"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." – Mary Oliver

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I’m Back, NaBloPoMo … and a Few Other Good Things

The Virgin of Orissen in the Pyrenees

I arrived home 1:30 am Thursday morning last week, after almost a month away in France and Spain. My email had almost 1000 unread emails, our finance manager went on holiday just before I returned, so I’ve taken over some of her work as well as having my own to catch up on, I wanted to get stuck back into my back to running program and the gym and my garden looked like this:

You can’t tell, but a lot of this is weeds, self-seeded parsley that needs to go and veggies that have gone to seed.

I decided to extend my bloggy break until today, the start of NaBloPoMo, so I could spend the time over the past week wrangling my life into some kind of order. I got to inbox zero, hit read all on Feedly, cleared most of my work backlog, pulled out all the parsley and winter veggies (apart from the broad beans), replanted with summer veggies, got back to PT, the gym, completed three walk/run sessions and wrote of few posts for NaBloPoMo.

Enough of that—the holiday was amazing. Our primary focus was the Camino de Santiago, but I spent a week in Paris while G worked in Italy and the UK. I loved pottering around Paris by myself, and then the Camino was fascinating, challenging and quite social. I plan to do some recap posts over the month of November, but here’s a little teaser …

Viennoiseries Yan Couvreur
The Seine Paris
St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Pyrenees, France. This was where we started the Camino.
Heading down from the Col de Lepoder (1450m) towards Spain.
Leon Cathedral, with its impressive stained glass
We finished! In front of the Cathedral Santiago de Compostella

I’m not a huge fan of Halloween—it’s only recently been imported into Australia. Still, for my readers who are fans of Halloween, I just had to share these photos of a totally over-the-top house around the corner from us.

Riley is a bit of a scaredy cat and was a bit put out by the black cats.


Some other good things:

  • My broad beans are ready for picking.


  • We’ve had multiple opportunities to catch up with the kids since we arrived home. E has been home quite a few nights so that has been good.
  • I had some stunning weather for my first walk/run


  • Melbourne changed to daylight savings while we were overseas, which has meant we’ve done a few after-dinner walks since we got home.
  • The weather is warming up, and I’ve been able to line-dry our washing outside.

How’s your week been? Are you doing NaBloPoMo this year?


Comments

19 responses to “I’m Back, NaBloPoMo … and a Few Other Good Things”

  1. Hi Melissa! Happy NaBloPoMo!!!
    Your trip sounds amazing, and I’m very impressed with the way you got yourself together afterwards (inbox zero? What’s that, ha.)
    I love that Halloween house, and I love that Riley is scared of the black cats. Someone gave my sister a life-like statue of a cat (it was a doorstop) and her cats were terrified of it- I mean, can’t they tell it’s not real???

    1. Ha, that is so funny that the cats couldn’t tell the statue wasn’t real. The delete button is my inbox zero secret weapon.

  2. Yay! Happy NaBloPoMo!

    There’s a house in our neighborhood that has a creepily realistic black cat figurine with these eyes that glow in the dark. It never fails to freak out Hannah the Dog, no matter how many times I go and touch the black cat to show her that it’s not real or dangerous. LOL. She and Riley could be anxiety buddies together.

    1. That cat figurine sounds creepy. Riley actually stopped paying any attention to the black cats after that first time.

  3. Yeah you are back. Just in time for the NabloPoMo shenanigans.
    Looking forward to reading about your trip. A friend of mine was doing that too at the same time.

    Your garden looks so lush. I bet you only see weeds but I think it looks gorgeous. And what a nice harvest of your beans.

    1. I do love a bit of a wild look to the garden, but this was getting a bit much.

  4. Oh, PARIS, I’m always here for posts about Paris (or any part of France, actually). I think my niece did that walk from France into Spain a year or two ago. She went in the summer and it was too hot, your timing is much better. That cathedral in Lyon is stunning.

    Welcome home, I’m glad you’re doing NaBloPoMo!

    1. I prefer travelling when it’s not too hot, much better for walking and seeing things. Our first day would have been brutal if their was heat as well.

  5. Wow, really lovely pictures! We spent two weeks in France in May and loved it too. Looking forward to reading your posts for NaBlo – greetings from Canada !

    1. Hi Karen, thanks for popping in. France is a wonderful destination.

  6. Yay Melissa, so happy you’re joining again for NaBloPoMo! I am sure you’ll have a lot of things to share from your travels. It sounds like you had a great time in Europe again (I am jealous in the best possible way!).

    1. Europe was fabulous. The food, history and culture is fascinating.

  7. What a wonderful post! I love that you got to spend time in Paris (dreamy!) and then fit in such an iconic hike.
    It’s also lovely you’re home and settled and the inbox is empty and you’ve been able to spend time with your kids.
    I’m curious how your foot is doing after all the walking. You mentioned running again, so I’m hoping that means it’s 100% healed?

    1. I taped my foot the first couple of days of the walk but it was fine. I think the walk probably helped strengthen it so coming home I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about the running.

  8. I love the photos and can’t wait to hear more about your trip. It is one thing I have had on my list for a while, and I would love to have my parents come with me, as I really think they would love that. Getting from 1000 to 0 emails is pretty dang impressive!! I still have many unread that obviously are not important but I just cannot delete them. Do you archive? How do you get to zero?

    1. PS! I am participating in NaBloPoMo!

    2. I think you would probably love doing the Camino because it’s active and you meet lots of interesting people along the way. A lot of the emails were in my promotions and updates page so a lot of deleting (at least 75% I’d say), with some archiving (I have seperate folders for finance, receipts, holidays etc)

  9. Welcome back! I can’t wait to hear more about your trip. A week in Paris sounds especially amazing and I’d love to do the Camino someday, but probably not until we are retired. It would be hard to take enough time off while working, especially for my husband. But we hope to retire young so it seems like something we could do someday!

    1. We just did a highlights tour and used trains to skip across a lot of the middle, so we walked for nine days in total and used transport for four days.

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