Our Grand Tour of Europe

Sometimes I longed for the possibility of a vacation at home… the opportunity to spend more than a weekend in my own home: puttering in the garden, putting together a photo album, cleaning out the attic, reading a page-turner at our neighborhood pool, renting a bunch of movies and having a personal movie marathon… or just doing nothing. But over the years I watched various colleagues attempt to take a few days off at home. It was too easy for them to be contacted, come back into the office, or cancel those home-based plans. I was always too busy to take a day off to just stay home. Instead I hoarded my fifteen days of vacation a year for something much more special.

I did once have another extended time away from work…. twelve years ago this summer… and it was called maternity leave. I was determined to show that motherhood wouldn’t slow me down and to maintain my involvement in managing my department. I worked almost a full day the day my doctor sent me to the hospital to have Kelly. I spent two days in the hospital while they tried to induce labor. I remember working the phone from my bed, actually extending a couple of job offers. In those days before widespread e-mail use, I had the company e-mail set up on my home computer so I could coordinate with my office once I was home from the hospital with my new baby. Staff members brought mail to my house on a regular basis. My official disability leave was eight weeks, but by the third week I was going into the office several hours a week, sometimes even taking Kelly in her baby carrier. She slept in a corner of the office or enjoyed the attention of my coworkers while I held meetings. Somehow I thought I’d have enormous amounts of free time at home while Kelly slept blissfully through the day, but the demands of caring for a new baby were much more than I had ever expected. The time slipped by all too quickly. My maternity leave wasn’t exactly a long vacation.

In my previous life, taking vacation was always accompanied by a certain amount of stress. By the time the vacation actually arrived, I truly needed a vacation—and the first several days away I simply decompressed. I worked frantically in the few weeks before a trip, finishing up projects, leaving detailed instructions, praying there wouldn’t be some crisis while I was gone. My boss was actually very supportive of vacations. He knew we all needed time to re-charge and time with our families, and he shared my own attraction to Europe. He also liked his own vacations, but except for unusual trips to remote exotic places, he usually stayed very much involved when he was gone. Sometimes—thanks to voice mail, e-mails and conference calls—even though he was in Europe or Colorado, we felt he was still there among us. When one of my vacations was approaching, though, it always seemed like deadlines multiplied… my departure date creating a new sense of urgency. “You can get this done before you leave, can’t you?” my boss would ask. “Let’s meet on this before Kathy goes on vacation,” he’d tell the others.

Our friend Kevin who has a B&B here in Provence told me an interesting fact about the e-mails he receives from potential guests from the United States. Most of these e-mails seem to be sent between the hours of 9:00 am and 5:00 pm in America. As a Human Resources person, I was horrified. People are planning their trips while they’re supposed to be working!?! Not me-- I did my travel research and planning on the computer at night and weekends, sometimes working on the internet until well after midnight.

The night before we left on vacation was usually a very late night at the office for me. I would rush home to wash clothes, pay bills and start my packing. Charley and Kelly were always packed days in advance, and I was jealous of their leisurely final evening at home… especially as I pulled my clothes from the dryer at 11:15 pm.

The day of the trip I would wake up early before the alarm, my mind racing with things that needed to be done before we left. I remember once going into the office at 5:00 am before an afternoon flight to England, trying desperately to finish up my lengthy to-do list and praying that nothing unexpected would come up during the morning. That last day at work was always horribly frantic. Finally I would run to my car and drive across town to our home, getting in that last 20 minutes of work on my cell phone while navigating the interstate. Kelly and Charley would be waiting anxiously with our luggage. All I needed was five minutes to change clothes and use the bathroom, and we were off to the airport. Whew!!

When we returned home after a trip, it was even worse—hundreds of e-mails, a voice-mail box that was maxed-out, stacks of paper mail, a calendar full of meetings… while at home I dealt with two weeks of dirty clothes along with more e-mails and paper mail. I could feel my heart rate start to accelerate as I began to work through my voice mails. “Your voice mailbox is full,” that irritating voice would say. I wouldn’t be able to reply to any messages until I could delete some messages, making my task even more complicated. Although I did enjoy my work, I dreaded the first day back after a vacation.

