Before leaving on this trip, I was re-reading a book of travel stories simply titled “The Best Travel Writing 2011”. This contained a couple of dozen stories of about a dozen pages each, each focussed on a particular country. The stories were each very different from each other, sometimes describing travel through or a return to a place of great personal and emotional significance, sometimes describing a place of historical importance, or perhaps covering some aspect of food or culture. The one thing that none of the stories had was the blog structure that we use in Cycleblaze, in which trips are described carefully day by day and place to place. In fact in many cases one had to read almost the entire story to nail down just where and when it was talking about, and sometimes I had to read the bio of the author at the end, to try to further pin down the reason for writing the story.

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Sometimes people suggest that the Cycleblaze blogs that we or others write should be turned into a book. But really it’s hard to turn a step by step account into a really riveting tale.

Recently my brother sent me a one page travel story that had been written by our daughter Joni to her grandparents. They held on to it, for 15 years until they died, because that is just what grandparents do. I found the story striking, because it was in that non-blog format, and also because it concerned Toulouse, and the St. Sernin cathedral. Years after Joni had lived there, we made our own pilgrimage to the place, coming back to compare our take on the place with Joni's recollections.

Today it’s one year since Joni succumbed to the cancer that she had evaded for 20 years. On this day we think of the grace with which she passed that time. One usually would write “the cancer that she had battled”, but Joni did not so much battle as accept the many trials cancer threw at her, and she carried on to bring a lot of good into the world while she could. This little story is just a small bit of her legacy, and we are proud to transcribe it here, on this anniversary day.

14 February 1994

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

Received your letter and hope all is well. I’m glad you’re so enthused about France. –The Perigord is a little ways outside of Toulouse where I live and very beautiful. I’ve enclosed an interesting chapter about truffles, from a book I’m reading. I think that I too could write a book like A Year in Provence, only I’d call it a Year in Toulouse. Strange and hilarious experiences have become a part of daily life for me here. For example, a few weeks ago I went to buy a croissant in the bakery, beside the cathedral St. Sernin. This seemingly innocent errand sparked an animated conversation with the baker, in which I received spirited lecture on poverty, war, civil servants, human nature, and God, accompanied by pantomime and sound effects! I had received amongst my change a 5F piece which had a politician's face that I didn’t recognize, so I asked the baker who it was. (It turns out that it’s a politician who organized free milk for schoolchildren after WW II.) Then the baker started talking about the Algerian war, talking about her four brothers who all fought there, and about the glory of god. As I edged closer to the exit she saluted me and said “ I’ll see you at God’s gates with everyone else”. That’s what one should expect, I imagine, when one buys from the church baker!

Toulouse is a large city (4th in France). Some weekends I go cycling in the countryside to get some air. The stolid church spire is always the first sign of an approaching village. A few children might be playing street soccer or riding around the back of the church on their bikes. Morose groupings of old men in berets or checkered hats congregate daily on old stone benches to stare and click their tongues at strangers. Shrivelled corn husks of people shuffle or limp passively through hollow streets. It's funny to think of these silent, time dirtied and shuttered collections of buildings and dust as having been bustling centres of commerce, trade, sites for pilgrims, in other ages: the crossroads of a much smaller world. Very interesting.

All my love, Joni