My favorite place? It’s hard to choose just one. I’ve been to so many places.

Many a childhood Summer was spent with my father sailing. We would mostly go up through the San Juan Islands and into British Columbia. Although, once we went to Seattle and used the locks to enter the inner-bay.

We never made it as far as Alaska, not that we didn’t want to, we just lacked enough available time to make the journey.

Later in life, after finishing my tour at the Job Corps Center in Astoria, OR, I travelled again with my father, to visit my uncle in England. We stayed and visited with family for a time before shoving on to the next leg of our journey.

We flew down to the city of Toulouse in France and rode the trains, stopping off in small towns along the way. I got to visit castles which I was always fond of since a child.

WyrdLight.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

After France, we took a bus into Spain and then another train as we made our way into to Barcelona. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with the journey, culture shock, and the language barrier by this point.

My father and I decided to head back at this point. We travelled northward along the Mediterranean coastline and sampled those foods unique to the regions.

photos by Stephan Audiger of Hotels.com

Eventually we got back into France where we rented a car and returned to visiting yet more castles. I still have my commemorative coins from the sites we visited; there were little coin-operated vending machines supplying the collectibles.

I think my favorite place was Villandry. It has these elaborate decorative gardens, and Japanese koi swimming in the waterways around the grounds.

The last site we visited was Mont Saint-Michel. We took a bus from the port town and spent the day there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many tourists in any one spot as at Mont Saint-Michel. The parking lot was packed with buses and the causeway up the hill was full of people.

photos by Robert Lio

I lost all of my photos from the trip quite sadly. I had uploaded them to an early cloud-storage site which traded hands a few times before going out of business. They were asking for outrageous sums of money to download my own photo catalog before the server shutdown.

We took the ferry from Saint Malo back to Portsmouth where we were met by my uncle. I stayed there for a few days and then flew back to the states. My father returned to his trip. He went down to Portugal and found himself a crew position on a catamaran making the return journey across the Atlantic and back to the US.

Many more trips would occur in the years to follow. But, I’ll save those for another day.