A mammoth honeymoon around France.
8.1 The honeymoon
For our honeymoon, we spent two months driving around France on the little red scooter. We went from Paris to Paris in a huge loop, travelling 4,000 kilometres at a top speed of 45 kilometres an hour (that’s about 2,500 miles at 30 miles per hour). It was one of the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve ever done. But it wasn’t easy. The only easy bit was the planning.
You see, I think travelling is more exciting when you don’t know where you’re going - and luckily for me, Lina agreed. We decided to go big in the plans and not let logic or reality get in the way. Long before the wedding, we had bought a map of France, pinned it on the wall, and circled all the places we’d heard about that we wanted to visit. That was the easiest part, and the towns and cities racked up quickly. Bordeaux and Marseille, obviously. Brittany without a doubt. The Alps and Annecy would be amazing, so would Provence and the Riviera. We’d heard great things about La Rochelle and the nearby island of Ile de Ré - and I was pretty curious about the English-ified villages in the southwest. Not to mentioned Carcassonne and its medieval history, or the famed boardwalks of Deauville to the north.
We stood back and realized that we’d left circles and underlines all over the map and that it would be nearly impossible to see them all. Due to the unusual hexagonal shape of France - the French even call their country l’Hexagone - it is a difficult country to explore geographically for a road trip. There’s such diversity, and it’s so well spread out that you’d be hard-pressed to find the ultimate route. You can’t just cross from one side to the other, that’s no real achievement. Following the border would mean a mighty 2,913 kilometres (1,810 miles), but then you’d miss a lot of highlights. Sure, you could always zigzag through the country, but then how can you possibly decide where to zig and where to zag? Especially if you start from Paris, which is inconveniently located rather far from the edges.
When we looked hard enough at the map I saw what was obvious. If we started in Paris and headed northwest towards Brittany, then south towards Marseille, then back towards Paris along the eastern side of France, then the route clearly, undeniably, absolutely would make the shape of a heart. Like a frenzied painter working on his masterpiece, I connected the dots and showed Lina the heart shape and watched her raise one eyebrow.
“It doesn’t really look like a heart,” she said, squinting at the map on the wall. “Maybe an anatomical heart, but not a love heart”.
I redrew the lines to make it even clearer. A tighter pinch at Marseille, a wider loop into Brittany - and a similarly wide loop on the way home. If you stood back far enough and squinted hard, the dots undeniably formed the shape of a love heart. Lina burst out laughing but agreed to the idea. Although it was a gimmick, the heart gave us a goal, a plan to stick to and it actually made it much easier to decide where we’d go.
We estimated that we’d spend between six weeks and three months on the road, letting the onset of winter and colder weather dictate the end of the trip. The scooter, after all, was much better suited to riding in the summer sun. The very idea of an adventure with no real end point was so freeing and exciting. Even more so considering we wouldn’t have a home to come back to, as our landlady in the 11th arrondissement had decided that she would sell her apartment. The timing was awful, on the one hand, but instead of complaining about it, we decided to see it as a positive sign. An even broader horizon had just opened up and it seemed like the perfect adventure to launch us into married life.
In the excitement of the trip, I mentioned our heart-shaped travel plans in a podcast episode. The next day a game-changing email dropped into my inbox from a listener in Brisbane, Australia.
“Hey Oliver. I’ve been listening to your podcasts over the last couple of seasons. Congratulations on your engagement! The idea of your round-France journey sounds fantastic, although it sounds more like a slow amble on your 50km/hr max scooter. It will be great to highlight some of La France Profonde. We have a little house in a small village in the Charente. It’s a lovely area and you may even be passing through on your journey south. If you’re nearby, and are so inclined, feel free to visit the village of Verteuil-sur-Charente for a couple of days and stay at our place gratuit, a little wedding gift from one Aussie to another. Cheers and all the best, Jim.”
I was speechless. I knew that the podcast had a lot of listeners at this point and I knew that people enjoyed the show, but no one had been so openly generous before. There had to be a catch… what did Jim want in return? Or was his place a wreck? Or was he, could he be… an axe murderer? With the email was a link to his home and it turned out to be one of the most charming I’ve seen. Nestled in the centre of the medieval village of Verteuil, on the banks of the Charente River, the 18th century stone house was cosy and inviting. Real village life, exactly how I’d imagined the French countryside to be.
I emailed Jim to see if he was indeed an axe murderer, and it turned out he was a kind soul who just wanted to give something back. On the next episode of the podcast I read out Jim’s email to thank him, but also to share the developments of the story - and it sparked something I’d never have predicted.
When I woke the next morning, my inbox was flooded with similar emails. Someone with a house in Chantilly; another in Cognac, Nancy, Carcassonne. By the end of the week I had made a folder to keep up with all the offers - together with a map so I could locate these exotic-sounding places. Carpentras, Essoyes, Grenoble, Paimpol, places I’d never even heard about before. Other listeners wrote in and said we could use their frequent traveller points to book hotel rooms. It was unbelievable.
