[PROVENCE, FRANCE] — I spent more than a month hanging out in this gorgeous corner of Provence, staying at three different places — two rented villas and a famous gourmet hotel — and scampered about each day, exploring some quaint village, hitting the rotating Market Days, hiking or seeking out a destination restaurant. It was a glorious month. These are the great places I found to go in the Luberon in Provence. The best villages and the best things to do in the Luberon. If you have some suggestions on what I missed, leave them in the comments below. My stay in Provence was conjoined with about another scattered month traipsing about all over rural France, visiting only small towns and natural wonders, no large
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[PARIS] — I’ve been to Paris a bunch of times over the last several decades, sometimes for a week, sometimes just a couple of days in/out. Several times over a quick Thanksgiving or Christmas bop-over. Sometimes I didn’t take any pictures, other times I just roamed around shooting everything. There are lots and lots of Paris guides, so I won’t go into much detail here, just think of this post like an old postcard rack at the train station, look for places that look good, then go find them. These are all my favorite places in Paris. I won’t go into much detail here, just think of this post like a cluttered old postcard rack at the train station. Look for places that look good
[SCANDOLA NATURE RESERVE, CORSICA] — Okay, who’s been to the Scandola Nature Reserve in Corsica? Non? Strap in. You’re about to see something really amazing. You gotta gotta go do this. A huge natural preserve in the northwest of Corsica, with the most dramatic rock formations, canyons and wildly shaped rocks you’ve ever seen, plunging right into the sea. Dwarfing everything in their midst, namely you. Scandola is like being in a one-armed Grand Canyon, with the deep blue Mediterranean sea on the right side, and every color and shape of rock you’ve ever seen on the left. The Scandola peninsula was created from a collapsed volcano that fell into the sea, so you feel the earth opening up before you. This is a protected nature reserve, both
Brantôme is a sleepy little village in Périgord. A gorgeous little town on a u-turn bend of the river, originally built on an island, surrounded on all sides by the calm rolling waters of the river Dronne — which is why it’s called “Venice of Périgord”. This would be a great fort. It’s a great central base to explore Dordogne. Here’s a giant related post I made on exploring Dordogne. It really is one of the cutest list villages in France, I loved it. There’s only about two thousand people that live here and the immediate surroundings. Just loved walking into town in the morning to pick up the International Herald Tribune and a cafe au lait and sit by the river. It has all
[DORDOGNE & PERIGORD, FRANCE] — You don’t read much about Dordogne in the U.S. travel press. But the French & English know about it, almost keep it all to themselves. In fact, this was one of the great battlegrounds of the Hundred Year’s War between the nobles of France and England. Now wealthy Brits have snapped up a lot of the incredible houses and chateaus. I spent a week there several years ago and these are what I found to be the best things to do in Dordogne. Are there other places? Certainly. But this what I found in a little less than a week in an early June. I just want to give you a taste of what it looks, feels and tastes like. I
[MOUSTIERS-SAINTE-MARIE, FRANCE] — Moustiers in eastern Provence is the gateway to the great Gorges du Verdon, The Grand Canyon of France. (see my post on the Gorges du Verdon here). It’s an Adventureland of fun, with trekking, boating, canyoning, climbing and just plain gawking at all the natural beauty. Here’s my review of Alain Ducasse’s incredible gourmet Michelin-starred hideaway La Bastide de Moustiers in the beautiful town of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, high in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Bathe in Lavender on the Valensole Plateau Driving up from southern Provence, you first drive over the high and flat Valensole plateau, home to some of the largest and most stunning lavender fields in France. Miles and miles of sweet purple flowers, as far as the eye can see. If you’re in Provence
[LANGUEDOC-ROUSSILLION | FRANCE] — I first came to the Aude region in Languedoc, never having heard of it before, nor that I was even going there! But realized I was in Aude during a four day stop at a cool friend’s place outside Carcassonne. I thought I was in greater Languedoc, but turns out Aude is the appropriate subregion in Languedoc. I spent most of my time hanging at my friend’s super cool gîte, so I didn’t get everywhere, nor get to spend great bits of time, but these are the coolest places I found in the southwest of France. And now that I have the lay of the land, I can’t wait to go back. The Aude Region This area used to be called
[PARIS] — I was scared to death on my first trips to Paris — I started going to Paris B.I., Before the Internet — totally intimidated about finding the best cool restaurants. The mere thought of a) figuring out how to use a phone in France and b) people not understanding a single syllable of my Bad French just made the whole process unbearable. On top of that, I’d tried many times to ask some un-listening concierge — in those days of “Snooty France” — who would just shunt ALL Americans to some crappy brasserie around the corner with surly waiters and lame food. So I rarely trusted them…despite giving them big tips. So then I developed my default restaurant-picking technique: Walking Until Finding Something
[CAEN, FRANCE] — The cold morning wind was biting our faces as we walked up to the big bronze plaque. Our incredible guide Mathias Leclère of D-Day Guided Tours, whom we just met ten minutes ago, pulled us over to chat in the protection of a wall dug into the hill. “Over along that ridge, German troops lined the tree lines, all the way to that bell tower in that village over there. Below us, all of these fields had been flooded by the Germans in anticipation of an invasion.” Mathias calmly shouted amidst the blowing winter wind, a little sleet stinging our faces. “Just behind us, 13,000 U.S. paratroopers had just landed in the middle of the night. It was pitch black, no moon.