When Charley and I were first married, I called into the office once or twice when we were on vacation. But over the past several years, the ease of electronic communications made it increasingly difficult to truly take a vacation from work, especially when we vacationed in America. For several years when Kelly was younger, we spent a week in late May on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a truly beautiful and relaxing spot. We always drove to the beach, and I’d spend the first few hours of the drive on the cell phone… working the voice mail, handling urgent details and issues. One year over Fourth of July we rented an apartment for a week on Kiawah Island on the South Carolina shore. I remember most of my mornings that week at Kiawah—waking up at my normal time of 5:21 am while Charley and Kelly slept soundly, dialing into my company’s computer network to check my e-mail and dash off some messages. A few days later on that same trip, I sent Charley and Kelly down to the beach while I participated in a three-hour meeting by telephone. Even in the hustle-bustle of a DisneyWorld vacation, I checked my e-mail early each morning and again before bedtime. When we vacationed in America, work was never too far away. It was part of our culture where I worked, but it was also part of me… the way I worked, the way I was.

It was much more difficult to stay in contact when we vacationed in Europe. First there was the awkward time difference… then the high costs of long distance, the strange phones that wouldn’t support the touch-tone required for voice mail, the small hotels where we didn’t even have a phone in our room. Perhaps one reason the walking vacations appealed to me was that I was really able—finally—to truly be on vacation. I was not just in another country—I was in the middle of nowhere… truly out of contact

But even when traveling to Europe, communication became much easier thanks to cell phone technology. On our first walking trip to England, my boss and I talked about how I could stay in touch. He suggested I buy a cheap cell phone in England so I could check my voice mail daily. I could then bring the phone back to the office for the use of any future company travelers to England. Charley and I spent a few hours near our hotel in Covent Garden shopping for an inexpensive cell phone. After a weekend in London, we traveled to the Cotswolds where we would begin a 50-mile walking trip the next morning. The cell phone worked just fine. The first day of our walk it poured down rain. That evening I took my new cell phone out of its plastic bag in my backpack. The phone didn’t work. Somehow water had seeped in through my pack, and the phone was useless. I dashed off a fax to the office and didn’t check voice mail for the next seven days. I have to confess I wasn’t too terribly disappointed, and fortunately, I was able to return the “defective” cell phone and get my money back.

One of my former co-workers and his family visited us in Provence over Christmas. He ended up spending a couple of hours a day working on the computer, checking his e-mail and working on various projects. We spent a rainy Christmas afternoon here at our farmhouse—watching television, reading new Christmas books, playing games, cooking and eating. Meanwhile, my friend was upstairs on the computer, preparing a major presentation for his first day back at the office. It was a strange sensation to watch him taking a vacation that in some ways wasn’t completely a vacation… I was watching myself in action less than a year before. Meanwhile in my new life I bustled around in the kitchen, a stress-free Suzette Homemaker cooking simply for the fun of it.

A Variety of Reactions

We publicly announced our plans to pursue this long vacation last February. We had a variety of reactions to our decision. Most people were very positive. “What a wonderful experience for your daughter.” “How great that you’re able to do this.” Some were openly envious: “I’d love to do quit my job and go to Europe. If only I had the nerve….” “If only I was younger… “

My boss of ten years was supportive, but also thought I was living in a fantasy world. He wanted to be sure I was making the right decision. “You’re respected here,” he counseled me, the day after I’d told him I was leaving the company to go to Europe. He worried that I was caught up in dreams of buying bread in a boulangerie and walking down street with a baguette under my arm.

My mother was also skeptical. How could I give up my career and the job I seemed to love so much? I told her about the many positive comments we received. “The people who don’t say anything think you’re crazy,” she said.

