After a really long hiatus, we resurrected Bordeaux in 365 Bottles last month. Our life has gotten a major shake-up recently with Tim retiring from the Air Force, us buying an apartment in France and actually merging our households back in to one again.
Tim arrived from his Mongol Rally retirement trip basically at the beginning of October. This is the longest we’ve spent together in more than three years. It’s kind of crazy, really. We’ve been married nearly 18 years and together for nearly 20. But it’s a whole new phase of adjusting to life in a foreign country and both being home 24/7.
Highs
We’re pretty much settled in our new apartment
I can’t believe it’s been nearly two months since we closed on the apartment we bought in Bordeaux and moved in. I managed to mostly unpack everything before Tim arrived back from his Mongol Rally, but I had a honey-do list of little things for him to take care of like hanging things.
It’s been a pretty smooth two months since we moved in {knock on wood}. As new home owners in France, I wasn’t sure what we’d be in for. But so far, there haven’t really been any surprises like discovering something major like an appliance didn’t work. And honestly, after a somewhat dramatic and stressful time leading up to the closing, I’m glad it’s been smooth sailing.
We even bought a wine fridge about debating exactly what we wanted to do with our wine collection. It was sitting in our storage locker boxed up until about two weeks ago. We opted for a large dual-climate wine fridge that claimed to hold 195 bottles. We managed to fit 167 bottles in, which is an impressive amount considering a large number of bottles in our collection were not the standard Bordeaux-style 750ml bottles.
The only major thing we really have left to do something about is our open-style rain shower. Water sprays the bathroom a bit more than we’d like, so we’re considering options for some sort of enclosure we could put in.
A return to incredible Kenya
At times our job is pretty freaking amazing. Especially when work takes you back on safari for not only the third time now, but the second time this year. Seriously, if you haven’t ever been on a safari, it’s the trip that has to be on your bucket list.
Going on safari is never not an incredible experience. It’s different every time because when it comes to wild animals just being wild animals, you never know what you’re going to see. Our trip with Elewana Collection took us to Elsa’s Kopje in Meru National Park, back to the Masai Mara and then to the private nature conservancy Loisaba Conservancy. We saw loads of wildlife, but some of the most memorable moments were seeing a new leopard mom emerge for the first time since her two cubs had been born, having sundowners one night next to mating lions and the next night under a seeing leopard in sausage tree, and spotting hyena pups just a few weeks old nursing.
We’ve got a ton of writing and photo and video editing to do yet, but our first post is already up on the Special Northern Kenya Five. Check it out to discover some species we’d bet you’ve never heard of.
8 MILLION readers
Our blog turned 10 years old this past June. It would have been super exciting to celebrate that with hitting 10 million readers. It’s not going to happen with only two months left in 2019, but we did pass over 8 million readers sometime last month.
And it’s definitely possible that we’ll hit that 10 million reader mark before the blog turns 11 in June 2020.
So here’s a giant THANK YOU to each and every one of you who visits our site. We couldn’t do what we do without you!
Back together again
The last three years haven’t been easy. We lived entirely separately with Tim working in South Korea for a year, then in the UK for two years. Particularly the past two years have been taxing with the majority of traveling to see each other falling on me, since my schedule was far more flexible.
But now that Tim is retired from the Air Force, we’re back under one roof full time. Not only that, we’re now working together full time too. We went from one extreme to the other. It’s great to be back together, but it’s not without it’s trials too…
Lows
Learning to live and work together again
Wow have we ever had a whole lot of change all at once. We bought an apartment, moved and moved back in together after more than three full years of living apart in different countries. We’ve never been home together this much ever in our lives.
I’m a night owl. Tim’s a morning person after years of being at work usually by 6am. There’s definitely a list of things that we couldn’t be more night and day on. But opposites attract, right?
We might have been smiling in the photo above of us enjoying bush breakfast, but let’s just say we had some creative differences while setting up the camera and tripod to capture our breakfast. By the time we were shooting, we were genuinely smiling. But I was like a growling lioness 10 minutes prior when Tim just wanted to eat and I knew we had to get shots for our article.
While we’re probably always going to have creative differences, our biggest challenge right now is finding a routine. I’ve got a ton of work to catch up on and I’ve always been bad at delegating, even when I was a manager with a team of more than 40 people. I also have to retrain Tim on a lot of things that have changed since he was last really involved in our business.
He wants to feel like he contributes. I want him to help and take on a bunch of tasks. But we both distract each other currently when trying to work, then neither of us gets much done. It’s going to take a bit of time to find a groove. We’ll get there, but it’s probably not going to be an easy task.
My broken foot isn’t healing
If you follow our Instagram Stories, you may have caught that I broke my foot at the beginning of the summer. Then just when it finally felt like it was healing, I re-broke my foot when I had a mishap with a tourist who backed a shopping cart filled with cases of water, soda and bottles of wine over it.
It’s my 2nd, 3rd and 4th metatarsals that are broken. They’re those little bones in the ball of the foot. And they still hurt like all bloody hell just from a day walking – which is basically every day considering we live in the pedestrian-only hyper center of Bordeaux.
I was prescribed a lovely boot to stabilize my foot so the toes won’t move. I wore it for about a week, but then it was impossible to move with a gimpy foot. After we get back from our London trip, I think I need to give in and wear my damn boot for the rest of November and let my little piggies heal.
Most Popular Instagram Photo
It’s fun re-discovering Bordeaux with Tim. There’s so many places I have yet to show him as he gets acquainted with his new home. Thanks to a collaboration with Baja Bikes, we took a 15 kilometer bicycle tour of many of Bordeaux’s highlights.
The tour was just 3 hours long, but we covered a ton of ground! We biked along both banks of the Garonne River that separates Bordeaux from La Bastide. We stopped at Bordeaux monuments dating back to Roman times and took a break at the polar opposite – Bordeaux’s street art/skate park/organic grocery/brew pub.
Our bike tour inspired Tim to move his bike from our storage locker to someplace accessible to our apartment. Now, if only this weather would cooperate so we can get out for more rides around town!
Coming Up in November 2019
November is going to be a pretty busy month for us! First, we’re combining a personal trip back to the UK to sell Tim’s Mongol Rally car with our first time back at World Travel Market in several years. I used to go to the world’s largest travel trade fair every year, but we’ve been so busy with an endless stream of collaborations and opportunities that I just stopped going.
That’s definitely a good problem to have, but I also enjoy seeing industry colleagues. So we timed our trip back to be able to attend WTM. If you’re a travel industry member, we have a few time slots still available on Monday, November 4th to meet – but our schedule is filling up fast!
After a week or so back at home in Bordeaux, Tim will be visiting his family back home in Chicago and his grandpa in Arkansas. I’m staying home to attempt to get caught up on all the work I still have from taking time off to buy an apartment and then move, and then just getting settled back in to some sort of work routine.
We’ll end the month by celebrating our first Thanksgiving together in Bordeaux. I didn’t order a turkey {read: special order a turkey to be fattened up and ready sooner than Christmas} so we may be having a Thanksgiving chicken this year. Regardless, I’m really enjoying being in our own home with a lot more space than I had in my old apartment.
marlene says
What an exciting month. This was the first time in the last 2yrs I haven’t been to Bordeau and am I every missing that. Would have enjoyed sharing things with you and helping with the move. Can’t wait to see you and Tim in December.
Ambika Balasubramaniyan says
Wonderful to see both of your settling in ! Great read as always. Can’t wait to see where you take this adventure!