Me, Myself and Moi 

                                                                                                           

Here's an article I wrote for France On Your Own November Newsletter

There I was, a 50ish American woman sitting on the beach in Cannes all by myself.  I looked around at all the bronze bodies, all ages and conditions, wearing next to nothing.  Behind me was the restaurant terrace set for lunch under a smartly striped canopy. In front of me was the Mediterranean, the ancient birthing pool of humanity.  It was now or never.

I dropped my top.  And that's when my French vacation took off.

Had I been with a husband, a couple of girlfriends or (shudder) a tour group, I would never have dared. But with nobody to consult, I followed my own instincts. Hey, I thought, if that plump granny over there can do it, so can I.

Nobody paid any attention, of course, but that gesture punctured my American bubble and released me into the stream of French life. I was no longer on the sidelines with a camera.  As we used to say in the Sixties, I was going with the flow.

Of course, you can have lots of fun in France while fully clothed - I give you this scenario because it was my own personal breakthrough as a woman traveling solo for the first time. That was me in a foreign country stripped of all my props and open to what the place had to teach me.

Now that I'm a veteran traveler living in France, I' d like to share all that with you - whether you're single, divorced, separated or just dreaming of stepping out on your own for a change.  I'm organizing a new Personal Provence Workshop to take cozy groups of neophytes through the steps of traveling solo in France. You'll start out from my home base in Saignon, a perched village in the Luberon region of  Provence, and you'll be sent out on adventures, staying overnight at personally selected hotels, inns, B&Bs, dining in charming restaurants and cafés, and exploring my favorite towns and villages. After each foray, you'll come back to home base, and well share experiences. Then well shuffle your destinations and you'll go off to your next adventure. It's a safe and fun way to go solo - and you'll be in good company!

Pathological Compulsion

I like to start the day with a solitary walk on the plateau above the village. In fact, I'm compelled to walk. It's the only way I can think clearly enough to write every day.  The path I take every day was cleared and marked more than 50 years ago by a  local man named François Morenas. He created a network of paths that take you on a tour of country life, highlighting the handiwork of man and nature. Each path reads like a story of life, punctuated by colored markers for hikers, bikers and walkers like me.  

This path leads through private property. The owners helped out by fencing their land in two sections so the path could continue its journey through the woods. Their horses are corralled behind the gate on the left,  and they're led across the path and through the gate on the right to graze in the pasture.

It's reassuring to know that the horses have their own space to roam around and do whatever horses do. It is even more reassuring, this being hunting season, to know that the hunters also have their space, so there won't be any bullets zinging over my head or ricocheting off trees that I'm looking at...like these.

There's a tree, left, that grew up on one side of the path and then crossed over to reach for the sky. I can relate to that--I grew up on one side of the Atlantic and am reaching for the sky over France.  There's another tree, right, that decided to straddle the path and enjoy both sides. It reminds me of a French term...jambes dans l'air... which alludes to an agreeable lady mightily enjoying herself. 

Here's a very human tree -- with a belly button. Could use a loofah.

The sheep have their side of the path today, surrounded by an electric fence put up by their shepherd, a young man from a neighboring village.

Stone critters are allowed to hang out on the path.

This is a borie, an ancient shepherd's hut, a dry-stone construction that uses no mortar. They've been around this area for eons, and the farmers respect and plant around them. This borie is the most famous.

Here's the lavender sleeping in off-season peace.

Beau was raised to hunt, and today he seems to be on the trail of something or someone...

...and he found them: a group of local hunters. The one in the orange cap is Pierre Roux, the Best Wild Boar Hunter. He can make the noise of any animal you can name; he can use a dowsing stick to find water; and he can cure aches and pains with the heat of his hands. But no luck today for hunting. 

I had to stop -- I was compelled -- to shoot these glorious golden cherry trees. 

My passenger waited patiently for me. He may not know that pathological can mean therapeutic and even cathartic, but he knows paths and how to appreciate them.   

We Are Still Daddy's Girls

Friends are losing their fathers this fall and I feel for them in a way that can’t be expressed in a simple “sorry for your loss”. I'm older than most of my friends; I’ve gone through this passage and come out on the other side. I remember that after the hospital and the funeral and the condolences, you enter a landscape that seems to be missing some of its elements, and it’s hard to navigate for awhile.

         As a girl, your father was your first love, your protector (even if he was away a lot, like mine). He was the force that introduced you to the wide, wide world, hovered over your adventures and screened your boyfriends.  As you moved on to marriage, childbirth, career, you were still Daddy’s girl, and that Daddy force surrounded you, warding off evil. Maybe you had to develop the Daddy force in yourself (as I had to).  In any case, you had that force in your life.  I’m here to say that even when he dies, the Daddy force lives on. It will just take you a little while to recognize it in yourself.

         My father was a powerful man and I learned a lot from him, but I never felt that he loved me like my girlfriends’ dads loved them. We had many angry confrontations, but we never shared our innermost thoughts with each other. When I had matured enough to understand him, Alzheimer’s had erased his thoughts. In effect, the man he was had died.

