with a travel agency, we booked two nights on arrival and one prior to departure at a central Paris hotel. I was so jet lagged the first day that Sahib went out for a solo walk and found the Hotel Malar where we moved after the second night and to which we returned after cancelling the original booking.

Having explored Paris, on my 30th birthday, we (instead of blowing the bank dining at Maxim’s as we had planned) took the Train Bleu overnight to Beaulieu sur Mer – a central spot on the Côte d’Azur discovered while reading Gourmet magazine! On arrival in Beaulieu sur Mer, Sahib sat on our luggage at the train station while I walked up to the nearby Hotel Victoria (found on a map at the train station) and arranged our room for the week! It was a lovely old hotel, huge room and lovely balcony (too cold to sit on, though, in February) which is now, as we discovered returning for our 30th anniversary, a very upscale condo building with no entry to mere plebes.

Sadly, the rest of our pictures were slides that are gone. However, we had a lot of fun hiking around the area after heading to the “Codec” for wine, baguette, gorgonzola cheese and sausage or pate for our picnic lunch. We hiked around Cap Ferrat, Eze, Nice and Juan-Les-Pins (home of Lanny Budd), visited the villa of the Ephrussi Rothchilds and the Villa Kyrios, rented a car and went to the glass blowing factories of Biot (I still have a mini pitcher we bought my great Aunt Molly who needed something to hold her milk for her tea and a picture of a deer we bought my mother in an antique shop as well as a five candle candelabra in silver that was our main souvenir) and Monte Carlo – all in a week of exploring the area. We also had lovely dinners at a restaurant in the side street near the hotel called Les Agaves. Our introduction to French cuisine was well enjoyed – especially bouride (a clear fish soup) with aioli.

After that trip, we planned to start our family and never expected to travel to that extent again … wow, were we wrong!