As international A travel slowly resumes, there are Love, Actuallystyle airport scenes taking place all over the world as people are reunited with their loved ones after more than two years apart. But for food writer Peta Mathias, it was more of a reunion of self.
Since selling her Auckland home and building a three-level house in the southern French town of Uzès, the 72-year-old has spent her years split between Europe and New Zealand, running her travel tour company from both.
Then came COVID and she was grounded, like all of us, for two and a half years. It was only in June that she was able to return to France for the summer.
"I didn't know how I would feel when I came back here," she muses via Zoom from the bright, colourful lounge of her Uzès home. "There were a lot of questions in my mind, like, 'Have I lost this life forever? Is it sustainable? Can I still do it physically? Am I strong enough?' And as soon as I got here, I knew that I couldn't give it up. I slid back into my life here as if I'd never been away. As if nothing had happened.
"I coped very well, but over the past two and a half years, I feel like I have been in a low-level depression because of all the shocks that I and everyone else have had to suffer. Now I feel normal. I don't have any of the aches and pains that I usually have, and I reckon that's because I'm happy again."
The last time Peta was on the cover of The Australian Women's Weekly, it was in February 2020 and the photo shoot had taken place in this charming French town. It was a story about travel, evolution and all the possibilities of the year ahead. Peta had named 2020 "a year of change" and said she was going to be possibly making big shifts in her life.
When asked now what her 2020 was supposed to be like, she bursts out laughing.
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