Making the Most of the French Coast

We kind of escaped from London. Maybe we escaped from all of the situations we were catapulted into: the death, the hospital, the medicine, the blood pressure, the funeral and so on. We had enough, or it was too much.

We’re trying now to find some peace, together, away from cities, traffic, and people. The noise is too distracting, too rough.

After taking a ferry in the middle of the night from Dover to Calais in France, we started our journey again. Doing our usual slow travels, discovering beautiful places on the French seaside, in the north.

We’ve been caught between the beauty of nature and the sadness of human beings (in the form of WWII bunkers, or WWI memorials and cemeteries).

But that’s life- it’s always barely balanced between life and death. We don’t forget that we are on this planet just for a short moment and try to enjoy our life as it comes. We are here, together. That means something.

It’s nice, as I write this post, to sit down on a dock in front of a beautiful lake, in the French countryside. The wind blows and shakes the trees around me. The sound is so relaxing.

Yesterday we discovered a magical place, near the small town of Le Crotoy. It’s the bay where the river Somme goes into the ocean. The entire place is so cinematographic and looks like a desert: miles and miles of untouched sand, you can walk for hours and you still don’t arrive at the sea.

And when the seals came to visit us there, at the edge of the ‘desert’- they looked at us with curiosity from the water…it was perfection. The place was so fantastic that my phone memory was brimming because of the number of pictures I took.

Next week we’ll be in Paris, a city that we both like and love. We’ll be staying at my best friend Pablo’s place, near ‘Place de la Republic.’

It’s a nice neighborhood. We’ll hopefully see some of our ‘road friends,’ Sue & Dave from New Zealand. We met them back in 2012, around Christmas, in a horrible campsite in Kavala, Greece. We’re planning to meet them in Versailles, for sure a better location.  During our travels we’ve stayed in touch with them on Facebook and by our mutual blogs, so it’ll be great to see them again and share travel experiences.

In Paris we’ll also take a deep and full immersion into our project: the Westfalia Digital Nomads website. It’s just over a year that we proudly started writing on this blog. In the beginning it was mainly to inform family and friends about our life in a van.

It seems that not only these people are interested in our lifestyle, so the best way to continue our journey is to get more professional. The main ideas are ready and on the table, we just need a good location where we can focus and start creating all the content we’d like to share. Paris is the perfect location.

We’ll also see my sister Laura, she’s lived there for almost (or maybe more than-?) 20 years.

The last time I saw her was a couple of years ago. I’ll get to see my lovely niece Audrey and nephew Brian, and have some fun with them. After that? We don’t really know yet.

It seems that life has so many unexpected things to show us everyday, that sometimes it’s difficult to make plans. Right now, it seems it’s better not to.

We miss you so much A.

-Armando