Our Grand Tour of Europe

By early 2003 I was planning our own trip to France—a week of walking in Alsace followed by a week in Provence. Although we’d been to France a couple of times before, our previous visits focused on Paris. This was our first trip to Provence, primarily selected because Charley and Kelly loved the video series so much. I didn’t really know much about Provence at all. Somehow I envisioned pastoral farmland… kind of a French version of the English Cotswolds.

We planned to spend the first week of June in Provence, at the conclusion of our Alsace walk. We also decided we’d rent a place—perhaps a small cottage in a village—and base in one location for our week. We could cook some of our own meals and experience some aspects of “real life” in another country. I began my internet research, learning quickly that Provence is a diverse region with many vacation rentals. I finally settled on a sweet little cottage… the Rose Cottage… in the small village of Saignon in an area of Provence called the Luberon. I learned that the Luberon is a range of small mountains about 50 miles north of the Mediterranean Sea.

Our major family hobby is the taking of great vacations, and that week in Provence was perhaps our very best. It was Kelly’s sixth trip to Europe, but for some reason (perhaps the familiarity due to the BBC show?) she developed an intense connection with Provence. We all loved the cottage, loved the village, loved the area, loved the food. We arrived by TGV train in Avignon on a sunny Saturday, picked up our rental car and drove east about 45 minutes. I found quickly that the Luberon was not a lush land of peaceful green fields but instead was a wild terrain of rugged natural beauty dominated by rocky limestone hills and canyons. The countryside was filled with farms cultivating olives, lavender, grapes, and cherries. In early June the lavender fields were just beginning to display a hint of that enchanting color. Old stone farmhouses dotted the landscape: some crumpling, some well lived-in, and others restored to pristine beauty (complete with swimming pool) by the influx of expatriates and well-to-do second-home owners.

We were especially enchanted by the old perched villages… hundreds of years old… their narrow streets lined with lopsided little cottages and shops with colorful shutters, unusual fountains, majestic old churches, and sidewalk cafes. We especially enjoyed the markets held on designated days in most of the towns and villages. In early June we found the markets geared partially for tourists but also very much for local shoppers. Fruits and vegetables, pottery, cheeses, olive oils, brightly-colored tablecloths, fish, lavender sachets, flowers, straw baskets, roasted chickens, even a pair of shoes—you could buy all this and more at the outdoor markets. During that first week in June 2003 we saw much of Provence—the beginnings of the French Alps to the east… the Mediterranean Sea to the south… the old Roman towns and ruins… the scenery that inspired artists like Van Gogh and Cezanne. We liked the laid-back rural environment, somewhat a step back in time… and certainly a very different culture from our lives in the USA. Yes, there were other tourists and shops selling postcards and mass-produced souvenirs, but we also uncovered many places where the tour buses simply didn’t go.

Something happened to all three of us during those seven days in Provence. I know I couldn’t get Provence out of my mind. That 2003 summer vacation ultimately led to our decision to step out of our “normal” lives and spend these fourteen months in Europe. When we began to plan Our Grand Tour, Charley and I had two major objectives. We wanted to travel extensively in Europe and visit lots of places. But we also wanted the experience of living for an extended time in another country—to settle in, be part of a community, experience daily life in another culture. I had lived in Australia with my family for almost four years when I was Kelly’s age—that was a key life experience for me. I wanted Kelly to have a similar opportunity. She had loved Provence so much and continued to talk about it often—we felt confident she would respond positively to leaving home for a year if it included a long stay in Provence. We decided that the centerpiece of our potential long trip to Europe would be a six-month stay in Provence, and the first step in our planning became the search for that special place to live.

Finding that Special Place

Although Provence would be spectacular in the summer (think of all that lavender), I knew it would be crowded and—most of all—extremely expensive at the height of tourist season. We couldn't afford to be there in summer. We needed to be there in the off-season and to find a rental that would give us a significant discount for a long-term arrangement. This timing would also potentially allow Kelly to attend a local school for a large part of the school year and give our family some stability in the middle of a long trip.

