France
We traveled throughout a good chunk of France in August, and I had meant to write something about it, but got sidetracked with all my Real Man Sports football posts.
I love the site mapfight.xyz, so for perspective here’s a screenshot of France losing its fight with Texas. No shame in that, though, because Texas is pretty big. Portugal, where we live, is about the size of Maine.
In any event, we flew into Lyon and made this rhomboidish path through the place:
The small rectangle at the bottom was our two-hour-each-way round-trip to a small town on Lake Annecy to visit friends for the first three days, after which we dropped our rental car back in Lyon and took a train to Colmar.
(Actually Heather took it all the way to Strasbourg, but it stopped in Colmar where we were staying, and she let Sasha and I jump off while she went the extra 45 minutes to rent the car and drive it back.)
Here’s what Lake Annecy looks like from above the house:
We spent the next few days in the Alsace region, exploring one town more quaint than the next. They seemed almost fake, like the backdrop to a Disney movie set or a cartoon. But they were real, and I realized those sets and cartoons were probably modeled after these 500-year old towns in the first place.
We dropped the car back off in Strasbourg and took a train to Gare de l’East station in Paris, where we hopped on two metros to get from there to Saint-Lazare station, and caught a train to Caen (in Normandy) where we rented another car to set out for a house belonging to Heather’s former boss in the wine business.
(It was strange treating Paris as a pass-through and not spending time there, but Heather didn’t want to deal with it in August when half the places would be closed, and it would be overrun with tourists.)
His house in Normandy had sheep, fruit trees and a garden, and his wife cooked us French food while he opened expensive bottles of Armagnac and Calvados after dinner. (He had written an 800-page book on Calvados and a 300-page book on Armagnac.) We also went to the local Calvados producer’s farm, apparently the world’s best.
Of course, we went to Omaha Beach and some of the nearby towns like Deauville and Honfleur. We had watched the movie The Longest Day a couple days prior in the Colmar hotel room to get us ready for the D-Day beaches. It was overcast, and there were some scattered tourists around, but you could feel something.
When we left Normandy, we hit Mont-Saint-Michel, which is a castle/fortress/monastery built on an island off the coast, then kept going to the small town of Dinan and eventually our hotel in Pleneuf-Val-Andre. The hotel was bad, but the bike rides along the Brittany coast were nice, and the towns in Britanny were in some ways even more beautiful and charming than those in the Alsace.
While waiting for Heather and Sasha, freezing in my t-shirt in the drizzle and wind on the beach (in August!) I posted the following note on NOSTR from my phone:
When I get home, I plan to write about France after spending time in all these unbearably quaint small towns.
It’s like I opened an old closet full of perfectly preserved Mickey Mantles and Willie Mays baseball cards from the 50s and 60s.
At first you think you have hit the jackpot but then instead of dozens there are millions of them, and what you thought was ultra rare is actually common.
It’s a weird disillusionment, no fault of the place. Got me rethinking everything.
. . .
Growing up in NY, I learned the best, most beautiful (and expensive) buildings were typically the oldest. To see so much of what I had once thought desirable, both the goal and material symbols of worldly success sprawling endlessly for mile upon mile was eye-opening.
What you think you want is not always what you actually want. Everyone knows the concept of a “trophy wife,” but there is trophy art, trophy real estate and trophy everything. If your life is not enough for you, you need a showpiece to announce its importance to everyone else. You therefore still depend on their approval, are still beholden to their assessments of you.
I don’t purport to be over this impulse entirely, either. In fact, this post is not really about France but my unearthing evidence to the contrary. The counterfeiting of the houses made me realize I was still allowing the parasite of status to ride atop my aesthetic tastes. That my desire for that kind of house diminished only after I saw how available it was. The star of old Europe, which seemed so charming to me when I arrived here seven years ago, has lost a little of its shine.