After ten hard-charging, pile-driving, train-feng-shui-ignoring days on the road in Italy and Provence, your Extreme Telecommuters were a well-oiled, performance-tuned, fire-snorting beast of a sightseeing machine. We could knock out a UNESCO site in the morning, blaze through a Plux Beaux Village in the afternoon, and complete a week’s worth of grocery shopping in the 90 seconds before the local Carrefour grocery store closed for the evening, leaving a trail of stunned clerks drooling in slack-jawed amazement in our wake.
With that level of performance at our beck and call, it was a bit of a shame that the whole experience had to be put out to pasture for a week, temporarily mothballed and otherwise back-burnered while the kids went back to “school” and I did my “job.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who will remark on this, but there’s an almost eerie resonance here with the career arc of one Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Yes, that Michael Jordan. Ah – so you see it, too. 
Yep, it’s almost exactly like that time His Airness abruptly retired from basketball in order to play baseball, doing it when he was at the absolute apex of his career, coming off his third consecutive championship, and still able to dominate legions of would-be contenders effortlessly. As you can see in the picture, there are some strong parallels between Air Jordan in a baseball uniform and, say, Air Calvin & Rosalie taking the kids to the library in Grenoble instead of taking them competitive bodysurfing in Cannes. Fish out of water, all of them.