I began to look at rentals in Provence on the Internet, focusing on "rent-by-owner" websites. I poured through the websites and the photos of beautiful cottages and farmhouses in Provence. I looked at homes in villages, homes in towns, homes in the countryside. I sent off at least fifty e-mails one weekend, inquiring about a long-term rental for an American family with a ten-year-old daughter. Replies began to come back, several of which were responsive to the idea of a six-month rental. Some owners responded politely that they used their house during part of the off-season or that the house wasn't suitable for winter because it wasn’t heated. I was able to narrow our search down to about five houses, most of which were located in the Luberon, where we had vacationed a few months before. I contacted the owner of the cottage we had rented in Saignon. She had never done a long-term rental before, but was potentially open to renting her other property… a three-bedroom cottage on the main square of Saignon. I also corresponded back-and-forth with a very helpful Englishman who owned a house high in the village of Menerbes with a spectacular view. The house was decorated in a colorful and attractive manner and I could envision our family living there.

A woman in a large village northeast of Aix-en-Provence was very interested in renting to us. We exchanged several e-mails discussing the house, the village, the price, even school options for Kelly. I had mentioned in my first message that we were talking about a rental beginning in October 2004. Finally, she sent me an urgent e-mail. "Please let me know as soon as possible if you are going to want to move into the house in October. If so, I need to come over from England and pick up some clothes." I realized she thought we wanted a rental in October 2003-- the next month! I wrote her back to apologize and clarify the timing. "So much for that," she responded. "What a waste of time for all of us." I later looked at her website, which was referenced in her e-mail signature. It turned out that she was some sort of psychic. This wouldn’t have been the right place for us.

We liked the idea of living in a village, but we were also open to living in the countryside near a village. If we settled in a village, we decided we'd like to be tied to a larger village than Saignon. Plus, the price for the Saignon cottage was more than we wanted to pay. The Menerbes cottage and the village of Menerbes really appealed to us, but that cottage only had two bedrooms. We really wanted to have company during our long-stay in Provence and this would shift Kelly out to the living room couch every time someone came to visit.

My most extensive communication was with a woman named Cynthia, a professional photographer. She and her husband Ian owned a four-bedroom farmhouse called La Bastide Vieille near the village of Bonnieux. They lived part of the year in Provence and part of the year in Mexico. We had visited Bonnieux during our 2003 vacation and were attracted to it.. Bonnieux was about 20 minutes from Saignon… also perched on a hill, but larger than Saignon with more shops and amenities. There was a small weekly market on Friday, which we had visited on our last day in Provence. The farmhouse was in the countryside, about halfway between Bonnieux and the nearby village of Lacoste, where the ruins of the old castle of the Marquis de Sade tumbled down the hillside. The house looked ideal for our family and the interior and exterior photographs captured our imagination—so very different from our modern condominium home in Knoxville, Tennessee! Best of all, Cynthia and her husband Ian were really interested in a long-term rental... they wanted someone to be in their beautiful house during off-season. The rates for the house "in season" were very high—we could never afford to stay there in July or August. But Cynthia and Ian offered us a very special rate, with the possibility that Charley could do some small home improvement projects to further reduce our costs. All we had to do was send a $1000 deposit.

Until this point Charley and I had been flirting with the idea of taking a year off… traveling in Europe… living in Provence… it was almost a daydream or a hobby. I was having fun on the internet—looking at the neat little houses and corresponding with the owners. Now, as Cynthia and I exchanged long messages and began to talk of very practical things (firewood, utility costs, the local school… timing!) and we discussed sending off $1000, suddenly it all became very real. The Gillespie-Smiths were willing to rent their house to us for six-and-a-half months. But we weren’t just renting a vacation house—we were talking about changing our lives! We were talking about me quitting a good job and stepping out of a well-established career, putting Charley’s home renovation business on hold, taking Kelly out of school for sixth grade, renting our house to strangers, selling our cars, leaving family and friends, living off our hard-earned savings.

Could we do this? Would we do this??

Well, obviously we did. After eleven weeks traveling in England and Scotland (including an amazing 190 mile walk across England), we made our way to France at the end of August. We arrived at La Bastide Vieille on October 2nd, and this is now our home until mid-April. We’re now living in Provence.

Our Part of Provence

This is the beginning of our sixth week at La Bastide Vieille. We’ve enjoyed watching the arrival of autumn in Provence. On our first day here—October 2nd—it was in the mid 80’s. The first week I sunbathed several afternoons on a chaise lounge out by the pool— and actually wore my bathing suit for the first time on our trip. Yesterday it was 41 degrees when Charley went out to the boulangerie in the morning. We now make a fire in the living room almost every night.

