Savoring The Chaos: Your Irregular Dispatch From French Life
Honest tips, real stories, and a few missteps from life in France — part guide, part travel diary, with a glass of wine in one hand and a “did that really happen?” in the other.
The French Saboteur
It’s been quiet at Château Dépaysement. Too quiet. The kind of quiet where my gut tells me trouble’s on the horizon.
Denise is in the U.S. visiting family, and I’ve been left in charge. Mr. Mom, dog wrangler, and groundskeeper-in-training. You’d think this would be simple. ...
Fall Comes to the Valley
This past year we focused on the outside of the house: planted flowers and bushes, yanked out weeds that thought they were grass, and hauled in so much river rock we basically built our own driveway and parking lot. All the things you can actually finish. The upstairs?...
The Winery, the Armory, and the Troglodytes
I get a lot of DMs from people. Aside from comments about my “sultry Sunday jazz brunch voice” (their words, not mine, though I can already picture Denise shaking her head as she reads this), the most common questions fall into three buckets: how we ...
Market Day in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue
The We were staying in Avignon, which already felt like some sort of movie set, all medieval walls and café tables spilling into the street, when Denise reminded me of something. Years earlier, back in our old life in California, we’d watched James Martin’s F...
I knew I’d have to kill it. I just didn’t think it would be so soon.
The “it” in question? Our kitchen, if you could call it that. A thirty-foot-long limestone cave masquerading as a living space, with a cement floor, a cinderblock ceiling, and appliances lined up on the left wall like contest...
We Waited All Day for 12 Seconds of Glory
You don’t go to the Tour de France for the race. You go for the waiting.
At least that’s what I realized, standing on a hillside above Lac de Vouglans, three hours into a picnic with no bathroom, wondering if we were even facing the right direction.
It...
The Flat Tire and the Frenchman
Last summer, my neighbor Pascal, who was renovating the bathroom in our gite, saw me unloading a new bike out of the back of our car. He asked if I wanted to go for a ride. I said “I can’t today, what about tomorrow”. And there it was. I had just committed to di...
How to Fail a Truck Rental in France
When you rent a U-Haul in the U.S., you usually wait in line in a fairly undesirable part of town, show a driver’s license, sign a form that nobody reads, and leave with a 14-foot box truck that smelled faintly of chicken nuggets and divorce. Then you retu...
How a Baguette Ruined My Smile (And Nearly My Sanity)
Back in my 20s, I took a baseball to the mouth. Bad bounce, worse timing. Knocked out all of the front top teeth. A good friend, and a better dentist, crafted me a bridge that lasted nearly 30 years.
It had been too long, I was told. But th...
Excuse me sir, that is an expensive car…
At least that’s what The Professor told me as he practically flung himself between it and my slowly advancing rental car. You would have thought I was about to run over his Faberge egg.
But let me back up.
We were in Caunes-Minervois for a month — a hillt...
I Think Just Then We Got Frenched
During our first week of moving to France, we had to drive from Paris to Lot-et-Garonne — our temporary home for the next month. We’d rented a house in a tiny town called Bourlens and figured the drive would take six or seven hours. But with a dog in the backs...
France Is Beautiful. Until Biology Betrays You.
During our month in Avignon, we tried to explore as much of Provence as we could within an hour or so from the place we were renting.
One day we went over to the village of Eygalières for lunch. I had been the week before on the day I bought our ...
