When I was nineteen, a palm reader at a cocktail party in Palos Verdes Estates read my palm. She told me that even though I was helping the hostess serve hors d’oeuvres, the kitchen wasn’t really my bailiwick. She didn’t mention anything about travel and she didn’t see France in my future.

By many strange twists and turns in the path of life, I ended up spending more and more time in France, particularly in Paris and Normandy. The palm reader was right in guessing that I might find producing a four-course dinner for French guests to be a daunting task, but well worth the privilege of gaining an intimate view of day-to-day living in Paris and the Norman countryside.

Parislogue.com came about thanks to Bootsnall.com founders Sean Keener and Chris Heidrich who launched the site and invited me to contribute my comments about French living. The Bootsnall.com site for independent travelers caught my eye back in the late late nineties as the ideal site for sharing my travel stories with like-minded travelers.

Aside from travel stories about French life, I’ve also published a number of travel articles for U.S. newspapers including the L.A. Times and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. My collection of travel essays titled “The Fearful Traveler’s Companion” was published in December 2005 by iUniverse.com A number of hair-raising encounters interspersed with unusual food thrills included in this first collection are just a sampling of future stories to be told. My travels have taken me from Appalachicola, Florida to Yap in the Caroline Islands, from Timbuktu, in Mali, to Phaplu in Nepal.

Boots’nall members are often requested to send in a photo or the name of their first pair of hiking boots. My first pair of hiking boots I borrowed from my dad for a trip to Aspen, Colorado. I was sixteen years old. Aspen is where I first drank a ‘smoothie’ and ate tempura veggies. My first introduction to snails was in a French restaurant in Telluride, Colorado. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to be in France to enjoy great French cuisine (but it’s well worth the trip, at least once in your lifetime).

Travel and food, for me, have always been an inseparable part of the same great adventure.