Rock Music, a Tiny Camper, and the Best Lunch in Brittany

France  |  Download Music Festival + Brittany road trip  |  June 2018 

1- Twenty Years, One Ring Per Five: Our Anniversary on the French Riviera

Twenty Years

Twenty years of marriage is one of those milestones that sounds significant even before you start trying to describe what it actually means. It's not just time. It's the accumulated weight of every decision made together, every trip packed for, every dinner cooked, every inside joke that wouldn't make sense to anyone else on the planet.

We decided to celebrate in France (of course we did). It’s a country that changed us both, and we went all in: a road trip through the south, ending in Paris, two weeks total. We had a French rap playlist queued up before the wheels hit the tarmac. We landed, picked up our rental car and hit the open road…credit card at the ready for the million toll stops we knew were on the way.

Dijon: Grey Poupon and a Good Night

First stop was Dijon, overnight on our way south, and yes, we absolutely leaned into the Grey Poupon reference. We had to. The town itself is charming in that very French way where the architecture does most of the work and you just have to show up and walk around appreciating it. A nice meal, a comfortable night, and then south toward the Mediterranean.

We had a wonderful dinner dining on chicken with fresh morel mushrooms that was unbelievably perfect and then wandering through the small streets as the sun went down. It’s a town that we would return to anytime we have the possibility.

Cassis: The Winemaker, the Wine Bar, and the Ring

Cassis sits on the Mediterranean east of Marseille, and if you've never heard of it, that's honestly part of its charm. It's not famous the way Nice or Cannes is famous. It's just deeply, quietly beautiful, with turquoise water and limestone cliffs and a small harbor where fishing boats still go out in the morning.

We were there for two days, and Uncle Larry had done us an enormous favor by pointing us toward Clos Ste Magdeleine, a winery considered one of the most beautiful vineyards in the world. The family still lives in the main house on the property, so you can't wander the whole estate, but what you can see of it is extraordinary. The sea visible through the vines. The kind of view that makes you understand immediately why someone chose this exact piece of ground to plant something permanent.

The people were so lovely. They walked us to a spot with a view of the sea, unhurried and genuinely warm, the way small family wineries often are when they're not performing hospitality but just actually being hospitable.

Then there was the wine bar.

We found a spot in town where the owner was what I can only describe as unreservedly wonderful. He gave us free pours. He gave us hugs. Every time we came back, which was more than once, he treated us like people he'd known for years. That kind of spontaneous human warmth is exactly why we travel.

Cassis is just a wonderful, quitter seaside stop where you could laze away the days and just relax. An enjoyable stay to say the least.

Gordes: The Hilltop Town That Earns Every Cliché

We made a day trip to Gordes, which is one of those Provençal hilltop villages that shows up on every 'most beautiful villages in France' list and still manages to exceed the expectations that list creates. The town is built into the rock. The stone buildings rise out of the limestone as if they grew there organically rather than being placed by human hands. The light in the late afternoon does things I don't have adequate language for.

We drove into the heart of the town and popped in and out of shops, took pictures, and then found a wonderful little café with excellent meringues, cocktails, and a nice view to boot. The sun was out and it was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.

Eze and the Château Eza: Our Splurge Moment

We made the short drive to Eze next, and I want to be careful about how I say this because I don't want to oversell it and I don't think I can undersell it: the view from Eze literally took my breath away when we arrived. I felt emotional. I wasn't expecting to feel emotional. But there it was.

Eze is a medieval village perched on a rocky peak above the Mediterranean, about 400 meters up, and from certain angles it looks like it shouldn't be physically possible that a village exists there. The sea below is that particular impossible shade of blue that the Mediterranean does in summer, and the whole picture is just too much to absorb at once.

Château Eza was our splurge hotel and room for this trip, and we committed to it completely. We sat in the on-deck jacuzzi with wine and champagne and looked out at the sea and tried very hard to absorb everything. We had a tasting menu for dinner that we watched unfold as the sun set over the Mediterranean.

I feel a wee bit like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous showing up in a place like that, but I also feel like 20 years of marriage and a lifetime of traveling as real working people earns you an occasional jacuzzi above the Mediterranean. We earned it.

Monaco: Because It Was 20 Minutes Away

We had never thought seriously about visiting Monaco, but when you're in Eze and Monaco is literally 20 minutes down the coast, the question becomes less 'should we go' and more 'why wouldn't we.' So we went.

It is exactly what you think it is. Incomprehensible concentrations of wealth made very visible in the form of yachts and sports cars that cost more than most people's houses. The casino sits there like it knows exactly what it is. It's a genuinely strange place to spend a few hours and I'm glad we did it, but I don't think Monaco is on our 'can't wait to go back' list.

Vienne: The Perfect Last Night on the Road

Our last night of the road trip before Paris was in Vienne, about halfway between Eze and the capital. Matt found an apartment on a couple's property with a view of the city, which is exactly the kind of accommodation discovery that makes you feel like you're actually living somewhere rather than just passing through it.

Fruits de mer for dinner. Which is to say: a glorious, cold platter of everything the sea has to offer, with good bread and butter and wine, the way the French do it, leisurely and completely unpretentious about the fact that you're eating very well.

