Since getting back from career break, I’m glad that I’ve kept on exploring. We have had weekends away, long days out of walking, volunteering days and I’ve been on-call a couple of times.

This weekend has been a super weekend at home. It will be punctuated by a trip to South Yorkshire (my word!) later today; it has otherwise been a satisfying mix of cleaning and sorting stuff out and generally feeling a bit more sorted out.

This photo summarises life at the moment:

Last weekend was an overnight in lovley Helmsley – I’d definitely recommend staying at the Youth Hostel in Helmsley for the self-catering facilities and spotless bathrooms, and the Feathers Inn for an excellent menu of local game, some Masterchef chef-fy details as well as pub favourites including a Chicken Parmo (!!) – and then walking the Kilburn Kanter, a 25-mile walk run by the North Yorkshire group of the Long Distance Walking Association. It was the 30th Kilburn Kanter and is a walk we have done a few times. It includes combined climbs of 1,300 ft (going up Sutton Bank at the end of the walk – what a bastard), which also means a lot of descent. This year, we ran a lot of the descent and some of the tracks, knocking an hour off our usual time and finishing in 6 hours 47 minutes. I was really pleased with that and finding out that run/walking is certainly a possiblity for those sorts of distances.

It’s a gorgeous route, which, along with the challenge of the climb, is what keeps me coming back. The autumn colours are splendid this year:

The weekend before that was spent in Paris. Searching for the footsteps of Van Gogh again, J came with me back to Auvers sur Oise, where Van Gogh died. I was one of the first places I went while on career break but I didn’t have a chance to see everything. I also wanted to spend more time there – it is a gorgeous village and you can recognise the wheat fields and countryside so loved by Van Gogh, Pissarro and Daubigny.

The trip took in the Van Gogh House, as it is now known. The Auberge Ravoux was the inn where Van Gogh took cheap lodgings for the last 70 days of his life and his bedroom, where he died, is open to visitors.

It’s an odd thing to want to do – to stand in a room where a man died. There is very little to see. It’s a small room – an attic room with barely enough space for a bed and a couple of pieces of furniture. It was emptied after Van Gogh died and was never let out again. The room next door was occupied by another Dutch artist, and has had furniture of the period put back in to help you visualise what it was like – a single iron bedstead, a simple dresser with washbowl.

On entry, you can visit the courtyard at the back of the inn, which still runs as a restaurant, where there are information panels about Van Gogh’s life. You then enter the upstairs of the inn, watch a 10-minute video about life in Auvers Sur Oise during Van Gogh’s time, and then are able to enter the room. The room has an empty picture frame on the wall behind a perspex screen. The owners for Van Gogh’s room would love to fulfil one of his expressed dreams, to one day have an exhibition of his work in a little cafe. They are fundraising to have one Van Gogh work permanently owned by the village that inspired him so much. However, the asking price and the security are proving too much at the moment but it is a lovely dream.

We then visited the Musee Daubigny, which has a permanent collection of Daubigny’s work and those of his sons, in his gorgeous house, and often has excellent temporary exhibitions. The current exhibition is of Mathurin Méheut, a painter and artist from Brittany, who was a soldier and war artist during World War I. His work, a mixture of paintings, drawings and watercolours from the front as well as the towns in ruins where soldiers passed through, is excellent and it was very interesting to learn about the story of a French war artist, having learned about a few British war artists. If you have a chance to visit the museum where his work is kept in Brittany, I would highly recommend it. It is poignant to look through his work today, on Armistice Day, a day that he painted and wrote about, too. One of his paintings is of one of the earliest air fields, with fledgling fighter air craft – such a moment in time now captured in vivid watercolours. A postcard of it is at the bottom of the first photograph above.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in Auvers Sur Oise, visiting the church painted famously by Van Gogh and visiting again his grave. The fields around Auvers are now harvested and the trees turning autumn colours. It was a moving afternoon of experiences. Lovingly, on the cross roads on the main road, there is a road sign pointing to Zundert and the number of kilometres to reach it – the birthplace of Van Gogh. We also stopped off to change train back to Paris and had a potter down to the Seine, a very tranquil 20 minutes.

Sunday was spent in the Natural History Museum in Paris. It was excellent and, like its London counterpart, you could spend days in there. So many exhibitions and things to see – we spent nearly 3 hours in the temporary exhibition on meteorites alone. We made friends with a taxidermied giraffe, now called Gary. I learned more about sealife evolution. It was awesome.

Next week – a weekend away walking and then a trip back to the south of France, for, well, more Van Gogh. A toute a l’heure.