Bonjour from the Lot in SW France!

[Dana]

Hello all,

My husband Michael and I are a couple of chewed up and spat out old travel writers who live in a pretty medieval village in the Lot and wrote many of the Cadogan guides to Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and the South of France: http://facarospauls.com/. We've also done a couple of excruciatingly detailed apps, one to Barcelona (closer to us than Paris) and the other Italian Menu Decoder, and have just last week released our first comedy ebook- the long awaited updated of The Travellers' Guide to Hell. And that's us!

Hi Pauline-Good to see you again and good luck with the forum!

 

[Pauline]

Hello Dana, I still use the wonderful Cadogan guides that you and Michael wrote - your Italy and France guides are THE BEST! I will get your Italian Menu Decoder app for my upcoming trip to Sicily and will look out for your ebook!

 

[Dana]

Thanks, Pauline! Have a lovely time in bella Sicilia—and let us know if you come across any word that we missed in the app. We're up to nearly 7000 words, but there's always more!

 

[Pauline]

Here is the Amazon.com link for the Kindle version of The Travellers' Guide to Hell.
Also available on Amazon.co.uk.

 

[Chris]

I just bought your Barcelona app!

 

[Dana]

Thanks, Chris—really hope you like it!

 

[Chris]

I'll "field test" it in October, when I'll be there for 9 days (my first time in Barcelona), and in the meantime, I'll use it for research. It looks like it's going to be very useful.

 

[Ann]

Welcome, Dana. Paul and I are big fans of yours and Michael's. I just recommended your guide to Emilia-Romagna to a friend this morning. Where in the Lot are you, if you don't mind sharing. We were just there and in the Aveyron in October.

 

[Roz]

Hi, Dana,

So nice to "see" you on this forum. I also have a husband named Michael, and we are also both huge fans of your travel books. We have quite a shelf full of them. I hope you'll put some of them in e-format as well.

I did buy your Italian Menu Decoder, and look forward to using it on our trip to Tuscany in a few months.

 

[Heidi]

This is great! I just bought your Italian Menu Decoder, Dana. Thank you!

 

[Dana]

Welcome, Dana. Paul and I are big fans of yours and Michael's. I just recommended your guide to Emilia-Romagna to a friend this morning. Where in the Lot are you, if you don't mind sharing. We were just there and in the Aveyron in October.

Hi Ann! Thanks for the kind words. We live in Puy l'Evêque west of Cahors, in the wine region—did you make it that far? I hope your friend can find one of our Emilia-Romagna guides in a second hand store. That's the book we were about to update when New Holland, the publisher who bought Cadogan, decided to stop updating them and just sell off the rest of the stock (the fiends!)

 

[jonathan]

Another member of the Dana & Michael fan club joining in! 'Tuscany, Umbria and the Marches' was our bible as we explored central Italy in the early noughties; my copy of 'South of France' dates back to before the Euro, but descriptions like that of Tarascon (do look it up, Francophiles reading this thread) never fail to set me grinning.

 

[Dana]

Hi, Dana,

So nice to "see" you on this forum. I also have a husband named Michael, and we are also both huge fans of your travel books. We have quite a shelf full of them. I hope you'll put some of them in e-format as well.

I did buy your Italian Menu Decoder, and look forward to using it on our trip to Tuscany in a few months.

Hi Roz, Yup, Michaels tend to pretty nice guys! Mine has just worked how to make ebooks for all the various platforms (what a pain in the neck!), so we hope to start updating and releasing the out-of-print titles (starting with Emilia-Romagna) this year, as soon as we can get the rights back—we're on the case. And thanks so much for buying the Italian menu decoder! As we wrote all our Italian guides (before there was such a thing as the internet) I used to jot down all the unusual names of dishes in the various regions and had about 75 pages worth, then with the internet, holy moly. I think we're approaching 7000 words now!

 

[Dana]

Another member of the Dana & Michael fan club joining in! 'Tuscany, Umbria and the Marches' was our bible as we explored central Italy in the early noughties; my copy of 'South of France' dates back to before the Euro, but descriptions like that of Tarascon (do look it up, Francophiles reading this thread) never fail to set me grinning.

Hi Jonathan, Ah shucks! Glad to know you enjoyed reading our bons mots as much as we did writing them. Quite often we'd be sitting there writing and just break into giggles!

 

[Dana]

This is great! I just bought your Italian Menu Decoder, Dana. Thank you!

Thanks, Heidi! Hope you like it—and again let us know if there's anything missing. The nice things about apps is they are soooo easy to update!

 

[Pauline]

Great news that you are going to get the rights back to your travel guides! Let me know when they are available and I will link to them from the main Slow Europe site.

 

[Roz]

Hi Roz, Yup, Michaels tend to pretty nice guys! Mine has just worked how to make ebooks for all the various platforms (what a pain in the neck!), so we hope to start updating and releasing the out-of-print titles (starting with Emilia-Romagna) this year, as soon as we can get the rights back—we're on the case.

Wonderful news!! Please keep us informed as they become available.

 

[Shannon]

Dana, I am another fan of your guidebooks and am thrilled you have joined these forums. Whenever I am going some place new, I check to see if you have a guide for it, and my Cadogan Spain is pretty beat up from constant use. Nobody does it like you and Michael do.

 

[Dana]

Wonderful news!! Please keep us informed as they become available.

Pauline and Roz, I will definitely keep everyone posted on the future ebooks.
In the meantime, we are trying to decide whether we should just concentrate on history, culture, food, wine, art and the places and maybe less (a lot lot less) on hotels and restaurants, as I think so many people find their own places to stay on the web and on forums like this (not to mention the very annoying habit hotels and especially restaurants have of closing or going bad as soon as a book goes into print!). Especially as we no longer have a team of updaters to send out and check things, and there are only two of us. If you have any thoughts, let me know!

 

[Dana]

Dana, I am another fan of your guidebooks and am thrilled you have joined these forums. Whenever I am going some place new, I check to see if you have a guide for it, and my Cadogan Spain is pretty beat up from constant use. Nobody does it like you and Michael do.

Ah shucks, thanks, Shannon— I'd send you a replacement Spain but am pretty sure we only have one copy left of the last edition!