Autumn has arrived in the French Alps…well, sorta. Here in the valley where Chambery sits, it’s Autumn, but in the surrounding mountains it’s already Winter. I guess that makes it something between Autumn and Winter.The valley vineyard leaves have changed color and it’s dazzling to see. The vineyards which are just five minutes from our home are one of my favorite places to walk – there’s something peaceful and relaxing about being surrounded by so many grapes and so much growth. And I’m always happy to be around anything that reminds me of wine!

A few days ago it rained in Chambery, but in the mountains all around us that translated into snow. This week, I woke to find them covered in a blanket of crisp, gleaming, white snow. It was so low on the mountains that it reached the little homes that are perched on the ‘frontier’ between valley and mountain.

Oh yes, snow…my first day living in Chambery was all about snow.  Keep in mind I grew up in Florida and spent the last 25 years in Los Angeles. Snow is not in my vocabulary. But nature thought it would play a little joke on me and in mid-April, when I made my big move to Chambery from LA, we had, what seemed to me, a blizzard.Hung over with jet lag, I woke up in a very cold room and looked out the window to see a white sky, white yard, white cars, white roads and white trees. The snow was coming down in buckets of white. I asked Bernard about it and he said it had been 13 years since he had seen so much snow that late in the season. It stuck around for a couple of days and I filmed my first little video of my white paradise and sent it off to my warm Florida family and LA friends. I can’t say anyone was envious of me. Well, at least not yet. Since then, I regularly send everyone photos and videos of our motorbike rides in the local countryside and mountain roads, and I do get the ‘you are so lucky to be surrounded by so much beauty’ comments fairly regularly in the return emails. I am lucky. It just doesn’t get more beautiful than this.

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I’m an Italophile. I love Italy. I love and speak the language, adore the food, find the people very entertaining and charming, have traveled to 73 Italian towns, studied there as an undergraduate, vacationed there for 20 years, and even lived there from 1998-2000 (that’s another story I’ll tell you one day).  I’ve never been a Francophile. In fact, I went to Paris in 1979, was so turned off by the people, I never returned to France in all these years, even though it bordered on Italy and I’ve been within a stone’s throw many times.

Every year I returned to Italy for vacation and, just to stay out of a rut, I added another country on to my annual treks…Malta, Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, Slovenia. I was running out of countries, so one year I decided it was time to do France. I figured how toxic could Provence be?  I, like many Americans, had succumbed to the media and political propaganda of the ‘snobbish, rude, arrogant, self-centered French’ – an almost daily meal fed to us in the States. Even still, I decided to venture out and, a one hour flight from Naples to Nice landed me on a train headed to Avignon, a city in Provence. That’s where fate caught up with me.

Within an hour, a handsome man, 45ish, sat in the seat across from me. I could feel my heart leap but I tried to play it cool. We kept glancing in each others’ directions in hopes of not being caught by the other. It was electricity. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and asked him if he spoke English. No. Did I speak French? No. Did he speak Italian? No. Did I speak German? No. We gave up and just stared at each other for the next 2 hours. Avignon approached, I pulled out my hotel information, and we got off the train, waving good-bye to each other at the station. An opportunity missed. But oh well, it’s for the best. Right?

Three days later at my hotel, I was eating breakfast, looked up from my table, and there he was….just standing there with an arm full of English-French dictionaries and grammar books. I was stunned. He had gotten onto another train – what was he doing in Avignon? He asked me, in broken English, if I would spend the day with him. I couldn’t say no.This was too mysterious and irresistible! As the day progressed I learned that he had gone camping with his friends but he couldn’t stop thinking about me. Two years after his divorce, I was the first woman who had brought something alive in his heart and he couldn’t let it go. He had left his friends, got back on the train for the four hour ride, and been hanging out at my hotel (he had seen the hotel name on the train as I pulled the information out from my purse). He finally had found me after two days of searching. For us female Americans, this sounds a lot like stalking, I know. It even entered my mind at the time, but I think that’s a cultural bias we bring from living in a violent society where women are often victims.

I learned his name was Bernard and he was the sweetest, kindest man I had ever met. That day together was the beginning of the greatest love story of my life – a love that took me 46 years to find. It was also the beginning of the biggest adventure of my life and some of the most challenging and joyful moments I’ve ever experienced.

When Bernard left his camping buddies to find me in Avignon, his friends told him that if he found me they would buy him a Ferrari. We’re still waiting for them to drive that baby into our garage!

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