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September 22nd 2023

Published: September 23rd 2023

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Dr Jon

Tree lined country roads

This photo was taken outside of St. Remy, but it could've been anywhere in France. They are the masters of tree-lined roads.

Frankfurt Airport

I'm on a four-hour layover waiting for my connection to Marseille, mindlessly following signs, mindlessly following crowds. Occasionally the crowds bunch into queues, queues for shuttles, queues for information, queues for coffee. I've come to accept the dozens of communication failures that happen daily when I'm traveling abroad. My first of this trip came when I summoned my best German to order coffee mit cream and got a cup of thick black ink instead. On the flight I watched a documentary about how we fail to appreciate the miracle of modern aviation. (No doubt produced by some airline consortium.) Each gate in an airport should be seen as a portal, the film suggested, a portal that allows us to step from London to Abu Dhabi, from Montreal to Lima, from Shanghai to Honolulu. The film didn't mention the zombifying effect this "miracle" has on travelers. There's an old Bedouin saying about how the soul should never travel faster than a camel can walk. My soul was still in San Francisco.

Saint Remy de Provence

I wasn't completely sure if Walid, my Algerian Uber driver, was lost or simply taking me to the middle of nowhere

Pope's Palace, Avignon

This is where the Pope of Avignon lived back when there were two popes.

so he could extort, mug, or murder me. I hadn't seen a pinprick of light since we left Avignon around 9 PM, the paved road ended 10 minutes ago, and we had now come to a dead end. I looked at my phone. Either Siri was lost too, or she was in on it with Walid.

For several months my girlfriend Pam and her wine club friends had been pressuring me to join them on a three-week tour of France. The trip had been in the works for a year. Bart and Lesley were the unofficial organizers, this would be a nostalgic return to some of their favorite haunts. But really the itinerary grew out of dozens of emails between the group members-- Dana and Michele, wine connoisseurs from LA who knew France well, mellow Neil and hyper Carolyn, who were up for anything, Gen and Kevin, a younger couple from South Carolina who were friends of Bart and Lesley's but whom no one else knew, and Pam, the only member lacking a plus-one. Everything was settled by the time I came on the scene. For the first week the group had rented a villa near Saint Remy in

Van Gogh's Room

This isn't a painting, it's the actual room, not in Arles but St Remy

Provence, for the second week they had rented a villa near Sarlat in the Dordogne region, and for the third week, everyone had hotel rooms in Paris.

I didn't want to go. I spent most of June in Europe and I was in Europe twice last year. I was sick of Europe. Every quaint village looks the same to me— old castle, old church, old bridge over some river. Also, group travel has never been my thing, especially a group like this one with so many alpha personalities. And wine tasting? Sure, I like wine, I like all wine, but that's the problem, to be a true wine appreciator one must not like some wine. And staying in villas? I subscribe to the motto of Lonely Planet—To get to know a place you have to be prepared to spend less. (I wonder if that's still their motto.)

Three weeks before departure my last excuse fell through. I bought a ticket. And now here I was with Walid, groping in the dark, trying to locate some Villa called Domaine des Cyprès. I gave up and called Pam. She and the others had arrived a day earlier and from the

Domaine des Cyprès

That's our villa taken from the other side of the first backyard!

sound of things had been drinking wine continuously. Pam was worried. Where was I? The phone got passed from one person to the next. Everyone had advice. Lesley told me to look for a gate with a pile of empty wine bottles next to it. Kevin (who?) told me to look for an S-curve in the road. Soon I was on speaker talking to the entire drunken mob. I hung up. Walid and I retraced our path to the paved road. Around the next turn I saw them standing in the middle of the road waving flashlights and glasses of wine. I had arrived.

Domaine des Cyprès

I got up early the next morning and wandered around the estate. My bedroom door opened to a lawn easily large enough for a professional soccer match. Hiding behind a row of cypress trees at the far side of the lawn was a second larger lawn and a tennis court. I meandered through the house passing through ornate rooms finally arriving at a huge country-style kitchen. A wing of three dining rooms led from the kitchen to the swimming pool. My God, the place was immense! Were we the only people

Villa kitchen

A busy morning in the Domaine des Cyprès kitchen. If you look closely you can see the hall of three dining rooms.

staying here? Yes! Was this costing a fortune? Yes, but divided 10 ways it worked out to about $100 per person per night. And what about the Lonely Planet motto? Screw it! I could get used to this.

In the footsteps of Van Gogh

Van Gogh came to Arles in 1888 where he roomed and painted with Gaugin, but when Gaugin left for Tahiti, Vincent flipped, cut off his ear, and started freaking people out. The citizens of Arles circulated a petition to get rid of him, so he checked himself into St. Paul, an asylum in nearby St. Remy. He spent a year in the asylum wandering around the gardens and the surrounding hills of the Alpilles. (Apparently, he only went into the town once.) He painted 150 paintings during that year. That's almost one masterpiece every two days!

