It is terrible that it has been nearly two years since our last post! I’ve started a few in the meantime but never felt like what I had to say was relevant to this blog. We do want to wish you all well and hope that you are coping with or at least surviving these chaotic times.

Between the time of my knee replacement in 2024 and today, a lot has happened to us. We have had two deaths in our families – my older sister died unexpectedly last spring, and Lisa’s mother passed away at age 88 at the end of the summer after a lingering decline. Since we live in Minnesota, we also had to deal with the murders of public officials last June, a school shooting in August and the ICE surge in the metro area last winter.

We’ve also enjoyed good times and some really great music, including in our backyard, and time with friends and family. We are excited to continue the good times over the coming months!

Our plan as we started 2026 was to ride across France on the France En Velo route, which goes from St. Malo on the English channel, and then south towards Toulouse, through Provence and ending in Nice. It looks like a beautiful trip and there is a good guide to the 1,000 mile route – we were going to do it in three weeks. As we were planning the trip (during our annual two week visit to the island of St. Martin – another place we can practice our French), the war on Iran began, and the prices of air travel shot up, so much that we began to wonder if the trip was going to be affordable.

The logistics around the France trip were complex and as we were planning, the prices kept increasing and in the end, in the midst of trying to figure everything out, inflation kind of finalized our decision to put that trip off for a year, sadly.

But we decided to still travel in a French speaking country – and one that we can drive to! We’ll be heading up to Toronto, Canada, on June 1 with our own bikes. Our plan is to leave the car in Toronto, bike on the north shore of Lake Ontario to Picton, where we’ll head north to Ottawa to visit our friends Nicole and Luc. Then we’ll follow the Ottawa River to Montreal, and the St. Lawrence River to Quebec City – a total distance of 1,000 kilometers (sounds better than 600 miles.) We are very excited to tour a part of Canada we have not travelled to together and are doing some reading and music listening to prepare. (“Acadian Driftwood” by The Band is on our playlist – the story of the displaced French who made their way to Louisiana and became “cajun.”)

We did not have a planned route to follow, as we often do on our bike trips, so we used RideWithGPS and Google maps and a couple other resources and designed the route ourselves. Canadian roads are reportedly very bike friendly, especially those in the Route Verte system. We will probably still be making some routing decisions while we are on the ride, but that is part of the adventure!

We are very excited about a French experience that is closer to home and hope that next year, the real France trip will be more doable.

You will be hearing more from us in the next two weeks!