Then we were on our way back to our travel heart…Paris.

2 - A Padlock on the Louvre and Twenty Years in the City of Light

The First Thing I Do in Paris

The first thing I do when I arrive in Paris is light a candle for my Dad. Every time. It's not a complicated ritual or a formal one. It's just something I do because my father was the person who first brought me to Paris, 27 years ago now, and I've been coming back ever since. He gave me this city, he gave me the gift of seeing a world outside of the tiny bubble I grew up in, he gave me that feeling…the feeling that I need to leave my hometown, try new things, experience new cultures, in order to grow. Lighting a candle is the least I can do.

Notre Dame has always been where I do it.

Notre Dame is still under construction. It has been since the fire in 2019, and it will be for some time yet. The scaffolding surrounds it, the cathedral is closed to visitors, and if you're someone who has stood inside that building and felt what it does to you, the sight of it wrapped in construction equipment is its own particular kind of sadness.

I couldn't light my candle there. So I found Église Saint-Merry, just a short walk away in the Marais, and I lit it there instead.

I stood in the quiet of that church, lit the candle, and said thank you to my father for changing the course of my life by bringing me here the first time. Some moments on a trip are private ones. This was one of those.

Our Paris, Revisited

We stayed in an Airbnb with a rooftop view of Paris, which is the right way to arrive in a city you've been to before. Not a hotel lobby, not a view of an alley. A rooftop, with the city spread out around you, lit up in the evening in that particular golden way Paris manages even when it's being completely ordinary about it.

We walked to Notre Dame our first evening, not to go in (impossible) but to see it, to check in on it. The construction is jarring and also somehow moving, evidence of a place so important to so many people that the whole world decided collectively that it had to be brought back. We stumbled upon a great little restaurant know for its wood-fired rotisserie chicken and had a nice meal before coming “home” to the rooftop.

Tuesday: Wine, Cheese, and a Full Day of Favorites

We started Tuesday with a French wine class paired with regional cheeses, which is an activity I will recommend to anyone visiting Paris without qualification or hesitation. You learn things. You drink good wine at an hour that would seem unreasonable at home and seems completely reasonable in France. You eat cheese that reminds you why the French are the way they are about cheese. It's an excellent morning.

Then we walked. We always walk Paris. Les Invalides, with Napoleon's tomb in that enormous gold-domed cathedral that somehow manages to be less about hubris and more about genuine grandeur in person. The Eiffel Tower, which I know sounds like the obvious tourist thing and is the obvious tourist thing and is still worth doing every single time because it's the Eiffel Tower and it never stops being improbable.

Musée Rodin. If you haven't been, it's not what you expect. The sculptures are inside but the gardens are where Rodin really gets you, The Thinker sitting outdoors with the gardens spreading around it, Burghers of Calais in the open air. It's a museum you can actually breathe in.

Wednesday: The Unicorn Tapestries, Montmartre, and a Jazz Club

Wednesday was one of those Paris days that strings together so many good things it stops feeling real.

We went back to Musée de Cluny for the Unicorn Tapestries, which is one of our favorite things in the city. They're housed in their own dedicated room in the medieval museum, six tapestries depicting a unicorn and a noblewoman in an allegorical setting that art historians have been arguing about for centuries. The colors shouldn't still be that vivid after 500-plus years. They are. You walk into that room and something about it quiets you down immediately.

Then Montmartre. Up to Sacré-Coeur, which earns its reputation from the outside even if the inside is less remarkable, and over to Place du Tertre, where artists have been selling their work for decades. We ended up buying another painting. This has become something of a pattern when we visit Paris and I don't intend to stop.

We wandered St. Germain-des-Prés, more fruits de mer, and then, through whatever combination of instinct and luck that good travel days sometimes produce, we found a jazz club.

I don't mean we looked one up. I mean we turned a corner and there it was, warm light coming through the windows, music audible from outside, and we went in. Great music and a great dinner in the same room. Some of the best nights in Paris happen this way.

Thursday: Rain, the Louvre, and a Lock on a Bridge

Our last full day in Paris started rainy, which is fine. Paris in the rain is still Paris. We waited it out, and when it cleared late afternoon we headed to the Louvre courtyard, one of our favorite outdoor spots in the city.

Two musicians were playing. We stood and listened for a long time. I don't know who they were or what they played specifically. I know the light was good and the Louvre pyramid was doing its thing behind them and it was one of those unplanned perfect moments that Paris produces with annoying regularity.

Then we put a lock on a bridge for our twentieth anniversary.

The Pont des Arts doesn't do the Locks of Love anymore officially, the weight of all those padlocks was genuinely becoming a structural concern, but there are still places along the Seine where you can add yours, and we did. Twenty years. One lock. It felt right to do it in the city where we've returned more than any other, the city my father gave me, the city Matt and I have made our own over two decades of coming back.

We wandered until it was time to leave. That's the only way to end a Paris trip. No agenda, no final destination, just more streets and light and the particular feeling of a city you love that you're not quite ready to say goodbye to yet.

Au revoir, France. You were, as always, everything.

Back home, I made Julia Child's Sole Meunière two nights running and then Chicken with Morel mushrooms. It's the only reasonable response to coming home from two weeks in France and being expected to cook for yourself.