Charley’s older brother is in his mid-70’s, lives in a small town in upper East Tennessee and probably hasn’t traveled outside the state in 40 years. “If you want to walk,” he told Charley a few years ago, before we left on a 50-mile walk in England, “why don’t you just walk in the Smokies and look at the wild azaleas?” Recently he wrote Charley a letter after reading about some of our hikes in Provence. “Before you do something else as foolish as the hike you described,” he wrote,” take a minute to think. If you or Kathy had fallen or worse, what about Kelly?”

When we tell people here that we’re spending 14 months in Europe, most are quite interested. Perhaps they think we’ve inherited millions or made a small fortune in some business deal. The truth is that we came into a bit of unexpected money, but certainly not a fortune. This isn’t early retirement or a situation we can continue long-term.

The British are very familiar with the concept of a “gap year”—the year between high school and college which many British young people use to travel and pursue various types of adventures before they gear up for the demands of adulthood. I sometimes describe our year off as a “mid-life gap year.”

“We’ve decided to retire for a year while we’re still healthy,” Charley sometimes tells curious people. “Then we’re going to go home and work until we die.” (I’ve told my husband that may be fine for him. I plan to go home and work, but I definitely don’t plan to work until I die!)

We’re now nine months into Our Grand Tour of Europe. Nine months of vacation. Nine months experiencing the history, culture and cuisine of Great Britain and France. Nine months soaking up spectacular scenery and hiking in the countryside. Nine months visiting famous cities, bustling towns, and small villages. Nine months of leisurely hours in pubs and cafes, drinking beer and sipping wine, eating steak-and-ale pie and beef daube. Nine months looking at churches, touring castles, visiting museums, snapping photos, sending postcards. Nine months of eight hours sleep each night. Nine months without a cell phone. Nine months of extended quality time together as a family. Nine months of living a life very different from that we normally live.

And we still have five months to go…

Living on Vacation

Our six-and-a-half months in Provence changed the rhythm of our vacation. The first three months of our vacation, we were travelers. Although we stayed in houses or apartments, shopped in the local supermarkets, and cooked most of our own meals, we changed location every week or two and were very focused on sightseeing. We met some wonderful people, but these relationships only lasted a couple of days. We were never anywhere long enough to establish real friendships. We traveled slowly, but we were still tourists.

In Provence we haven’t had jobs, but we’re living here for an extended period of time. Kelly’s going to school, we’re taking French lessons, we’re caring for a house, we’ve got a dog and cat, we’ve made friends, we’ve had guests, we’ve settled in. Provence has very much become our home.

We know our lives here are different than those of people who live here all the time. We have an enormous amount of flexibility and free time…. more than I’ve had since I was 14 years old, my last real summer of childhood. (The next summer I got my first job.) I do pay attention to our finances because we’re living off savings and investments, but we’re sticking pretty close to our original financial plan and so we’re not worried right now about making a living. And although we have a house here, we don’t have the responsibilities of home ownership. It was fun to pick almonds, but we haven’t had to deal with pruning the olive trees or preparing the vineyard for the next year. We’ve chatted with the gardener Remy and watched him do his work, but we haven’t had to supervise him. We’ve enjoyed improving our French, but we never felt the pressure of knowing we had to learn the language in order to earn a living. In contrast, our friends who live here permanently don’t feel the same sense of urgency we do to see and experience as much as possible in a short period of time. We make it a priority to visit other towns and villages and to hike several times a week, and we’ve probably seen more of the Luberon in six months than many residents will see in six years or maybe even sixteen years. Charley commented the other day that we know the Luberon more intimately than Knox County, Tennessee… where we’ve both lived for more than twenty years.

When we announced our plans for the trip, my mother was quite concerned about our winter in Provence. She knew how important my career was to me, how busy and full my life was.

“What will you and Charley do all winter long in that farmhouse in Provence?” she asked. “You’re so used to having a career…. won’t you be bored?”