Our house sits on four acres in the foothills of the Petit Luberon mountain range, the smaller of the two Luberon mountains with an altitude of about 2300 feet. The Grand Luberon is a few miles to the east with a peak of 3691feet at Mourre Nègre. If we walked straight back from our house for ten minutes, we’d be climbing up the Petit Luberon. Today it’s so clear I can see the individual trees along the crest. Here in this peaceful valley, we’re surrounded by grapevines, cherry trees, and olive trees. We somehow hadn’t noticed the extent of the grapevines when we were here last June… now we realize they are everywhere in this particular part of Provence. Five weeks ago when we arrived, the vendange (grape harvest) was underway… now the vines have turned beautiful shades of red, yellow and orange. The leaves on the cherry trees have also turned to autumn colors. Last week a beautiful field of tiny white flowers burst into bloom under the field of cherry trees we pass on the way up the road to our house. It looked almost like snow.

The olives on our ten or so olive trees are turning from green to black. We’ve decided to harvest the olives our trees, and we’ll take them to one of the local olive mills (called a moulin) to press into our own olive oil. The gardener Remy told Charley that we should pick the olives at the end of November. We’re using a surprisingly large quantity of olive oil in our cooking.

We also have about 15 almond trees on our property. We harvested almonds the first few weeks we were here—quite exciting for suburban girls like Kelly and me. We got quite serious about the almond business, even sending Charley up on a ladder to reach the higher branches. We picked at least a bushel of almonds. Charley has been shelling and drying them, and he’s developed a wonderful recipe for seasoned almonds.

Our friend Janice told us that this area is called “Terre Blanche” or “White Earth,” we think because of the white limestone rocks in the dirt. We live between the two perched villages of Bonnieux (1436 residents) and Lacoste (417 residents), and both villages are visible from different parts of our property. I love the sight of these old hill-top villages just a few miles away, especially at night when they’re both illuminated. Bonnieux is topped by a 12th century church, and Lacoste is topped by the ruins of an 11th century castle… once the home of the notorious Marquis de Sade. Although we’re part of the commune of Bonnieux, we live a bit closer to Lacoste. There are two American art schools in Lacoste and Pierre Cardin now owns the old castle, but there’s not much going on there this time of year. Lacoste has a boulangerie and a tabac/café, but the other cafés are now closed until spring. Bonnieux has two boulangeries, a tabac, an alimentation, a greengrocers, a butcher shop, a post office, and several cafés/restaurants that are open year-round. Bonnieux has a small market on Friday mornings. We like Bonnieux a lot. Kelly is especially proud of Bonnieux… we don’t dare suggest that we might find some aspect of another village more appealing than Bonnieux! It’s an eight-minute drive from our house to Bonnieux—we normally make the drive four times a day, four days a week, taking Kelly back and forth to school. She comes home for lunch most days during the hour-and-a-half lunch break.

On a clear day (like today) we can stand at the back of our house and look across our neighbor’s vineyards to a spectacular view to the north. Lacoste seems close enough to touch. The Vaucluse plateau rises straight ahead with glimpses of the villages of Goult, Gordes and Roussillon. The top of Mount Ventoux—twenty-five miles directly north—is very distinctive today. Many days it can’t be seen at all. At 6263 feet, this is the highest peak in Provence. We drove to the top last summer, shocked by the drop in temperature and the gusts of wind at the summit. The top of Mount Ventoux always appears covered with snow, but isn’t snow—not yet anyway. Above the treeline the mountain’s surface is covered with a white scree… small chunks of limestone… that give the impression of snow from afar.

We have made a friend in Bonnieux, a woman named Janice. Cynthia and Ian connected us with her, and she advised us on our visa problems. (We’ve decided to lay low and pursue this no further… which is apparently the course taken by many non-EU expatriates.) Janice is English, was educated in America, and married a Frenchman from this area—she’s been here for almost 20 years. She had us over for dinner the week before last, and we enjoyed meeting her two teenage daughters. We ran into Janice at the Friday market in Bonnieux, and joined her and her neighbor for coffee outside at the little café. The neighbor has lived here all her life. She sniffed the air and said the mistral was coming. The mistral! It’s a fierce wind that’s unique to Provence… something to do with our placement between the Alps and the Mediterranean. We’re excited—yet nervous—to experience it. Supposedly when it comes it will stay three, six or nine days. I don’t know what happened to the neighbor’s prediction—we’re still waiting for our first mistral.