Of all the offers, the one that made the planning the easiest was from Chantilly. Susan, the Irish owner of the property, said her place was available for one weekend in August. Located an hour out of Paris, it seemed like the perfect destination for the first night of the trip. We chose Giverny for the second night, and decided we’d never plan further ahead than that. And it was fortunate that the listeners were so generous, because I was still on minimum wage and we’d be relying on their membership fees to fund our travel. Luckily the scooter only cost five euros to fill up. Here’s to a healthy, carefree, wondrous adventure! Or so I thought.
8.2 The disease
On an unusually cold and overcast day in mid-August, we packed our luggage onto the back of the little red scooter and headed north out of Paris. It was a 45 kilometre trip to Chantilly, where we’d spend the first night of our honeymoon. As we drove out of Paris and through the suburbs we learned a lot about our limitations almost immediately. The first being that it was pretty hard to figure out which roads we were allowed to drive on. We knew that we couldn’t legally take the autoroutes - the kind of highways where cars could get to Chantilly in mere minutes. We had to take the back roads. But we didn’t know how to find the back roads. At first we experimented with setting the GPS for a bicycle, which worked well. That is, until it would inevitably lead us to a children’s park or a little alleyway - neither of which the scooter could cross. A few times on that first day we ended up on big highways where the speed was up to 100 km an hour, and it scared us both. Remember, our scooter could only go 45 km an hour and having trucks whoosh past us was horrifying. Every time we ended up on a major road we took the first available turnoff and headed to the safety of the back streets.
The drive took several hours and left me feeling surprisingly tired. Suspiciously tired, even, but I didn’t think too much of it. Susan, our lovely hostess, had organized a cottage for us in the charming town. She walked us over to the Chantilly chateau, which had its own taste of fame as a James Bond movie setting. We even got exclusive access to the royal stables for a video, but all the while I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind: Why am I so tired?
We only stayed one night and moved on towards Giverny, a drive that was more than twice as long as that from the previous day. And as the morning progressed, I couldn’t shake the concern about my fatigue. It was worrying me at this point, not least because I started to feel deeply sore over my whole body. I ached, all the way from my shoulders to my legs. I knew riding the scooter would be a challenge, but I hadn’t imagined that it would leave me feeling like this. I searched online and found it was fairly normal for motorbike riders to get sore arms and shoulders after long drives, so I tried to ignore it. Surely, after a few days, I wouldn’t notice anymore.
But it got worse.
After a few more days I needed to rest after every half an hour of driving. We’d pull over and I’d lay down on the side of the road to recover. In the nights I had cold sweats beyond any I’d experienced before and I was starting to wonder if it was a good idea to continue with the trip. Lina, who at first had said she was also sore from the ride, realized that we weren’t on the same playing field and began to keep a close eye on me. It was around this time that an unusual mark appeared on my right thigh, a red rash that continued to grow and sprouted concentric circles.
By the time we reached Deauville on the north coast, a pharmacist said it looked like an insect bite and gave me some cream and headache tablets. I figured that was that. I frolicked on the beach, delighted to walk in the footsteps of Coco Chanel and all the other wealthy Parisians who had flocked to the town for their summer getaways. We were five days into the trip and I was glad my mystery illness would be cured. Despite still feeling pretty grim, I pushed on along the coast to the sobering D-Day beaches, then we marvelled at the medieval tapestry in Bayeux.
But I didn’t get any better. One afternoon, a week into the trip, I went to a drop-in doctor in the middle-of-nowhere, Normandy. After three years in France I’d still never been to a doctor, so part of me was quite excited by this new experience. Not least because I was eager to use my social security card that had been so hard to get. My doctor didn’t speak English, but there was no mistaking her diagnosis.
“Oui, ça c’est la maladie de lyme,” she said after a brief look at the bullseye on my leg.
If you’re wondering what that sentence means, then you know exactly how I felt when I heard her say it. What the heck was maladie de lyme? Using a little help from the internet, we understood that I’d been bitten by a tick, and that tick apparently wanted to kill me. Perhaps it was a revenge for my fruit fly massacre the previous summer. While I may not have noticed the tick bite at the time - it had left me with an unusual illness known as Lyme Disease. The main symptoms, the doctor said, included intense fatigue (which can last up to six months), fever, headaches, and joint pain. Well, that sure explained why I’d been feeling so rough. We also learned that if untreated, Lyme Disease can lead to infections of the brain and heart, memory loss, and severe joint problems. Extreme cases can be even worse.
The doctor put me on Amoxycillin and told me to get some rest. We drove less each day, took it easy on the exploring front, and avoided potentially tick-infested areas for safe measure. And it seemed as if the drugs were doing the trick. Indeed, I enjoyed another lovely week of the honeymoon, while my symptoms seemed to disappear.