After spending a few hours taking in the self-conscious quaintness of St. Remy, our group followed a trail of sidewalk markers that led from the town center to St. Paul, which is still a functioning asylum (so we had to whisper). At several points along the trail there were signs where Vincent had set up his easel.

It's nice, but ...

At various places in St Remy there are signs like this showing Van Gogh's painting in front of the actual scene.

The paintings he did at these spots were shown on the signs along with relevant quotes from some of his letters. In the letters he talked about the overwhelming emotions he felt trying to capture the beauty of nature. I didn't get it. As I looked out over these same landscapes, I saw flat, sunbaked olive orchards reminiscent of the San Joaquin valley. I wondered why he didn't paint forests, mountains, the sea, or our villa. I guess that's why I'm not a famous artist.

Food, Music, Wine, and Fireworks

We went to dinner once as a group in St. Remy. We ate at a fun restaurant that specialized in leg of lamb. Apart from that we ate at the villa at a huge stone table next to the pool. On the last night we hired a professional chef who cooked a four-course meal for us. Lesley and Michele are both gourmet cooks, but sensing some tension between them, I volunteered to cook two dinners. They weren't gourmet meals, but no one got sick and it was fun to cook in a real French kitchen. After dinner we usually sat around the table, drank wine, and smoked a

Dinner

Most evenings in St Remy we ate at a big table next to the pool.

joint some daring person (not me) carried through customs. I brought my portable speaker and played tango music. I danced with Pam and Lesley. Around 11 some of us would go swimming before bed. The weather was perfect and we were all in heaven.

Heaven heated up a few days into the trip when Lesley pushed one of Michele's buttons and she erupted, something to do with toast. It was bound to happen. Fortunately, Dana and Michele had plans to spend the next week walking the Loire Valley instead of coming to Dordogne with the rest of us. For the remainder of the week everyone worked at keeping the peace.

Dordogne Valley, New Aquitaine

I was excited to see La Vigerie, the next villa Bart had picked for us. It was located on the banks of the Dordogne River about six hours north-west of St. Remy. It didn't seem possible to top Domaine des Cyprès, but it did. My first impression was that La Vigerie was a hotel that we'd be sharing with other guests, but no, it was all ours. Of course there was the rolling lawn, tennis court, and swimming pool that we'd come to

La Vigerie

Our villa in the Dordogne

expect, but this place also had a river running through the backyard. Not just any river, but the Dordogne, one of France's most scenic.

Along the Dordogne

"Bart, we didn't have breakfast; we're starving." That's Pam and Carolyn, attempting to instigate a rebellion against Bart's jam-packed tour of the Dordogne Valley. "Can we stop for lunch before the next activity?" they whined. I joined the protest by pointing out that it was Sunday and that if there were any open restaurants they would be closing soon. Bart glanced at his watch and said no, there wasn't enough time.

We had all grown to like Gen and Kevin, Lesley and Bart's young friends from South Carolina. They were good storytellers and had loads of energy, but they would be leaving La Vigerie after a few days, reducing our number to six. Consequently, Bart wanted to cram as many activities as possible into the few days they had remaining.

He got us up early that day. With nothing to eat and barely awake we found ourselves speeding down the road to see Les Milandes, the castle where Josephine Baker lived for 30 years. It's now a museum

Josephine Baker

... Where the women wear no pants.

devoted to her life. Who was Josephine Baker? I didn't know either, but after wandering through her museum I was a fan. Born in St Louis in 1906, she managed to escape poverty and racism and ended up as a Folies Bergère sensation in Paris where she did a weird jerky dance wearing nothing but a belt made out of bananas (which was on display at the museum). She got rich, bought the castle, had a distinguished career serving in the French Resistance, adopted 12 children, all different nationalities, and eventually returned to the US where she became an icon of the Civil Rights movement.

Next, Bart put us all in canoes for a two-hour paddle down the river. We put in at La Roque-Gageac, a village carved into a cliff overlooking the river, Anasazi-style. It seemed a bit dodgy to me. One landslide could take out the entire village. But I learned that the caves have been occupied since the Stone Age, so it's all good, I guess.

Canoes are the best way to experience the valley. You see a lot of undersides of old bridges, and around each bend a castle pops into view. Pam got

Canoe time

Pam and me on the river. I'm the one sweating.

upset because I criticized her paddling, which I felt lacked direction and oomph. Did she not realize that this was a competitive situation, that my manhood was at stake? We were the last to pull in at the pickup site. No one said anything but I knew what they were thinking: "Losers!"