         One year while he could still travel, he and Mom visited me in Washington, and I had a little party for them. Dad must have pulled up an old social script from his unconscious, because he circulated among the guests making such polished conversation that everyone thought I was exaggerating his illness. As the evening wound down, Dad came walking toward me as if he had spotted someone he recognized from the past. “How are you?” he asked with his famous smile.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

He smiled wider and began to move on, but something stopped him and he turned around with a worried look.

“Are we…you and I…are we okay?”

And I said yes, “We are just fine.”

“Good", he said, satisfied that he had settled things with someone important.

I like to think it was me.

From the ridiculous to the sublime...the trail leads back to Saignon and the first event at La Maison des Arts et Lettres, where Andrew (center in front of the Paella Painting) and around seventy visitors contemplated the making and enjoying of art.

I'm home in Saignon. The next leg of my solo camping tour will have to wait awhile: tonight is the long-awaited opening of Andrew's show at the new gallery at our Maison des Arts et Lettres, and I just couldn't miss it! 

I have been accepted by my closest neighbor even though I live in a tent and she has a big, wide trailer with a deck, which she has privatized by lashing grass mats to the railing and secured it with a rope to keep the gate shut. The family's plastic lawn games and dirt bike are safe from thieves.

 See… that’s what gets me about tent living in the Trailer Park--- she has a deck and I don’t.

She is a plump fiftyish Frenchwoman with short, home-colored gold hair, who sits on her deck in a pink and blue flowered housedress and flip-flops. I met her the first night when I was looking for the outlet for my electrical appliances ( my laptop and my Blackberry charger). 

I approached her carefully, (trailer-park etiquette requires that you ignore strangers, even if they’re right in your face, until they speak politely to you).  She hustled down off her deck and led me to the back of our common lot, showed me some cables entwined in the wire fence separating us from the trailers behind us. (Thankfully the naked man was not in his window). But there should be a box with outlets to plug in those cables ---where was it? She said she must ask her husband, and hurried back up to her deck. She didn’t go into the trailer---she positioned herself by the open window on the deck, and launched the question into the murky interior. A low growl answered back. 

“My husband is taking a sieste", she said, a little apologetically. "He says the box is midway behind the trailer”. She led the way, both of us creeping sideways between the trailer’s side and the wire fence, until we got to a box on a post spewing cables in every direction. There was an outlet left for me, thank goodness. Too bad my ralonge didn't work.

The next morning as I made coffee, I nodded at her, sitting on the deck making complicated arrangements with someone on her mobile phone. She put the phone down from time to time and went over to speak through the open window, like at McDonald’s drive-up, and received a series of low growls. Did that guy ever get up? I pictured him in an undershirt, lying on his back, bald head toward the window, looking up at the tinny ceiling of the trailer.

Mid-morning, as I was washing my breakfast dishes at the spigot out front, a frantic bark sounded from inside her trailer. She got up, opened the door and brought out a scruffy little dog, who got a whiff of Beau and promptly went beserk. From the window, Low Growl ratcheted up to a volley of growls.  Madame made apologies, attached a leash and dragged the dog down the road. When she came back, she put him inside and out came a husky man-kid. When he spoke to her I recognized another voice from the night before: that of an adolescent with Down’s Syndrome. 

As the garçon and his Maman played paddleball in front, I found myself wishing Low Growl would get off his cot and take the boy fishing or something.

On the other side of my tent a Dutch family with a couple of teens spends all day and into the night laughing, eating and drinking and laughing some more. It’s infectious, and sometimes I have to smile and chuckle too, even though I don’t know what they’re saying. The mother came over and spoke to me in French (the Dutch know everyone else’s language). She said her daughter, an animal lover, was dying to take Beau for a walk. The daughter spoke English and approached Beau, who was very happy to leave the Trailer Park and sniff his way along the lane that winds through shady, tranquil Tent City. Tents in nature colors-- green and blue and khaki--sitting on the earth, tucked in between the trees. Ahhhhh. That’s where I belong!  

My neighbors all got together for a party in the trailer across the street—30-somethings filled the deck and spilled out onto the front yard. My Dutch neighbors were there—everybody was there, apparently, except for Madame and Low Growl and the boy…and me. The beer and wine were flowing and the stories got more outrageous as the night wore on. There were thunderous booming guffaws from the males and hysterical shrieks from the females. Everyone was having such a rollicking good time that I couldn’t be annoyed. I was reading in my tent, but I had to giggle at some of the outbursts. 

Much later, when the party broke up and I turned out the lantern, ready for sleep, I heard the voices of the Dutch family close by. They were back on their own deck, hooting and shrieking with laughter. They were speaking their own language now, but they’d brought home the French punch-lines I recognized from the party, reliving the hilarity and giving it their own special embellishments.

The next morning, I greeted Madame as she was putting up another lawn game to play with her boy. I told her I was leaving, and offered her my left-over groceries. She wished me a bonne continuation and gave me a wide smile. A strangely black smile. 