We explored the northern coastline of Brittany and fell in love with it once again. We revisited Fabien for a lesson in making the local specialty of galette pancakes. We wandered the sands at the mythical abbey island of Mont Saint-Michel, getting lost in its medieval streets. The nearby town of Saint Malo triggered my interest in fortified towns, an interest that would almost overwhelm me by the time we got to Carcassonne. We even got up to Ploumanac’h, a town with remarkable pink granite beaches (not to mention the remarkable apostrophe in its name). We were now two weeks into the honeymoon and decided if we were going to go around the whole country, it was time to escape the northwest and to head south for the first time. We wanted to chase the sun and to find the lavender, the vineyards, and the open road.
Yes, life was good again. It was the honeymoon we were hoping for. We rode in T-shirts and shorts, with the summer sun beating down on us as we headed for the west coast. We were in love, newly married, and were on the open road. And we didn’t have a care in the world.
It was around this point, while driving down a road in rural Brittany, that the sun was so strong that it made the back of my neck tingle. Funny how the sun can make you itch, I remember thinking. Lina interrupted my thoughts to say that she had noticed a strange rash on my neck that wasn’t there just minutes before. I looked down and saw that the rash had spread to my arms too.
This Lyme Disease wasn’t finished with me, it seemed.
8.3 The wolf
They say there are no wild wolves in Brittany, but they’re wrong. I saw one. It tried to bite our scooter as we arrived in the village of Guermeur. We’d found a cottage in the woods where I could relax and recuperate for a few days from the Lyme Disease. I was loaded up on antibiotics from the village doctor in Normandy, eleven boxes of pills in total, but this rash was worrying me. By now my chest, back, and legs were covered in spots, and we headed - once again - for a local pharmacy.
We scooted some 10 kilometres out of Guermeur and into La Sourn, population 2,000. The pharmacist took one look at me and said I had to go immediately to a doctor. She was looking worriedly at my throat. My throat? I looked in the mirror to see the rash was spreading quickly, now covering my entire body - even my palms. The local GP was just down the road, and the receptionist told me a doctor was available. Unbelievable, not even a second’s wait. Imagine that in Paris!
The doctor, a young man from the area, asked me many questions while inspecting my body. His interrogation gradually drifted further off topic until I realised he was perhaps more interested in something beside my illness.
“And how is your throat?” (Bad.)
“And does this hurt if I press this?” (No.)
“And are you sweating at night?” (Yes.)
“A lot?” (Yes.)
“And how long have you been travelling for?” (Two weeks.)
“And how long will you continue?” (Maybe two months.)
“And where will you go next?” (Vannes.)
I began to realise that these geography questions weren’t about nearby doctors or tick-infested national parks. No, he was after something else.
“What about after Vannes?”
“Do you plan to stay in villages or in cities?”
“Have you heard of the Gulf of Morbihan?”
The questions glided smoothly from health to holiday. By the end of the visit I had tips for the entire western coast of France. Almost as an afterthought, the doc told me I’d had an allergic reaction to Amoxicillin, hence the rash. We headed onwards to the chemist at Pontivy to get my new drugs.
“Try and avoid the sun,” the pharmacist said, handing me my new pills, Doxycycline. “Any exposure to sunlight will cause severe sunburn.”
When I told her we were driving a scooter around the country all day and every day, she handed me the strongest sun cream she had and told me to use it liberally and wished us luck. We visited the tourist office in the town, which is inside a péniche moored to the canal-side. The woman at the desk said it was the only tourist office in France on a boat. She directed us to the main sites of the town, including a 15th century chateau built in the style of King Philippe Auguste, who was behind the city walls of Paris that had grown so dear to me. Now armed with a good grounding in Pontivy, we dined on croque monsieurs, completed the suggested walking tour, then headed back to Guermeur, where the wolf was waiting for us.
I say wolf, and it definitely looked like a wolf, but I suppose it was a Breton Husky on steroids. Whatever it was, it was waiting by a farmer near the entrance to the village, and as we pulled in and drove by it gave chase. The farmer screamed at the hound, something that sounded like “Didier!!!” Now, Didier is a pretty pathetic-sounding name for a wolf-hound, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I was focused on two things: the beast tearing after us and the road ahead.
The dog was snarling as got closer. I accelerated as we passed an abandoned church. Lina was yelling as we flew through the cornfields. But I couldn’t go too fast, the roads were too small. The wolf gained on us, gained on us, then drew level. He looked at me, my bare left leg, now spotty from the spreading rash, no doubt a tempting treat for a hungry predator. I skidded around yet another corner, where just 24 hours earlier we’d picked blackberries and eaten them on the go. The dog pulled back and started biting near Lina’s ankles.
From pure instinct I navigated through the country roads. I tried to put some distance between us and the monster, which I could now see had switched to the right side of our scooter, eyeing up my other leg this time. In the side mirror I saw into its bloodshot eyes, which were looking into mine.
