Just Humans Being...

Halloween and All Saint's Day (La Toussaint) is a big event here in France and it has been for a long time, probably as big as in North America. We remember being in Paris with our kidlets many years ago over Halloween and seeing lots of decorated places and kids dressed up, which we didn't really see much of in the UK at the time. Our hotel overlooked one of the city's large cemeteries and on November 1st, we woke up to an incredible sight - the cemetery was absolutely buzzing with people bearing flowers and gifts...it was fascinating for us all to see and experience.    At the moment, we are house and kitty sitting in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region of France and there is much activity in the cemetery of this rural village this week, as families honour their dead loved ones. Today has been a quiet day for us, we are happy to stay away from the Halloween celebrations and instead just enjoy the peace of this lovely house, cuddle lots of kitties, feast and relax.

As lots of you will be aware...we eat porridge every day. When we go away, we take all our ingredients, pan and utensils so we can continue to eat it on the road. We have recently introduced various hosts to the benefits of eating a daily bowl of what we call superfood porridge and have gone through the recipe with them, but we did promise to make a video too, so here it is! It's funny, but we still get contacted by old blog followers and B&B guests from years ago asking us for a reminder of the recipe.  Simon made it back then and would beautifully hand write the recipe out for anyone who requested it. One guest wrote to say after using Simon's recipe for years, she went and knocked a cup of coffee over it and could no longer read it, so this spurred us on to create a copy on our laptop and now we just press a couple of buttons and off it goes attached to an email (yes, we realise this technology has been around for a while, but still - it's a cool id

All you need is the plan, the road map and the courage to press on to your destination. ~ Earl Nightingale ~  We are pretty sure that we have covered this subject before... We absolutely love road trips and they start as soon as we close the door at home. We focus on the journey, rather than the destination. Sometimes the journey turns out to be completely different than we expected, but it never matters. What is important to us is that we enjoy it. Being on the road lights us both up - the amazing places we come across and the people we meet, the new friends and connections we make - it's all wonderful.  Even when we set out to explore a place only to discover that we have been there before, which seems to happen a lot lately...Hahaha!!! It makes us sad that most people are so keen to get to their destination as quickly as possible, they miss out on so much. Folks who drive long hours don't seem to think of their journey as part of their trip

"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly."  ~ Bertrand Russell~ Buying our French house was a dream come true for us and something we have talked and blogged about a lot since we started out with Just Humans Being. We stopped buying trivial stuff years ago and instead focused on what we really wanted...A tiny house in France and a decent energy efficient car to travel in.  Our plan finally materialised last year and it fills us with joy that we made this happen. We intend to "creep and go" with regards to furniture and any decorating, as most of you know - we rarely rush into anything! On our recent visit, we bought a second hand table and chairs from a wonderful resource centre - La Ressourcerie du Pont in Le Vigan. We had visited twice before on previous trips to the Cevennes, but never found what we wanted, but it felt very important for us to support the centre, as t