The next big event after the Tokyo Marathon will be my annual trip to Europe, and I was planning to start preparing for this trip soon, but it has been delayed due to the effects of the earthquake.
I’m very worried about the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, but even so, Tokyo is slowly coming back to life around this week.
Now let’s revive this one, too. We’ll be leaving in four weeks.
Last year we focused on the southern part of France, « Midi-Pyrenees », but this year we would like to visit beautiful villages in the north, « Normandy » and « Brittany » by car.
Now, the preparation we are doing from today is to check the location of the beautiful villages on the map. The villages belonging to the most beautiful villages in France are not shown on the wide area map because they are very small and one of the conditions is that they have less than 2,000 inhabitants.
The first thing I do is to record my location on google maps (save it to my maps) and then mark the location on a road map of the whole of France (which I bought locally over 5 years ago). It’s a good idea to use a paper map.
In addition to finding and marking places on the map, you will also make a separate list of places to visit. I also make a separate list of places to visit, with the location of each village on each page of the map. For example, this is how it looks like.
La Roche-Guyon p59 F1
Gerberoy p33 F1
Lyons-la-Forêt p33 D2
Le Bec-Hellouin p31 E4
Beuvron-en-Auge p30 A4
After you have done this, you can plan your travel itinerary. However, even if I say itinerary, I do not make a schedule so detailed. It’s about 3 days to go around this area. It is possible to take into account the time for traveling and getting lost in the area, but this time, I don’t decide where to stay except for the departure point and Paris, where I will return at the end, because I want to travel as flexibly as possible.
I think the main reason why I can go without making hotel reservations is that I’ve naturally gotten used to this style of travel, and since last year I’ve been able to travel locally using the « mobile internet. It has become a very convenient time.
Anyway, this work is very plain and simple work, so it is quite tiring. And it takes a lot of time.
So we are proceeding in a relaxed manner while drinking coffee and eating cake.
But today I was a little unfocused and didn’t get much done at all.