After the paddle we found an open restaurant back in La Roque—a miracle considering it was Sunday—but it was too late for food, they were only serving beer and salad.

Bart's breakneck tour continued, but Neil, Carolyn, Pam, and I mutinied. We returned to our villa to scrounge cupboards for any scraps of food that may have been left over from some previous century.

Under France

Dordogne is riddled with limestone caves. It's a spelunker's paradise. We may have spent as much time under France as we did on top of it. One cave featured a boat ride down an underground river. We were provided with headsets that played a reenactment of the cave's discovery by what sounded like Monty Python characters. Another cave featured an underground train ride. I felt like a coal miner on my way to work.

Paris

The French Underground

felt relief when I walked out of the Montparnasse train station and into the bustling streets of Paris. Country life is nice, but it's glacially slow and deathly quiet. I crave the manic pace of the city. I love sidewalk cafes crowded with intellectuals, artists, revolutionaries, and fashion models. I love aromas wafting from restaurants of every conceivable ethnicity. Honking horns and wailing sirens are a kind of jazz for me.

Being in Paris was also an opportunity for Pam and me to separate from the others, to go our own way. And which way did we go? Straight to Jardin Tino-Rossi to fulfill a dream—dancing tango by the Seine.

At a quick pace I dragged Pam across Luxembourg Gardens, through the Latin Quarter, and past party barges docked at the quays.

Pam: "Is that Notre Dame over there?"

Me: "Yes, no time for that now, gotta hurry."

Pam: "But my leg hurts."

Me: "Maybe dancing will fix it."

When we arrived at Tino-Rossi we were shocked. Yes, people were dancing by the Seine, but disco, not tango. I was disappointed (Pam may have felt relief, not sure.) Maybe disco had replaced tango.

Tango on the Seine

Before turning around we walked a little further upriver. Behold! I saw another group of dancers. We rushed over. Were these our people? No, these were polka dancers, but I was starting to get the idea. There were lots of nightly dance parties by the Seine. We only needed to walk a little further to find the tango-istas.

The tango dancers were tucked into a small amphitheater-type structure with seating for observers. An orange rope at the edge of the river was provided for ladies to tie up their purses. The DJ was a young man with a shaved head. He was hunched over his laptop. There were about 20 couples on the "floor". I saw varying levels of experience. The dress code was obviously casual. I guessed that this whole scene was pretty spontaneous, a Frankenstein that just willed itself into existence. Pam tied up her purse, we slipped dance socks over our shoes (I always carry them), and muscled our way into the line of dance.

We danced three or four sets (3 tangos to a set). Pam danced well. The surface at the very edge of the water had a smooth marble-like finish. It was

Sacred Heart, Montmartre

slippery. I wondered if anyone ever fell in.

Pigalle

A week earlier, when the group expressed an interest in going to Montmartre for a view of the city and dinner in the square, I agreed to lead the expedition. (My daughter and I had been in Paris less than a year ago, so its geography was still fresh in my mind.) But when the time came the group had dissolved. Everyone was doing their own thing. It would just be Pam and me. My plan was to take the metro to Pigalle, where we could snap a photo of the Moulin Rouge, then take the funicular up the hill to Montmartre.

The metro was crowded. Flashing signs warned of pickpockets. Pam and I put on our masks, but we were the only ones. During the long ride I spent time fantasizing about the people around me. Was the pretty girl reading a thick book an exchange student studying at the Sorbonne? Was the plump African man wearing an expensive suit a diplomat from Senegal? Was the man wearing wire-rimmed glasses really reading his newspaper or was he a SPECTRE agent assigned to follow me?

When we

Moulin Rouge with tour buses

emerged from the metro stop in Pigalle we found ourselves on a pedestrian mall that ran along the center of a broad boulevard. Vendors selling off-brand sneakers were packing up for the day. Every shop on the avenue was a sex shop—lap dances, topless bars, X-rated movies, sex toys. Pam wondered aloud why I brought her here. I was embarrassed. The scene at the Moulin Rouge was even more embarrassing. The street in front of the old windmill was jammed with huge tour buses. Everywhere I looked there were dense crowds of tourists following tour leaders holding flags. We couldn't get out of there fast enough.

To make matters worse, Montmartre was also crowded, and dinner in the square-- forgettable.

Home?

Our last night in Paris we had dinner with Neil and Carolyn. I asked if they were eager to get home. No one said yes. My theory is that there's some magic length of time on the road after which the idea of home becomes a fuzzy abstraction; home is nowhere and everywhere. If I learned that I couldn't go home for another year and had to stay in Paris, I'd shrug and say, "Sure, whatever".

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