Update about Our House in Provence Blog

Hello faithful readers!

I have not entered the witness protection program, become incapacitated nor am I dead if you have been wondering why I have not posted anything new on the blog for a while.

So here's the story. A few weeks ago, I turned on my computer to look at pictures to choose what I was going to write for my next post. I had new restaurants, villages and wineries to choose from.

I clicked on the picture file and instead of seeing lots of picture, all I saw were black images. As you can imagine, I had a sick feeling in my stomach. I bravely clicked on one of the pictures to see if an image would appear behind that black mask.

What opened was a message telling me that I needed to follow the instructions if I wanted to get my pictures back. The instructions were essentially I had to send them $2,000 in bit coins. I had been hacked and my pictures were being held hostage.

After speaking with our IT consultants at work, I decided the only thing I could do was have them clean my hard drive which meant the pictures I had not saved to an auxiliary drive were forever lost. So I won't be doing too much blogging until we get to France in June.

I am really down about the photos I have lost but it was really my own fault since I wasn't backing them up to a secure environment like I should have been. It is hard to replicate the good scenes which occur spontaneously when you are with family and friends.

I have been blessed the last few weeks to hear from several readers with questions about Provence or nice feedback about the enjoyment and travel help they get from reading the blog. So I can't let you down, I will be back very soon.

Until then, à bientôt mes amis.