For Christmas my parents sent a big box of very thoughtful gifts, many designed to give all three of us something to do during our long, lonely winter in our Provençal farmhouse. Charley and I both got paperback books. My mother sent Charley several books of sheet music, since our house has a piano and he would have time to play. I got a pasta cookbook and a Van Gogh paint-by-number set. Kelly got some craft activities, including a fashion design set. We got a couple of games we could play as a family. My mom was looking out for us.

The reality is that our lives are really very full… just very different from our lives at home. Last week I commented to Charley that we’re really very busy. I haven’t been bored one minute. I’ve got so many things going on without a job, I wonder how I ever had time to have a job… especially a job that occupied sometimes 60 hours a week. And—sorry, Mom—I haven’t yet had time to work on my little Van Gogh paintings.

So, what in the world are Charley and I doing in this farmhouse in Provence?

We’re getting plenty of sleep. In my previous life I got less than six hours of sleep a night, even on weekends. The alarm went off for me every morning at 5:21 am, and I never got to sleep before 11:30 pm, though I sometimes took a nap in front the television set. Now I get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more. I feel rested and relaxed, for the first time since… maybe high school??

We’re getting regular exercise, mainly through our walking and hiking. The last several weeks Charley and I have averaged at least 15 miles a week, much of it in hilly terrain. Despite our couple of long-distance walks before this trip, I haven’t had regular exercise since before I was married almost 13 years ago. I had become very overweight—and worse, horribly out of shape. Now we are exercising for pure pleasure… different somehow than taking an aerobics class or going to a gym. Before we leave in four weeks, we want to complete fifteen hikes in the Luberon from a book of hikes I gave Charley for Christmas. All of these hikes are in an area less than 40 minutes from our house. We have five hikes left to go, some of which will include Kelly on her days off of school. The hikes give us an opportunity to experience the hidden Luberon that most tourists never see. I feel better physically than I have in many, many years.

And we’re doing some “normal” sightseeing, usually with Kelly on the days she doesn’t have school. When we first arrived, we made a list of farther-away places we wanted to visit, and we’ve steadily worked through our list: Barcelonnette, Forcalquier, Sisteron, Uzès, Vaison-la-Romaine, the Gorges de la Nesque, Arles, St. Remy, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Lourmarin, Ansouis, the Camargue. We’ve been to some of these places several times. With less than four weeks to go, we still have several destinations that haven’t been checked off. We find ourselves torn in how to use our time before we leave. Do we spend a Saturday at the Apt market we love so much—or do we make a day trip to Cassis instead? Do we do the long hike at Font Jouvale—or do we head back to Avignon to visit the Palais des Papes? Do we visit the village of Venasque—or go to the boulangerie museum in Bonnieux and the corkscrew museum in Ménerbes? How, we wonder, did our six months here go by so quickly?

We’ve gone on several overnight trips while we’ve been based in Provence—what Charley calls “vacations from our vacation.” Four days in Paris for New Year’s with the Rohdes, three days of skiing in the French Alps, four days in Barcelona, a weekend near Nice on the Côte d’Azur. We especially loved Barcelona. It’s been fun to see some other places and even to sleep in other beds for a few days, but we always have the feeling of “coming home” when we arrive back in the Luberon, spot Bonnieux and Lacoste up on their hills, and head down the dusty dirt road to La Bastide Vieille.

Thank goodness for exercise, because “food” is one of my favorite pastimes here in Provence. We eat out about three times a week, usually lunch at one of our favorite places. From time to time we also sample a new place, but we really enjoy being a “regular” and the interaction with restaurant owners and servers who know us. The style of dining here suits me well… the three-course lunch, extended over an hour and a half or so, never rushed, a carafe of the house wine, the beautiful meal presentation.

Our life here also gives me time to pursue one of my other interests—cooking. I enjoy planning meals, shopping for food, and the actual cooking. (I don’t enjoy the clean up, but thankfully Charley normally handles that!) The last ten years Charley had the responsibility for fixing dinner during the workweek. He planned the dinners, shopped and cooked, and dinner was ready soon after I arrived home, usually around 7:30 pm. On the weekends we normally ate out a couple of times. I loved cooking, but probably only cooked two or three times a month. It was a huge effort to have anyone over for dinner (the shopping, the housecleaning, the cooking), so even though we liked to entertain, we didn’t do it much. I’m not sure I was in the grocery store ten times in the year before we left home.

