Train We caught the bus from grandpa and grandma's place to get to the train station. We took the train from Toulouse-Matabiau to Carcassonne, painless, standard issue train. Ville Basse We walked the mile from the Carcassonne train station in ville basse to the citadel, with a requisite stop at Jen's new favorite store Etam. We explored the walls, the shops, the chapel, and had lunch. Carcassonne is an incredible place and we will have to come back to stay at the hotel on-site and take some time to visit the wine country.... read more

Not all the tourist spots, but some of them that we missed the last time we were there, plus our favorite place to hang out while there, the Gautier Palace and Gardens.... read more

Coming In You'd think that because it's in the Caribbean, it's not too much trouble to get to, but being exclusive requires some restrictions. So we flew into St. Maarten so we could clearly see what we were NOT missing! That place looked like Jamaica on Spring Break, all dilapidated. That doesn't mean we weren't in for a bit of a scare when we came into St. Barths on the STOL aircraft. The runway is so oddly located and short that these special aircraft are required and the approach requires a last minute nose-dive onto the runway in order to clear a large hill at its western end. We later heard stories that some cars had been clipped, even carried away from this hill by landing aircraft. Le Manapany Hotel & Cottages We stayed at the ... read more

We celebrated New Year's on the Bund watching the fireworks over Pudong with Stefan and Markus, my fellow students at UIBE. As I described in the previous blog, these guys had been traveling all over China, as far as Tibet and we had agreed to meet up in Shanghai. We came down on the double-stacked "soft sleeper" express train from Beijing, sleeping across from each other on the top bunks, a great improvement from the tripled-stacked "hard sleeper" I had taken in October to Inner Mongolia. Poor Jennifer was so sick and we had to share what I had come to view as luxury in China, but was clearly a little bit of a shock for the uninitiated. We stayed at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music which had dorms that served as a hostel. Yet more ... read more