Our Grand Tour of Europe

Last Monday afternoon we stood in the bitter cold on the platform at the Avignon TGV station. It had snowed at our house in the Luberon that morning, but there wasn’t a snowflake to be seen 45 minutes away in Avignon.

Kelly turned to me. “I really, really like having guests,” she said.

In his famous book, “A Year in Provence,” Peter Mayle writes about the “invasion” of visitors from home. Many were only distant acquaintances, who begged for invitations or unexpectedly descended on him and his wife Annie between Easter and the end of September. Peter describes in detail how he came to dread the phone calls and the deluge of unwanted guests.

Perhaps we were more fortunate to be here in the off-season or to be much farther from home than the Peter Mayle was from England. For us, having houseguests has been a very positive part of our Provençal adventure. We decided to rent a much larger home than we needed for the three of us so we had space to welcome friends and family. With four bedrooms and three full baths (plus an additional WC), we have room for up to five more people. We also thought the idea of visitors from home would be a selling point for Kelly, who we initially thought would be horrified at the idea of a year abroad. She wouldn’t be totally isolated from the world she knew—special people would come to visit, including her best friend. We didn’t realize at the time that “having guests” would become an important part of the experience for all three of us.

We have a big home in America—a four bedroom house, one of which we’ve turned into a travel room/office. We have a very large, very nice guest room… but very few guests! Since my parents moved to Knoxville several years ago, the only occupants of the guest room have been my sister and her family who visit once a year. Most of our closest friends and family live in Knoxville. And with the demands of my career, I didn’t really extend myself to drum up visitors. Other than long-ago 1982 (the year Knoxville hosted a World’s Fair and I hosted eight sets of company in a four month period in my small post-grad school apartment), Knoxville has never really been a magnet for attracting friends and family—certainly not a magnet like the South of France.

We met two Americans in Aix-en-Provence last week while making a major purchase in a pottery shop. They were teachers from a high school in California, taking a group of high school students around France for ten days.

“Ohhhh…” she gasped, sounding very much in awe. “That’s quite a vacation!”

Webster’s defines a vacation as “a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation.” Hmmmm… sounds like what we’re doing. We’re away from home and business, traveling and recreating. We aren’t old enough to be retired, we don’t have jobs, we weren’t laid off or fired… so this must be vacation. Strange as it may seem—given my life up until this point—I’m on a fourteen-month vacation.

Vacations the American Way

I was a loyal member of corporate America for 27 years, enjoying vacations the American way: a couple of weeks a year based on company service. The average American has 12 paid vacation days a year; I was a bit luckier than most Americans—I had 15 days. (In contrast, the average Western European enjoys 25 days of vacation a year… and here in France a 35-hour workweek.) There were some years—before I met Charley and started taking European vacations—when I didn’t even take all my vacation. I was too busy at work, didn’t have the money, didn’t really have anywhere to go, or (most likely the real reason) didn’t have anyone special to go with.

With Charley and Kelly, I learned to love vacations. Vacations were our major family time together, and we became known among our friends for our outstanding vacations. We went to Europe (seven times before this trip), to Nova Scotia, to the beach, to New York and San Francisco, to DisneyWorld, to the mountains, to visit my family in Maryland. Frequent flyer miles and Marriott points helped to make more travel possible. We combined vacations days with long holiday weekends and tried to maximize our time away and our enjoyment of new experiences.

We were especially drawn to Europe. Our European trips expanded from one week to ten days and finally two weeks. If we left on a Friday afternoon and returned two Sundays later, we could have sixteen nights away from home. We started taking two weeks at the end of every May, leaving on the last day of Kelly’s school year and incorporating the Memorial Day holiday. We also started going on trips at Christmas. We could go somewhere for two weeks at Christmas and sometimes only use four days of vacation because of holidays and weekends. Although the first half of December always seemed to be the busiest time of the year in my job as VP of Human Resources for my company, the last half of December was the quietest. Most of the other senior managers took off at this time, which made it very easy to be away. Christmas travel also helped me cut back on some of the self-imposed stress of a Christmas at home—fewer decorations to put up, fewer presents to buy and wrap, fewer cookies and casseroles to bake, fewer parties to attend.