We have a small library of cookbooks, and the internet has been a great resource for other recipes. I’ve developed a small repertoire of French meals, along with some American favorites. Dinnertime has become a special time for our family. We set a pretty table with cloth napkins, light candles, and sit down together every night for a home-cooked meal and conversation. At home in America we had slid into a terrible habit of watching television (Seinfeld and Home Improvement re-runs) while we rushed through dinner at our eating bar. I often did my normal multi-tasking, leafing through the day’s mail while I ate and watched TV. We might as well have used paper plates. When I had a dinner meeting, Charley and Kelly ate all-too-often from Taco Bell and Burger King. We have promised ourselves that we will change the way we handle our family dinner hour when we get home.

Here in Provence, shopping for food is fun—an experience, not a chore. Charley and I enjoy our weekly trip together to the big Leclerc supermarché. I still delight in the different mix of foods and the unique French food products. Of course, we all love the local markets and visit markets once or twice a week. As spring approaches, it’s interesting to watch the big Saturday market in Apt grow in size, and we enjoy buying different fruits and vegetables as they come into season. The produce stands now sell large, luscious strawberries. Asparagus is available, and we’re starting to see some melons. I bought some enormous and very ripe tomatoes this past week. The Saturday morning market in Apt normally takes up much of our typical Saturday—a full morning at the market followed by lunch at our regular café.

Now that spring has arrived, the smaller village markets are also starting to expand. The Friday morning market in our village of Bonnieux had 20 sellers this past week…. up from six sellers in cold December. We’re getting to know the regular sellers and see them at various markets on different days of the week—the pizza truck people, the cheese man, the vegetable couple, the old farmer selling lavender essence out of the back of his truck, the couple from Oppède with fabric items, the goat cheese woman from Saignon. We can buy good produce at Leclerc, but I much prefer the leisurely shopping at the open-air market and the interaction with the sellers.

We’re reading more now and watching less television—another positive pattern to continue when we get home. I’ve averaged a couple of books a week since we’ve been in Provence and I devour the magazines that my parents mail or friends bring from home. Charley and Kelly are big, big readers too. Our only problem here has been ensuring a good supply of English-language books. We’ve built a small library that will need to be disposed of when we leave. Kelly and I are determined to ship some of our favorite books home. Our house has satellite television, so we get a couple of English-speaking BBC channels and have enjoyed several of the programs. Kelly and I recently started watching the English version of “The Apprentice.” At home we watched way too many reality shows, but here we watch just this one. Our favorite BBC program is a fast-paced cooking show called “Ready, Steady, Cook.” We gather in the living room every evening at 5:30 pm to watch this show, then head into the kitchen to fix our own dinner… inspired by what we’ve just seen. I wish I could prepare wonderful gourmet meals like they do—and in 20 minutes like they do too.

Our life is not all recreation—we are doing several productive things! In our life at home, Charley has a small home renovation business. Here in Provence he’s done several “bricolage” (home improvement) projects for the owners of our house, which offset some of our rental costs. He also helped our friend Kevin lay a hardwood floor on the third floor of his house, a barter arrangement that enabled us to have regular French lessons with Kevin’s wife Elisabeth, an excellent language teacher. Charley’s also been working on a major writing project, one he has wanted to pursue for years.

A Type-A personality like me doesn’t change overnight, and so I have my projects too. I watch our investments and manage our finances—all remarkably easy thanks to the internet. I have my own writing project—a detailed journal and an internet blog that perhaps will develop into a book about our trip. I manage our large library of digital photographs—over 5000 since we began the trip. I carry on an extensive electronic correspondence with friends, family and even total strangers. I post regularly on a travel website, sharing our experiences and helping other travelers. I provide occasional support to my old company, answering e-mail questions and assisting the former co-worker who replaced me. And I’m still working hard to finalize arrangements for the last four months of our trip.