I’m not ashamed to say I was scared. What if the wolf leapt at us? What would I do? The farmer and his screams were now far behind us on the other side of Guermeur. It was just us and Didier. I heard what sounded like the wolf biting the back of the scooter - and it may well have been that - or it may have been a rock hitting the bike, or a screw flying loose as we tackled the uneven terrain.
And just as it was all getting too much, just as I was thinking I’d spend my last moments in the jaws of a Breton wolf, the creature stopped dead in its tracks and turned away, trotting back to his owner. Miraculously, I’d steered us back to our own cottage, which was on a road called “Dead-end swamp” (Impasse des Marais).
We pulled into the driveway and didn’t hang around to inspect the bike for tooth marks or blood. Instead, we went inside, shut the door, locked it for good measure, and caught our breath. Then we relaxed. Just as the doctor had ordered. That night, we skipped the sunset walk through the cornfields and stayed inside, watching the sky from the window of our little cottage.
And fancy that - shining stronger than the stars was a perfectly formed full moon.
8.4 The croc
There’s no better way to truly experience a country than to see it from a scooter. I’ve read similar things about riding a motorbike, but we told ourselves that a top speed of 45 km/hour (30 miles) was more pleasurable. Now several weeks into the trip, we were getting used to the slower-paced lifestyle out of Paris and were delighted by the friendliness of the locals.
Elderly ladies would wave at us from their kitchen windows as we chugged by. One time a whole team of village firefighters whooped and cheered as we passed. Every time we stopped for a meal or a snack, shop owners would ask us where we were from, and the further we travelled the more impressed they were with our adventure. One cafe owner stopped us mid- conversation to call over his wife.
“Françoise, come here, this is énorme,” he yelled, then retold our story using elegant French words and phrases that I noted and tucked away to remember.
It was through these exchanges that I learned how to say words like périple instead of voyage, which I think sounds much more impressive. I worked on my routine of explaining the trip so well that I knew how to get laughs from the locals. After revealing our top speed, 45 km an hour, I found that if I added “but it’s 50 when we go downhill” then even the toughest mechanic would chuckle. The trip was a valuable way to improve our French, as we found ourselves talking about things that never cropped up in daily Paris conversations. We would have to discuss extremely specific directions; or would have to negotiate the price of scooter repairs; or we’d have to eventually master describing the heart-shaped route (en forme d’un coeur). Travelling through the countryside of France is an excellent way to improve your French (the scooter bit is optional).
As we continued the trip we were meeting some memorable characters too, perhaps none more so than Éléonore. You may remember the story of the crocodile in the Canal Saint-Martin. Heck, you may even believe it. But a big part of the story that really gave it some credibility was that in 1984, sewer workers found a baby croc near the Pont Neuf on the Seine River. After a short stint in a Parisian aquarium, the reptile was sent to a zoo in Vannes, a town in western France. One of my favourite parts of the story was when I found out that she was still alive all these decades later. But nothing gave me greater pleasure than meeting Éléonore the croc when we passed through Vannes on the road trip. The staff took us behind the scenes to get up close to her. Éléonore, they estimated, was a 40-year-old Nile Crocodile. She was three metres long and weighed 200 kg (10ft and 550 pounds). Part of me was sad to think she’d never taste the local fish of the Nile River. Part of me was sadder still that her enclosure was designed to look like the Paris sewers, where she was found, and not the wilds of eastern Africa. But mostly, I wondered what would become of the two crocodiles in the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Would they ever make it to the age of 40?
These were the thoughts in my mind as we continued to head south through the French countryside. As we left Brittany the weather turned even warmer, and we spent long days scooting through the sunflower fields of western France. It was a scorching summer, which I would have loved if it weren’t for the damned medication. I was supposed to be avoiding the sun at all costs. Where I’d previously been wearing a T-shirt and shorts, I now had a bandana around my face, sunglasses, a jacket, and gloves. But the sun still found me. By the time we got to La Rochelle my nose and lips had more or less peeled off. As we crossed the enormous bridge to the beautiful island of Ile de Ré, I must have looked like a zombie. But it didn’t matter to me; we had finally made it to this popular summer getaway and I was keen to see what the fuss was about.
We stayed in the port town of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, where I’d go through the final hurdle of the Lyme Disease. We rented a tandem bike and set off to explore the salt fields. These fields, or pools really, are laid out like patchwork across the island and are crisscrossed by cycle paths. Locals are on hand, harvesting the salt, and selling it off with salted caramel at mobile stalls. Our tandem ride, which led to a little fishing village, had all the markings of a romantic honeymoon activity. But me, I found it hard to enjoy the romantic part of it all. I was on the front of the bike and the sea salt was so thick in the air that you could taste it. Well, I couldn’t taste it - I could feel it. My lips were so badly peeling that it felt like someone was rubbing that salt on my open wounds. Lina was squealing in delight on the back of the bike and I squealed along with her. But little did she know that I was squealing in pain as the thick salty air crucified my raw face. Back near our hotel, I popped into yet another pharmacy for some cream and wondered how many we’d visited so far.