She had no front teeth.

Time to hit the road.

Camping Le Ventadour

Stepping out of my tent into the light of day, I have to admit something to myself. Last night, grateful to have a space to myself with a nice shade tree and help with the electricity, I avoided looking too closely at my immediate neighborhood. There was something not quite right about it---pale angular shapes loomed in the darkness. Human voices accompanied by mechanical clanking. It was disturbing, but I held in my mind the tranquil leafy scene I’d seen on the camp’s website as I settled down to sleep. 

Now as I zipped open the tent flap the first object that greeted me was a trailer hitch, jutting toward me. I remember that trailer hitch. It belongs to the trailer next to me. I pitched my tent facing it because the trailer on the other side has a window that would look right into my private space, and facing it toward the street would have exposed me to the row of trailers across from my site.

I let Beau out of the car, where he had chosen to sleep after freaking out when the walls of the tent fluttered in a sudden night breeze. He likes a more solid enclosure. Who knows what signals danger in the mind of a rescued greyhound. We walked through Camp Suburbia to the river, where I hoped to find the wild natural beauty that I’d paid for with MasterCard.

Here’s how it looks in the morning before the kids come with their floats and flippers. I sat on a smooth rock and watched Beau standing in the clear water in his hunting pose, intent on the tiny trout zipping around just under the surface.  He quickly realized that it wasn’t like hunting rabbits. The first time he thrust his snout into the water he jerked up and blew out bubbles. But he kept at it. If I hadn’t led him back to the campsite he would have stood there calculating his chances for another hour.

Back in Camp Suburbia, I pulled up the tent and turned it to face the street so that if I got up in the night to go out and pee I wouldn’t be impaled on the trailer hitch, or caught in the light from the other trailer’s window, where mysterious voices and shadowy figures loomed. The only other option would have been to turn the tent toward the back, but the morning sun revealed that what looked like a vine-covered wall was really…yes…more trailers. In the closest window, a flabby, shirtless (and probably pantless) guy  scratched vigorously under his arm as he reached up to a shelf and found the coffee to start his day.

I have to be honest with myself. I booked too far into the vacation season. I can imagine the conversation when they received my request for a site. “You know…there’s a little space down in the trailer section we could rent her.” “You’re right! And after all, it’s just one woman.” 

So they'd put me in the trailer park.

 

First Night Camping Solo in the Ardeche

“Why would you want to go camping all by yourself?” asked the Dutch guy at the campground reception. His blonde wife looked up from the desk with a grimace.  I’d just seen the campsite they offered me and I’d just been told there was no wi-fi connection, so I was kinda wondering the same thing. Why would I drive for three hours, accompanied only by a large greyhound, to sleep on the ground in a tent? 

 It’s a personal outward-bound kind of exercise for me—a hurdle I put up on my life path. Last time I did it I was 62. Now I’m 65 and the hurdle seems a little higher. (The French say ‘I have 65 years’. I like that better—as if age is to your credit.) But it is a good personal challenge, isn’t it?  Just you and your mental and physical abilities out there, under a foreign sky, no room service. If you “live” for awhile like that, you can get a pretty good idea whether you still have the chops for adventure.

Speaking of chops, it was Sunday evening and there was no food in sight. Stores closed, restaurants…(what restaurants?)…camp store—Nope. Just a mini-freezer of ice cream bars and cones. And a cold case stocked with drinks---mostly beer. Oh yeah…they’re Dutch.

I remembered I brought Andrew’s fresh tomato sauce and some pasta, so I went back to my site to put up my tent. It’s a big pop-up job that claims to take only 2 seconds to set up and it’s true. But then you have to drag it around to make sure the ground’s level under you, and you have to find a rock to pound in the stakes because you didn’t bring a mallet. But first you have to drive a stake into the ground to hitch up the greyhound.  Then you can bring out your butane camp-stove, and a lantern because now it’s dark and you’re tripping over the cords stretching from the top of the tent to the pegs in the ground. You use a foot pump to inflate the new double mattress—nice! You push and pull it into the tent like an ant with a slice of bread, and you dress it with covers and pillows. Comfy! The greyhound agrees. He slips in around me and elongates himself corner to corner, dissecting the bed into two small triangles holding no possibility of comfort for me. He sighs in satisfaction.

I get the ralonge out—it’s an extension device with multiple electric outlets which allows you to take current from an outlet anywhere in the neighborhood. But when I try to connect the electric cooler I realized it only works with the car’s cigarette lighter. I try to connect the next vital appliance, my laptop, I discover that the thick layer of spattered plaster from months of renovation chez nous has clogged all the connections.

Now I know there is no other way…I have to go back to Mr. Why-Would-You-Go- Solo and ask for his help. I hope his wife isn't at the desk. I hope he has a mallet. Maybe I'll get an ice cream bar too... 

Here I go again...hitch a ride with me! Starting point Saignon, next to Apt, east of Avignon. First campsite is Le Ventadour, in the southern Ardeche, a mountainous region with ancient villages, rivers, gorges and hot springs.