The couple from Massachusetts waiting outside the Orangerie in the warm, green Tuileries Garden agreed it was a relief to be away from disasters. You could walk around Paris, said the woman, and almost think the world was fine. The restaurants had lots of business and the tiny sidewalk tables were full of coffee drinkers in the morning and wine drinkers the rest of the day. There were lines at the artisan gelato shop until 11 p.m. People even smoked cigarettes and sat in the sun like nothing bad would ever get them.

Except for the cigarettes, we joined in. That’s what happens on a vacation. You get to leave reality behind for a while.

And yet, there really is no full escape, as the French reminded us. A squat guy in a black T-shirt came up to us at the metro and asked if we were Americans. When we said yes, he said, “I’m worried about your fish.”

We had some sense of what was going on back home, getting an occasional glimpse of the news when we checked our email. Obama was getting clobbered by both sides. Tipper and Al separated. The worst was seeing the photo of that noble but doomed oil-soaked pelican on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.

Taking a news break was kind of like going to a film noir, leaving your seat to go get some Milk Duds and coming back to more death and disaster.

We did avoid TV except for joining the crowd in front of a giant screen full of tennis, set up in the square at the Hotel de Ville.

Then it was back to “pass the pate” and one more carafe of the vin rouge.

From the top of one castle or another throughout France you can see fairy tale panoramas of perfect little villages, soft winding rivers and fields of red poppies. They look like make-believe scenes you might set up around a train set.

The rich and powerful built their castles up high, said my husband, so they could throw rocks on the people coming after what they had. Castlenaud, a medieval fortress hugging the cliffs in the Dordogne River valley, is now a museum dedicated to the art of war in the middle ages. This is how people used to kill each other, with crossbows and cannon balls that blew huge holes into the enemy’s castle across the river. It was mean stuff but what those boys played with seem like slingshots compared to our modern war arts where we can take out whole villages by an airborne robot.

If we’d wanted reports on the latest body count in the current bloody conflicts there was a TV in the kitchen at our inn in the Dordogne where Madame Chantel in fiery red hair and orange robe assembled breakfast. But we were content to simply listen to the river running past her gardens. It’s called the Ceou which means “sky in the water” in Occitan, the old language of southern France.

One night we sat beside it with our innkeepers, who speak as little English as we do French, and discussed our oil spill. Jean Luc got out a U.S. map so we could show him the Gulf of Mexico and where the poisonous ribbon of oil was fouling the waters from Texas to Florida and Lord knows where else. He traced around Florida and pointed up the Atlantic coastline and we all shrugged helplessly.

At Dallas we got through customs, found our gate to take us to San Francisco and were greeted by the urgent face of Wolf Blitzer on a TV screen. Not quite ready for prime time, we turned the other way and went looking for a banana smoothie.