As we watched the sun set over the harbour from our hotel room, I reflected on the honeymoon so far. Sure, there had been a lot of struggles, and it was easy to focus on them. But there’d also been moments of pure romantic bliss. Earlier that day, on the salt field ride, we’d stopped to take in the view. An older man, a local from the village, offered to take our photo as we posed with the tandem on the harbour’s edge.
“Don’t fall,” he said to me. “But then, you’ve clearly fallen once already. Into the arms of madame.”
8.5 The breakdown
I heard the helicopter before I saw it. Thwack thwack thwack thwack, the blades pounding away dangerously close to the scooter. I scoured the sky above the sunflower fields, but saw nothing. The noise continued as I slowed down, making it immediately and painfully obvious that the thwacking noise wasn’t a helicopter at all. It was the front wheel of the scooter. We were in trouble.
I pulled over to a nearby dirt road and parked across the middle of it to investigate. We were in the deep countryside of western France, and far from phone or internet reception. I laid on my back and inspected the damage. There were two loose screws on the front brake pad. It was an easy fix, all I needed was a specific Allen key, the exact kind of which I didn’t have. I reflected that several people had said we had a few screws loose when we told them our honeymoon plans, and they appeared to have been proven right. I set about trying to tighten the screws with anything I could find. Scissors, a key, a matchstick. But nothing worked. Just when all hope seemed lost, Lady Luck decided that she had other plans for us.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a truck pulled up beside us. Two tanned and wrinkled farmers stepped out and gazed at us with amused smiles.
“Vous avez un soucis?” one of them asked, in a sentence that literally translates to “Do you have a worry?”
Boy, did we have a worry, we explained. We pointed to the wheel and tried to find the French words for “brake pad”, “Allen key”, and “screw” - none of which I knew at the time (and actually, none of which I know now).
“We saw you and your scooter as we drove past, and thought it seemed a bit bizarre, so we turned back to check up on you. That’s our farm up the road,” said one, introducing himself as Fabrice.
“Can you make it up there with the scooter? We can take a look, perhaps.”
We wheeled the scooter along the road to their barn, and Farmer Fabrice was waiting for us with a perfectly fitting Allen key. He tightened the screws in mere seconds.
“You’re the first Australian I’ve met,” Farmer Patrick, his colleague, said to me. “And you’re the first Swede,” he told Lina.
As with all the other country folk we’d met, the farmers admitted that they had no time for Paris, and hadn’t been there since they were children. Too many people, too fast, too much stress. Why would you live in Paris when you could live in the countryside, they wondered. Farmer Fabrice stood up, dusted off his hands, and said the job was done.
“And I have something for you, a little gift for the road,” he said, jumping onto his pushbike and disappearing over the hill.
We were left with the other farmer, talking about our journey, Paris, and why my lips had peeled off. Farmer Fabrice returned with a glint in his eyes, concealing my apparent gift in his clenched fist.
Tenez, he said, take it.
I took the object, small, metallic, rigid, and I looked down to see the most valuable gift I’ve ever received - Farmer Fabrice’s back-up Allen key.
“It may come in handy along the way,” he said with a wink.
We thanked the farmers, noting how lucky we were that we had broken down so close to their farm.
“Lucky? Why, yes of course, you know where you are, non?” Patrick said. “You’re in the village of Saint-Félix, he was the patron saint of good luck”.
The sun was getting low in the sky and the farmers advised us to hit the road again if we were to make it to Verteuil before dark. We mounted the red beast, fastened our helmets, and prepared to take off. Farmer Fabrice had a parting message.
“I have one word for you: merde,” he said. (Which is French for shit.) “Don’t ask me why, but in France, when we want to truly wish someone good luck, we just say merde. So, merde,” he concluded.
“Yes, merde,” echoed Farmer Patrick. “Now, get back on the road and don’t lose that key.”
With that, we pulled out of the farm and onto the road again, the scooter purring like a happy kitten. We had endless cornfields ahead of us and there wasn’t a helicopter in sight.
8.6 The Brits
Did you know that a lot of Brits retire in the south of France? Many of them feel like they’re maybe too old to get 100 percent into the “integrating” side of things and end up creating little English communities. As I understand it, a couple typically buys a place in a quaint little village, then lets their British friends use it as a holiday house when they’re away. Those British friends become equally charmed by the lifestyle, then end up buying their own plot of land somewhere in the village too. Eventually, another Brit sees an opportunity and buys the local pub (or opens one) and sometimes even gives it an English name. Tourists from the U.K. will end up hearing talk of these little havens where the bartender speaks English and they pass through on a vacation and sometimes end up staying for life.
