Time has really shifted gears. September has come and gone despite the daily pace being wonderfully slow. After the rush of the road trip that took us along 5,000km (yep, thinking metric now, we are so cultured) coastlines, over the Alps, through farms and urban centers, nothing sounded better than staying still for a few days in the mystery town of Ceps. I honestly hadn’t even known the name of the town we would be in until Bernhard (our host) drove up to it. Just that it was near Beziers and that was where we needed to show up. (I have a lot of trust for Ashley, so far we have been lucky and avoided the, ‘I thought you were handling this piece, where the heck are we supposed to be today?’) I also feel lucky that I have another highly active but low-energy, restless but still a homebody-at-heart partner in Ashley. L’vendange, which is specifically Grape Harvest and is now one of several French words I now know, although not the spelling. Along with Aperol!!! Merci, merci boku, camping, ‘Je ne pal Francais, quezca parle vu ingles?’, croissant!, croissant aux chocolat (better), and the always appreciated reposte, which for you non-few-French-word-knowers is, break.

Working the vendange has been a wonderful fit for our rhythm. We get up at the ungodly hour of 5:30am, although really, the first 10 minutes of any day feels like an ungodly hour and this way we get to watch the sunrise each morning. Then after working outside, diligently cutting grapes for 5-6 hours and hope that our backs will straighten back out when we get back to the house and take lay down for a nap. Then in the afternoon is a mix of reading (lots of Game of Thrones), playing the piano, hiking along the river, more coffee and eating, and computering. Really, we just work, read, eat, drink, explore the area around us, talk with kind people and sleep deeply. It has a nice balance to it, and more so, it is the pace I want to live at and hope we can bring it back home with us (as we attempt to found a Ceps, Oregon just outside of Portland).

It has been a good place to spend figuring out what we are going to do when we are back home and to deal with some stressful pieces. The house, ever resistant for having just a single thing on it go smoothly, had another deal fall apart. Then for a confluence of financial reasons, we are cutting the second leg of our trip (although there is still a chance of going to Bali in Jan, it is dependent on things still shaking out…). But there are silver linings and this will be good. We have been itching to set our roots into Portland and we have done some good figuring on what work we will be aiming for in terms of jobs when we get back, and we’ve been getting a bit homesick. Ceps (and the south of France for that matter) has been absolutely wonderful and I have loved it here.