(NORMANDIE, FRANCE) — You can spend a day, a week or a month in Normandie and never get enough. We only had a couple of days on our own to explore the province after taking a D-Day tour, so didn’t get to see a lot, but here are my favorite finds. Normandie is really really old. Certainly there were neolithic settlements, but it was settled by the Vikings long ago –“Northmen land” is basically what the name translates to — who in the 800s rowed up the Seine in their longboats all the way up to Paris — long before the Viking Longboats were even conceived — pillaging along the way and eventually seizing the province from France. Then the Celts, William the Conqueror, the
[PYLA-SUR-MER, FRANCE] — A review of Philippe Starck’s amazing design hotel La Co(o)rniche. One of France’s top design hotels, perched overlooking Europe’s largest sand dune, the Dune du Pilat in Pyla-sur-Mer France. Setting The Stage — The Amazing Dune du Pilat I didn’t even know this beast was here. Never heard a squeak of this giant dune before. I actually came here in search of a beautiful hotel which mentioned its prime location next to the Dune du Pilat, about an hour south of Bordeaux. But when I pulled up, holy cow! My dumb fortunate luck led me to yet another amazing natural phenomenon — the largest sand dune in Europe. Almost 3km long and about 110m (300 ft) high, this giant Gibraltar of sand stands between
[TOURRETTES-SUR-LOUP, FRANCE] — I was on my way back from nine blissful days in Greece and heading toward the southwest of France. Having already done most of the coast, I wanted to find a new place to explore. I opened a new travel website I kept hearing about i-escape.com and started scouring pictures for something that grabbed my eye. And then BOOM. I saw a the picture above. That was all it took. This is in France? Looks more like Italy, or maybe Corsica. An ancient village perched high above the Côte d’Azur in the mountainy Alpes-Maritime region of France. I’ve always heard about this region, but had never been. So that’s where I pointed my car as I hopped off the plane in Nice.
[GORGES DU VERDON, FRANCE] — I wasn’t planning on this hike. It was all innocent, really. I just stumbled on the signs and kept going. I had no water, no backpack, no raingear, no flashlight, no map, no guidebook. But the Scope-colored water and steep canyon kept pulling me “just a little farther.” The path descends to follow along the water, then climbing up ladders, dodging between stone arches then, disappearing into cool dark tunnels, emerging on the other side. When I say tunnels, I mean pitch black tunnels. Signs warn you should have a headlamp. Not having one, I mumbled to myself “Hahaha, we don’t need no stinking torchiers” as I entered that last… and longest tunnel.” Well, they were serious. Unbeknownst to me,
[SARTÈNE, CORSICA] — I was having dinner by myself the first night in Corsica at Domaine du Murtoli — one of the most exclusive resorts in France — and sitting back and grinning at all the natural wonder before me in this candle-lit treehouse of a restaurant hidden under the maquis trees. Barefoot waitresses in linen frocks darted under the leaves, bringing drinks, appetizers and cute smiles. Around the corner came a vision, the most perfectly tanned specimen on this planet. Valérie, the proprietress of this magical haven (and a former model and mother to four beautiful children). She floated on a cloud up to my table and I gulped. “Bon soir, my name is Valérie. How was your dinner? Did you see your little friend?”
