James and Paula in France

In 2017, we took a giant leap of faith, sold everything we owned and moved from New Orleans, our home for all of our adult lives, to a small medieval village near the center of France, population: about 250, depending on the month. The reasons were simple and profound. After 40+ years working as journalists, we wanted to travel, write and edit, photograph, and experience the wide world in a way that would be impossible by staying in the US in the workaday world. It’s a journey that comes with some risk, but it’s one we’ve never regretted. We try to be open to the adventure every day, to rest in the present, to live with gratitude. In short, we try to be true to all those cliches that are easy to say, much harder to achieve. We travel to be lost, to see beauty, to learn more intensely how much more alike than different we all are. We travel not just to learn about other places and people, but to learn about ourselves. We travel to feel alive. We are works in progress.