La Bastide Vieille

“Vieille” means old and a “bastide” is a type of old Provencal farmhouse. Our house is made of stone with light blue shutters, built partially into a hillside with the major windows facing south toward the Petit Luberon. According to Cynthia and Ian, the oldest part of this house was built in the 17th century, probably as some sort of small shepherd’s dwelling. Ian’s architect identified fourteen different additions to the house. As a result, many rooms in this two-story house are on slightly different levels and there are interior steps here and there—dangerous in the pitch-black night until you are familiar with the layout! Ian has owned the house since the early 90’s. He hasn’t done any more exterior additions but he’s made major changes inside.

We overlapped here for a day with Cynthia and Ian so they could give us a thorough orientation to the house. She’s American and he’s British, and they definitely have a non-traditional international lifestyle. We like them a lot. The house is partially decorated with her photography—she was with National Geographic for several years. It was an interesting experience to spend the night with two people we’d really just met—though we had visited with them briefly on our strange day-trip to Provence to try to resolve our visas, and she and I had e-mailed back-and-forth for over a year. During our time together, they really tried to show us everything we needed to know about the house and the area. Charley knows all about the boiler, the fuse boxes, the water system, and the best route to Bonnieux. I can tell you where to get a haircut, have a great meal, and meet other English-speaking people. We had a wonderful dinner together and then breakfast the next morning. Finally, they hugged all three of us, handed us the keys, said “It’s your house now,” and headed off in their big mobile home (“camping car”) for a vacation in Corsica. Two weeks later they stopped back and had lunch with us on their way from Corsica to England—we were greeting old friends… or maybe even relatives! They’re headed now to Mexico and we’re staying in regular contact through e-mail.

La Bastide Vieille is even better than it looked on the internet—and quite a contrast to our modern home in Knoxville. There are six doors opening to the outside, but there really isn’t a traditional “front door.” The main entrance is from the sunny side terrace… through French doors into a big bright kitchen with a peaked cathedral ceiling and exposed stone walls. The kitchen is painted pale yellow and was supposedly modeled after Monet’s dining room at Giverny. The cabinets, wooden table and six chairs, and the big cupboard are all painted the same yellow as the walls. We love the pottery dishes, glasses and linens in bright Provencal blue and yellow. In this old house we have all the modern conveniences we need: convection oven, six-burner stove, dishwasher (yes!), and under-the-counter refrigerator. In the adjoining utility room, we also have an American-style big refrigerator/freezer… actually just like the one we have at home, complete with ice and water dispenser. The utility room also has a washing machine and a strange clothes dryer that doesn’t work well. We normally hang our clothes out on the clothesline, and we bought a drying rack to use inside. We’re trying to do major laundry (sheets and towels) when the weather is nice. There’s a little room with a toilet and sink off the utility room.

The kitchen opens into a big dining room with wooden beams and a rough old high ceiling—with good natural light from a window and a door to the outside. The dining room is furnished with wooden antiques-- a big wooden table and chairs, a big hutch, and a grandfather clock. There’s a fireplace that we haven’t used yet. We also haven’t eaten at the dining room table yet—we’re eating in the kitchen, even with company. Maybe we’ll eat in the dining room on Christmas Day when we’ll have a big group of friends with us. Right now the dining room table is Charley’s work table and Kelly’s home school table. Last week (when Charley’s daughter Angie and her friend visited), it became a games table for some heated games of Rummikub.

The dining room leads down a few steps to a cozy living room with foot-thick walls and a timbered ceiling. The walls are painted a bright mustard yellow and a big double window looks out to the back garden and the Petit Luberon. Two love seats and an easy chair face a big raised fireplace. There’s also a piano (actually a player piano) and a big bookcase. The piano was a big plus for us, since Charley loves to play. We’re working our way through all the books. Fortunately, I like Cynthia and Ian’s taste in books. Kelly has found an old series of children’s classics—the Swallows and Amazons series—which she’s really enjoying. We have satellite TV and get a couple of English news channels, including CNN. There’s a VCR, and Cynthia and Ian have left a supply of movies… they must like old movie musicals. We’re working our way through all the movies too—so far we’ve watched Oklahoma, the King and I, South Pacific, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Showboat. I expect we’ll watch about every movie and read about every book before the winter is over.