Now, I think it’s wonderful what they’re doing. Often they bring some much needed money, and I’ve read reports of some local communities crediting these Brits for the survival of their villages. But I’d never experienced this British phenomenon until we got to a place called Verteuil-sur-Charente, somewhere roughly east of La Rochelle. It was 150 kilometres inland and it put an unsightly dent in the side our lovely heart-shaped journey, but the village sounded just too enticing to miss. It was here that Jim, the Australian podcast listener, had his home and it was here we’d stay for a week. I’d always been curious about village life and had long wanted to experience it for more than just a day or two. This would be our chance.
Over the course of the week, we got to know everyone in the village. It turned out that Jim was something of a local celebrity, or at least that’s how it seemed. Whenever we talked to a shopkeeper or cafe owner, they’d inevitably ask where we were staying and when we said “Jim’s place” they’d beam and ask us how he was doing. We’d say that we’d never met him, and they were bamboozled by the story of his wedding gift. Then we’d get into talking about the podcast and the honeymoon and by the end of the conversation we’d feel like we’d made another friend in the village.
A British couple on the far side of town looked after Jim’s home when he was away, and they’d greeted us with a bottle of wine. A few days later, they invited us to dinner at their house, where it felt like the whole Anglophone community had gathered. Over the coming days, we’d bump into them all at the local hangouts, and they’d introduce us to new people. The slower pace of life, the trust between the locals, it was all too good to be true - and such a far cry from the big city life we were used to in Paris. At one point, I got a haircut at the local barber and when it came time to pay I realized he didn’t accept card payments. I had no cash, but said I could go and find an ATM.
“Ah, there’s no cash machine in the village. Pay me when you can, no rush,” he said.
By the end of the week, we had become locals. On our last night, one of the Brits in the village was having a blowout party for his 70th birthday and we’d been invited. It was surreal. We knew everyone, or at least that was how it seemed. There at the bar were Kev and his wife, our dinner hosts. Out in the beer garden was the Scottish couple. A British plumber we’d met at the local cafe offered us a glass of wine. And look, my hairdresser was talking to our favourite waitress at a table in the distance. It was all such fun, but it started to remind me of a movie ending where all the characters meet up in a dream after the main character dies. By the end of the night, just about all of the villagers had invited us back to Verteuil to stay with them at some point in the future. And we said we’d come.
As we packed up and hit the road again the next morning, I thought about how a week in a French village would suffice at this point in my life. Give me another thirty years, however, and I might just come back for good.
8.7 The accent
The first time I heard someone from southwestern France speak French, I got the giggles. I didn’t mean to be rude, I really didn’t, but it was just too funny. We were staying at a little bed and breakfast owned by a friendly lady with warm, kind eyes. She was so kind, in fact, that when she learned we hadn’t eaten dinner, she brought us bread, eggs, and tomatoes from her garden. But what I’ll remember most was her accent. She was pointing out a good path to wander along in her enormous garden. The word for path in French is chemin, which is pronounced in Paris like “sh-MAH”. The sh should be short and the mah should be long and gentle. But that’s not what the woman said. She said “sh-MENG”. I’m not exaggerating, she literally said sh-MENG. But it wasn’t just that. Her full sentence was that the path wasn’t far (loin) away. The way I’d learned, the sentence should be “The sh-MAH isn’t lwah”. But she said “the sh-MENG wasn’t LWENG”. And when she said it, I’m ashamed to admit it I laughed. I thought she was joking.
“What did you say?” I asked.
And she repeated it. “The sh-meng isn’t lweng”. What the hell was going on?
“Why are you saying lweng and not lwah?” I asked, baffled at whatever game she was playing.
She took one look at me and laughed too.
“Ah, jeune homme, you’ve never met a Toulousain before?” she asked. “That’s just how we speak down here.”
And she was right. That’s how they talked. Any of the words that have a gentle ah sound instead get a strange eng instead. And you hear it a lot. See you tomorrow, à demain, goes from ah-de-mah to ah-de-meng, bread (pain) goes from puh to peng, and the word for good, bien, goes from bee-uh to bee-eng. My favourite was when they put several together, like saying “tomorrow morning” (or “de-MENG ma-TENG”), which I thought had a fantastic ring to it. It doesn’t even sound French; to me it sounded more Indonesian.
I later learned that this southern accent was often ranked as the most charming in France, even the sexiest. It’s sometimes called provençal, or the language of Occitan, and is apparently a remnant from the old regional dialect. I found it fascinating and definitely charming, but I also found it very hard to see the sexiness in it, or to take it seriously.
I asked a policewoman in Carcassonne about it and she just raised an eyebrow. There’s nothing strange about it, she said, which makes sense - no one finds their own accent unusual. I asked her if she would mind speaking into my microphone so I could give the podcast listeners a taste of this phenomenon. She agreed, and I scripted the following sentence: “Demain matin, je vais acheter un pain au chocolat” (Tomorrow morning, I’m going to buy a pain au chocolat pastry). My idea was with the demain, matin, and the pain, the accent would shine through. But she had the last laugh.
