Welcome to The Introduction to our blog about our traveling lifestyle

     We have re-started our traveling lifestyle. From 1995 to 2014, we traveled 365/24/7 without a home, with no jobs, no cares and had a blast. That is what this Traveling Love Affair blog has always been about since we started it in 2006.

     We are in Morocco spending three months from September 2026 to December on a roadtrip in our Kia car. We have been traveling outside the USA continuously since June 2025, when we escaped with one-way tickets for France. We drove our newly purchased Kia car to Italy in July, where we spent the summer and then three months of the 2025-2026 winter in the ski destination of Monte Pana, Val Gardena, Italy.

    At the end of May 2026, we began a two-month French Road Trip north from Lyon to Normandy and Brittany. During this period, we had originally planned to eat mangos in April and May 2026 in Thailand and Philippines. Instead Dimitri had a hip replacement in Lyon in April and we stayed in Lyon for almost two months. He was thrilled that the awful hip, groin and knee pain was gone, although his recovery time, at 84, was too slow and unpleasant for him.

    After Normandy and Brittany we headed to Andorra in the Pyrenees for August. The heat domes that plagued France during the summer of 2026 did not cover Andorra. We took a ferry from Barcelona to Tangier at the end of August.

    You can keep track of us by scrolling down to the bottom of (this) home page to the end of the Table of Contents on the right. That’s where you find our latest post. 

     We've come a long way since we started traveling on a budget in 1995--both in travel expenses and in our ages! For twenty years we meandered the globe on a frugally chic budget. Now our budget seems to be more chic than frugal.

     At 84 and 79 there will be challenges. It's the unknown unknowns (such as Dimitri's need of a new hip) that we can't prepare for that worry us . But we think that it will be worth it! More on that as our renewed traveling lifestyle unfolds.

Us at the Sassolungo rock - up close and personal, in the Italian Dolomiti where we spent the summer of 2025 and spent the winter of 2026 (not skiing much)

Our traveling lifestyle started in 1993 when Audre got a contract for a World Bank project in Indonesia - that was the beginning of our Odyssey or worldwide traveling or vagabond globetrotting... call it what you will (Dimitri likes "global meandering" the best). A year and a half later, Dimitri planned a 9-month trip from Jakarta to Istanbul. It was supposed to be just an interlude between contracts. However, six months into that trip, while meditating on top of Mount Sinai, Audre saw the light! (A couple of weeks earlier, Dimitri had calculated that we could most probably live on just the appreciation on our mutual funds (without our touching our capital) and had proposed retirement to Audre's initial shock and dismay.) But on Mount Sinai, Audre got the message from above that it is perfectly okay to retire and go traveling throughout the world at 49 (Audre) and 54 (Dimitri). We retired in 1995 and global meandered from 1995 (somehow surviving the financial meltdowns) until 2014 when we settled down in Vail, CO and bought a condo. See our tab above "About our traveling lifestyle" to read more about how we do/did what we do/did.

This blog site was started in 2006 during our 2½ years of South American Explorations (to begin reading at the beginning of our blogging in Santiago click here) and continue by clicking on Older Post at the end of each one. 

Consequently, the travelogues about our first 9-month trip from Jakarta to Istanbul, our nine months in Turkey, our six years in the rest of Europe, our three months in India, our nine months in Singapore, our three months in Phuket, our one year in Australia (although you can click here to see the summary of our 26,000 km Australia Road Trip in 2004-05), our one year in New Zealand and our three months in Tahiti, will be posted when Audre writes them. Which, in 2026, looks like it will be never.

On the right margin is a Table of Contents that lists each place we have lived since 1995. The descriptions of our travels begin with our posts in South America in 2006 (when we started this blog). Before that, you will notice most are still "to come." To start reading at the beginning of our travelogues, click here and click on Older Post at the end of each post.

If you are epicureans of food, like we are, then have a look at the list of "Restaurants Reviewed by ALEDM Organized by Country and City" in the banner at the top if this page. If you click on a city, you will be linked to the blog posting of our restaurant reviews for that city. It's been so long since we've been to some of those places, we fear that the restaurants we reviewed may no longer be in business (send us an e-mail about your experiences)!

And, if you want to do a search for a specific place, topic, or for a person, use the Search Blog feature that is a box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen (from here on your laptop click "Control - Home" on your keyboard to get to the top of your screen).

While we were in Beijing in the fall of 2010, the China Daily (the largest newspaper in English in China) published an article about our Global Meandering Lifestyle. Our picture is on the front page of the newspaper in the upper right-hand corner and click here for the article itself.

2025 Our ordeal getting to Tignes, France (subtitled from living at the Four Seasons Vail to Sleeping in our Car)

48 hours after leaving Denver, on Sunday, February 2 at 7:30 am, we arrived at Les Suites du Montana in Tignes where we will spend our first week. We are now fully installed in the hotel. On Sunday morning, we ate breakfast at the hotel that made up for missing lunch and dinner on our arrival Saturday. We showered and got our (free lift tickets—season pass—because we are so old). We felt kind of human but went to sleep right after dinner last night and slept 10 hours.

      Our debut en France certainly will be memorable. This is a picture of the rock fall that closed the road to Tignes:

We started out from Lyon for a 3-hour drive at about 1pm. At about midnight we got off the highway at a gas station because we were out of water. The road was actually closed from the time of the rockfall at around 10am but we (all the cars) inched along somehow. At midnight we and all of the cars were at a standstill (and had been for hours at that point).  Around the gas station all of the side roads were also jammed with cars—they were trying to get back on the highway. That’s when we decided to take roads in the opposite direction from the rock fall to find a hotel to stay the night. At about 1 am we gave up because all of the hotels étaient complets and decided to sleep in our rental  Citroën SUV. We parked in a quiet hotel parking lot and locked the doors. We were so tired from the (very good Air France Business class) flight that even  Audre (the bad sleeper of the two of us) slept with the help of Tylenol PM. We woke at about 6 am and saw that the highway to Tignes was empty. We got on and were able to make the last 1 ½ hours to Tignes with only one delay (when the road narrowed to 1 lane). The drive on the curvy mountain road was in the dark (dawn was at 7 am). Luckily, we had a car in front of us to follow.

A map of the spots we visited

Click here for the photo album. 

(You might need to open a Google account to see our photos. Click on the "i" in the top ribbon and look at the  description at the bottom of the list.)