We have developed a comfortable routine we will miss when we begin traveling again in mid-April. Charley takes Kelly to school four days a week at 8:40 am. She now stays at school for lunch one or two days a week, and on those days Charley and I usually hike. One day a week we try to walk to the village and have lunch with Kelly at Le Terrail. She especially enjoys coming home for lunch a few days a week—she has an hour and a half break, so even with the traveling back and forth, she has a good hour at home. Although this means Charley and I can’t go too far away on those days, it’s a precious opportunity we’ll likely never have again—having our child home for lunch in the middle of a school day.

This afternoon I baked American-style chocolate chip cookies to take to an event at Kelly’s school this evening. When Charley brought Kelly home from school, I was in the kitchen, wearing an apron, baking my chocolate chip cookies. My first-ever June Cleaver moment… right here in Provence, France. I was never there to welcome my daughter home from school in America. How wonderful to be there today.

On Wednesdays there’s no school. We’ve been driving over to St. Saturnin every Wednesday morning for our French lessons with Elisabeth—first a lesson for Kelly and then a lesson for Charley and me together. We’ve all made progress, though Kelly has far outdistanced Charley and I since she spends several hours a day in a French school. I’m sure her youth also helps too—it somehow seems much harder for us. After our lessons, we usually have lunch out and then go on some type of excursion or hike.

Some days I pick Kelly up at the end of school, driving the now-familiar seven minutes up into the village. Although I once dreaded the wait, I now enjoy gathering with the other parents at the school gate, a social time at the end of the day. The English-speaking parents (four or five of us) are all now friends. Some of the families have become our very good friends. But I also now can speak to some of French-speaking parents… just simple greetings and short conversations, but I no longer feel so much an outsider. We are becoming a part of the village community.

Charley and I take the little dog Juno—the spunky blind poodle who has been with us since the end of November—on the less demanding hikes. One day we even took her with us to the café for our post-hike beer and dessert. I wanted the French experience of taking a dog into a restaurant and was delighted that she sat quietly under my chair. I had Charley take my photo just to prove that I was in a restaurant with my dog! Cynthia and Ian—the owners of our house—will pick Juno up this week. They arrived in England a few days ago after a winter in Mexico and South America and are driving down through France. They will stay at another house they own in Provence until we leave La Bastide Vieille in mid-April. Juno and I have developed a very special relationship, just as Kelly has developed a special relationship with Chico the black cat. I enjoyed having a dog here—especially this very special dog—I will definitely miss her. Her departure also signifies the approaching end of our time in Provence.

A Spring of Mixed Emotions

We’ve had such a good life—and a very full life—during our six months here. Spring is arriving in our peaceful valley and our world is changing as we watch with mixed emotions. Our almond trees are starting to bloom, and we hope to see the cherry trees bright with their flowers before we leave in a few weeks. The farmers are hard at work, finishing the preparations of their fields, vineyards, and orchards. Yesterday morning our neighbor was out early on his tractor, his sounds mingling with the church bells in Bonnieux. The pace of construction and remodeling work has accelerated, as homes are readied for the season. The gardeners are busy at the beautiful second homes… pruning and trimming and planting. Shops and restaurants that have been shuttered all winter are beginning to reopen. Almost overnight the outdoor terraces at the cafes and restaurants have reappeared, and everyone is eager to sit in the sunshine after the unusually cold Provençal winter. We sat outside for lunch at Le Louvre after the Apt market this past Saturday, enjoying the bright March day. As I sipped my glass of wine over our leisurely outdoor lunch, I noticed many more people at the market… and more chic clothes, more fashionable hairdos, a mix of languages and accents. The second-home owners are arriving for Easter week and the tourists are arriving for the beginning of the new season in Provence.

They are arriving, and all too soon we will be leaving… headed off on another chapter of our long vacation.