“Ah mais non, down here we don’t call them peng au chocolats, we call them chocolatines,” she said with a wink.
Ah, rumbled again. I noticed from that point on that no pâtisserie in the southwest made any mention of pain au chocolat. In fact, it’s the only place in France where the famed chocolate-filled pastry is known by another name. But would a pain au chocolat by any other name taste as sweet? Yes, is the answer. The chocolatines were delicious.
By the time we left the southwest, I had fully embraced the eng and was using it with carefree abandon. If someone thanked me along the way, you could bet I didn’t say de rien as I would in Paris. No way, I said de rieng, and I said it proudly. And nothing was going to stop me. Rieng du tout.
8.8 The Alps
We spent a few more breezy weeks driving through the south of France, which was every bit as wonderful as it probably sounds. We explored the small villages of Provence, the seaside towns of the Mediterranean, and the student cities like Bordeaux, Montpellier, and Toulouse. I learned that Carcassonne was the pearl of France for anyone with even a remote interest in history. All the while we were booking our accommodation one day ahead, sometimes even on the same day. It was a mix of AirBnB, hotel websites, and simply showing up at places and asking if there were any rooms available. And of course, we took up the occasional offers from lovely listeners who welcomed us into their homes. We even stayed in an old castle in Cognac and splashed out on my birthday at a fancy hotel with a Michelin-star restaurant downstairs. But for the most part, it was budget travelling. I was filming live videos along the way for the podcast members, and without them, we’d have had no income to continue the trip. I’d filmed live streams from the ramparts of Carcassonne and Saint Malo; while making galettes in Brittany; from a vintage car show in Angoulême; along the D-Day beaches of Normandy; and through the heart of Bordeaux. As we moved through the south we filmed from Montpellier, Roman arenas, and from the top of the famed Pont d’Avignon bridge. And we were blessed with good weather at every step of the journey. Lina and I were also doing weekly podcast episodes, discussing what we’d seen and giving recommendations along the way.
By the time we reached the northern part of Provence, we realized the warm weather wouldn’t last. We only had one day of rain in two months - and we were well aware that if it got too cold or wet then it would be too dangerous to carry on. A farmer we stayed with in Normandy who collected motorbikes had taken one look at the tyres on our little scooter and had forbidden us to ever drive in the rain - or even when the roads were wet - and his warning had stuck with us. We set our sights on Annecy, a mythically idyllic Alpine town just beyond Grenoble, where we planned to have one last hurrah before tackling what would be the biggest challenge of the journey - crossing the mountains.
Annecy, for its part, lived up to the hype. It’s the most beautiful town in France and I tell anyone who’ll listen that you shouldn’t leave France without visiting it. We were there in October, yet the skies were blue, the sun was out, and it was warm enough to take a dip in the transparent waters of Lake Annecy, which I did. It feels like you could point a camera at any angle and strike gold with that town. With its clear-watered canals, its Alpine backdrop, and the fairytale charm of its old town – it took us just five minutes to realize it was worth staying an extra night. But that may also have been because we knew the next day would be the hardest both physically and mentally. We were in the most mountainous part of France and couldn’t get out without going up and over.
When it came time to leave Annecy, we filled the fuel tank for just five euros, as usual, but also filled up an empty plastic juice bottle with some extra gas, just in case we got stranded. We scrutinized the maps much more strategically than ever before, trying to find the roads with the least traffic, but crucially, the ones that had the gentlest inclines. The Red Beast had made it over 3,000 kilometres so far and we didn’t want to push it any more. Worse, we didn’t want it to die halfway up a mountain. The phone reception was terrible out there and we couldn’t take too many chances.
It had also gotten cold. We’d been on the road for 55 days. The summer had ended, we were in October, and autumn had grabbed the countryside by both shoulders and given it a good shaking. The temperatures had dropped considerably, gone were the T-shirts and shorts, we rode with jackets, several layers of sweaters, and scarves.
And in tackling the mountains we had made up our minds up about one thing. If we didn’t make it, we’d leave the scooter to rust on the side of the road as a warning to other scooterists foolish enough to take the same trip. Like Green Boots, the mountaineer who died on Mount Everest and whose body has marked the way for countless other climbers, Little Red could maybe be useful for years to come.
The journey was intense. The scooter struggled. When the mountains got to their steepest our top speed was around 10 km an hour (six miles). We sometimes drove in zigzags so the engine wouldn’t stop. But while the ride was excruciatingly slow, it meant we could appreciate the stunning autumnal views. The wooded slopes blazed red and orange, the golden pastures stretched out below steep roadside cliffs. We stopped to drink from Alpine streams. But my favourite was the Peregrine Falcons that soared majestically above and kept us company through the deserted Jura Massif. Well, I like to think they were keeping us company. They were probably hoping for an engine failure and the rare chance to feast on Australian and Swedish meat.
