Our Grand Tour of Europe

Our Dream of Provence

Several years ago I ordered Charley a set of videos of a popular BBC television miniseries—A Year in Provence. Like thousands of other people, we had both read several of Peter Mayle’s books about his life in the French countryside, and Charley had particularly enjoyed the stories. I thought he might like the videos also.

The videos sat unwatched on a shelf for several months until one bored night Charley and Kelly finally pulled the first one down. They were quickly captivated with this show, watching the episodes over and over, even memorizing parts of the dialogue. My husband and daughter were caught up in the story of Peter and Annie, the renovation of their stone farmhouse, and their various French neighbors. The program was all filmed on location in Provence and much of the dialogue was in French. It became their nightly ritual to watch a bit of A Year in Provence before Kelly went to bed. My nightly ritual was working on the computer in the adjacent room… usually planning vacation trips for our family. I actually saw very little of the show.

Notre Petite Écolère (Our Little Schoolgirl)

The three of us sat nervously on a concrete bench in the schoolyard of the Bonnieux École Élémentaire. It was 4:15 on a Tuesday afternoon, our first week in Provence. We hoped to meet with the director of the school—Monsieur Grimaud—and make arrangements for Kelly to start school on Monday.

When we first began to plan this trip, we thought we would home school Kelly during our extended stay in France. One day I mentioned this on the Slow Travel message board and received an interesting response from a woman who had recently returned from a year in Florence, Italy with her three children. She initially home schooled her children, but then enrolled them in the local school. She highly recommended this approach and said her children had quickly become fluent in Italian. Her story caused me to reconsider our home schooling plan, and Charley and I had several discussions. I started thinking about the three of us in our farmhouse in Provence… our own little one-room school with two teachers and one student. How would Kelly make friends? Would this be too much togetherness? And what about our free time… the projects Charley and I wanted to pursue? We finally decided we would pursue a blended approach—hopefully for Kelly to attend the village school where she could be with other kids, learn French, and experience another culture. We would supplement this with home schooling, working with the same textbooks as her class at home.

When I left my job of ten years to pursue our dream of spending a year in Europe, my business partners (the other 15 shareholders in our company) gave Charley and I a wonderful going-away dinner. They also surprised us with a special gift… a meal at one of the most famous restaurants in Provence—Oustau de Baumanèire in Les Baux-de-Provence. The CEO of our company—my former boss—had eaten there several times, and he and his wife (fluent in French) made arrangements for our meal and the bill. Our afternoon at Oustau de Baumanèire was—without question—the best dining experience I’ve ever had.