The second level of our house has three separate sections. A door opens off the south side of the dining room to a small staircase and a cozy attic bedroom with two twin beds. We may use this room once or twice when we have friends visit—meanwhile, we kind of forget this part of the house even exists. A wide tile staircase leads up from the other end of the dining room and splits in two directions. To the left is the “Poppy Room,” a beautifully-decorated bedroom with its own bath. We’re using this as our main guest room. Our family sleeps to the right in a separate wing of the house. Kelly has a sunny room under the eaves with two twin beds and its own bath—her room is called the “Iris Room”. Charley and I decided to use the smaller “Sunflower Room,” a bright yellow room with its own little terrace. We use a toilet room and shower room on the hallway. The hallway is wide and bright with an office area at one end. That’s where I work on our laptop… where we’ve set up our internet connection through the phone extension. The window in the big door at the end of the hallway looks to the north—across the vineyards to the village of Lacoste. I open the heavy shutter every morning to remind myself I’m living in Provence and see what the day will bring. How clear is Lacoste? Can I see Mount Ventoux?

There are a couple of other rooms we don’t even use… private areas for Cynthia and Ian’s stuff. One room under the hillside off the dining room used to be a stables of some sort and now houses Ian’s big “snooker table” and some of their personal items. We’re keeping our empty suitcases there. Another room is Ian’s cave, which Charley has seen—a long curved underground room with lots and lots of wine. Cynthia also has a small office off of the little attic bedroom.

The house has beautiful outdoor areas and landscaping…. three outdoor terraces, two pretty walled gardens… one of which has a swimming pool, pool house (with full bath), and barbeque grill. I especially like the little wooden bench that sits across the driveway between an olive tree and a big pine tree—a great place to have coffee or a glass of wine, gaze up at the Petit Luberon, and contemplate the wonders of life. Big rosemary bushes (bigger than I could have ever imagined), lavender and wild thyme are here and there around the terraces. We have vines of table grapes, a quince tree, and a productive tomato plant. Part of the yard is planted with grass and is irrigated to keep it green in the dry months of summer; an electronic fence circles the manicured areas to keep the wild boars (!) out! At this time of year the fence is turned off… I’m not sure where the boars (called “sangliers”) are now, but thankfully they’re not down here rooting around in our yard.

There’s one other wonderful feature of our home in Provence: a nice black cat named Chico, who belongs to Cynthia and Ian. We eagerly accepted the offer for him to be part of our family during our time here. Kelly is responsible for his care—she has a dog at home and loves dogs, but she’s enjoying having a cat. We now have a new tool to get her going in the morning—“Kelly, Chico’s crying for his breakfast!” She’s getting used to the more independent nature of cats. Chico has adapted quickly to a new family. He comes running when we drive up and spends much of the day circled up on the couch in the sunny living room. Ian and Kelly have a bet related to Chico—that we will one day forget and leave him in the house when the alarm system is set… and Chico will activate the alarm. It’s obviously happened to them. We did actually leave him inside one day, but he must not have moved from his spot on the couch. At least for now, Kelly’s winning the bet.

Our Grand Tour has taken on a very different rhythm since we arrived in Provence. We’re no longer moving from place to place every week or two… getting up most every morning off to sightsee and explore. We’re living here, with a daughter attending school, making some friends and trying to settle in. Charley and I both have our various projects, and I’m still enjoying cooking dinner most every night. There are days when we don’t’ go anywhere except to take Kelly back and forth to school. We have a list of “things to do and places to go” here in Provence, but we’re taking it much more slowly… just a few excursions a week. (Yesterday we hiked to the top of Mourre Nègre—the first major hike we’ve done since our Coast-to-Coast walk. We were sadly out of shape!) We’ve enjoyed having company—our friends Jeanne and Fred the first week we were here, and Charley’s daughter Angie and her roommate Kelly last week. Now we’re on our own for about a month.