[CORSICA, FRANCE] — You know when you’re in a rental car in a foreign land and you’re on a steep impossible skinny one lane road with dropoffs of hundreds of feet and wondering “what the hell am going to do if another car comes the other way???” I was in exactly in that situation, on a steep rocky road, barely wider than my car, pointing downdowndown on my way to the a sleepy fishing village I was told was a gem. The crazy road was a bunch of zig-zags all the way down to the sea, each turn more precarious than the last. My clutch skills failing on the steep hill, killing the car as I rounded the tightest bends. When you’re traveling with someone else, you kinda
[CORSICA, FRANCE] — “Emmm, Monsieur Dan, please be careful. The water is deep enough, but there ees a big rock down there. So you must jump out from the cliff to not hit it, but not too far. Or you will hit the beeg rock.“ That was my super-cute young French guide, shouting above the roar. I was canyoning in Corsica for the first time. We were standing on top of a huge stack of elephant rocks, a swift stream was zooming under our feet, funneled into a torrent off the edge of this cliff, crashing twenty feet five below. We were high, high up in the raspy mean mountains of inner Corsica, a lush island in the middle of the Mediterranean, that thrusts out of the
[CORSICA, FRANCE] — Smack in the middle of the deep blue Mediterranean Sea are two big islands, Sardinia and Corsica. Almost like twins, ripped apart, both jut out of the sea like breaching whales, with huge mountains in the middle and some of the best beaches in all of Europe ringing their rocking shores. Corsica, known as Corse in French, is a magical adventure land, with an infinite amount of sporty things to do. Hiking. Climbing. Canyoning. Snorkeling. Sailing. Boating. Or just sit on the beach. The middle is spiked with enormous shark-toothed mountains, some as high as the Alps, often dotted with snow year-round. Corsica is only 200km long, but with a wild spread of geography that would rival entire countries 100x its size.
[GÈDRE, FRANCE] — I always wanted to go on some great hikes in the French Pyrénées, but I could never figure out where. As I finally figured out after all these years, the Pyrénées aren’t just a single group of mountains, but a bunch of groups of Pyrénées spread all along the French/Spanish border. So when you think, as I stupidly did, “Oh I’ll just go hike in the Pyrénées” you’re instantly in over your head when you finally try to Google it and figure out where to go. There’s the Pyrénées-Orientales in French Catalonia (which I wrote briefly about in another earlier post), the Pyrénées-Atlantiques in Basque country near San Sebastian, the Midi-Pyrénées in Languedoc-Roussillion, the Haute-Pyrénées and several other sub-parts. And then there’s the complementary Spanish Pyrénées on the very other
[EUGENIE-LES-BAINS, FRANCE] — A review of Les Prés d’Eugénie, the late Chef Michel Guérard’s amazing healthy living hotel, spa and three Michelin-starred restaurant in the countryside of Gascony. It’s one of the France’s best luxury hotels. And one of the 50 Best Restaurants in the World. _______________________________ I had the best intensions… Looking to break up my random drive across France in the summer of 2015, I decided to sneak in to the famed Les Prés d’Eugénie hotel for a taste of what made Michel Guérard world famous — one of the pioneers of Nouvelle Cuisine who changed French cooking forever. Chef and his wife Christine built this magical spa hotel in the country as a destination for his 3 Michelin star restaurant. We’re talking
[MOLTIG-LES-BAINS, FRANCE] — Here’s a review of the beautiful Chateau de Riell a beautiful boutique hotel and spa in the mountains of French Catalonia and the best boutique Relais & Chateaux hotels in the region. _________________________________ So, here I was last April sitting in Skoura, an oasis town in Morocco, and I had to make a choice. Fed up with my stupid job, I’d quit and left for a little sabbatical for a month in Portugal and Morocco. My plane to the States left the next day, but I wasn’t ready to go back. So I cancelled it. I flew back to Barcelona, walked up to the Hertz desk and asked “Can I rent a car for a long time? Like two months?” “Si!” So they hooked