In the afternoon we reached the summit right as the scooter sounded like it was about to breathe its last. We did it! We parked the bike on the side of the road, took off our helmets, and hugged one another. Even though we had been sitting all day, we were hit by such incredible fatigue - which had probably been accumulating over the past eight weeks. The downhill ride that followed was the sweetest of the entire trip.
We reached the town of Lons-le-Saunier on the other side of the mountains and the hotelier couldn’t believe what we’d done. He kept repeating the details as we told him. You started in Paris!? Via Brittany?! You crossed the mountains?! For a honeymoon?! He upgraded our room to the biggest he had and sent up congratulatory drinks.
Lina and I, exhausted, unfolded our map of France on the bed and studied it once more. The plan had been to make a sweeping arc back towards Paris via the northeast of France, thereby exploring a new part of the country and tidily completing the other arc of the love heart shape. But as the sun set out the window and we sat on the edge of the bed, we decided that enough was enough and we instead planned a direct route back to Paris. The heart was a gimmick, and even though we’d based so many of our decisions on that silly heart-shaped route, completing it didn’t seem important anymore.
In some ways, that day felt like the last of the journey, even though we’d continue for another week. We had driven 130 kilometres that day, which might not sound like much to you if you’re used to travelling by car or motorbike, but for us it was a stupendous achievement. Tough driving conditions, perilous and unfenced ledges, and speeds as slow as 10 km, it was no wonder the hotelier was amazed. As for me, I was done. Absolutely wrecked. And so was Lina.
We plotted the route back to Paris with a rough idea of where we’d stay each night. While the carefree adventure was now (pretty much) over, we planned for a few memorable sights on the way home like some ancient caves and the pilgrim site of Vézelay. But make no mistake, we were done. We had conquered the mountains. The Red Beast was now The Alp Slayer.
And we slept very well.
8.9 The return
I knew we were officially back in Paris when I saw the other scooters. For two months, we were the only scooter on the road. Cars would beep their horns as they passed us, waving in delight to see us in the remote French countryside. Other motorists would chat to us at gas stations. But the novelty was gone as we approached the capital from the south. It was strange to see how the city became so much denser from such a long way out. Cornfields turned into houses. Houses turned into buildings. Roads turned into highways. Traffic lights popped up more and more frequently. And there was traffic. Heavy traffic. And just like that, we no longer felt unique. We were back to being one of the pack. Two people in the glorious heap of a million. Sure, we had a story, but everyone did. This was Paris, after all.
We took a few victory laps around the Arc de Triomphe then headed to a friend’s place to crash, and to crash hard. The friend was out of town for the week and we didn’t have anywhere else to go, after all, since our apartment had been sold off while we were away. Meanwhile, the hotel prices in Paris were a rude awakening after two months in the countryside. That night we went to our local bar to meet our friends who we hadn’t seen for months. And each of them, without fail, walked into the bar and said the same thing:
“I’ll be honest. I was certain you wouldn’t make it”.
But we did make it. 4,000 kilometres, countless terrible hotel rooms, two months, one honeymoon. We’d scooted through the wild plains of the Camargues national park, where white horses and pink flamingos roam in green fields and on white beaches. We dined in Michelin starred restaurants and swam in the Mediterranean. We’d broken bread with village mayors, had numerous run-ins with local doctors, and three visits to the mechanic for repairs. I tasted cognac in Cognac, Bordeaux in Bordeaux, and Chantilly cream in Chantilly. We’d admired the ancient arenas of Provence, explored abandoned chateaux, and even stayed in one. I’d met fans, friends, and family along the way - and more kindly strangers than I could ever list. We’d scaled the ramparts in Carcassonne and Mont-Saint-Michel, dipped our toes in three different seas, and shared the view from the top of the Alps with soaring falcons.
In short, we’d seen France, the real France, the France that isn’t Paris. And we could appreciate, well and truly, that it’s a magnificent part of the world. The trip put the country into perspective, and as a result, it let me understand Paris and its people better too. Most French people in Paris aren’t originally from the capital, and they often take great pride in talking about their hometowns and regions. Now that I was armed with the context from the trip, I felt I could understand the French a whole lot better. After all, as we had heard time and time again on our trip, we had probably seen more of France than many French people ever will. It wasn’t an easy journey but we did it and it was wonderful. The scooter survived. And so did the relationship, thank God.
And for the umpteenth time in my Parisian life, I got ready for bed that night exhausted and I wondered what my next step would be. After all, we didn’t have an apartment, our belongings were in storage, and we had no idea what the future held. As I got to bed, I saw Lina looking over the map from our trip and it turned out there was one last surprise.
She was drawing the last day of the journey onto the map, and she paused after adding the final stroke. She stepped back, turned her head to one side and furrowed her brow.
“You know,” she said, “we may just have made the heart shape after all.”
She took the map, which was almost as big as the bed, and turned it ninety degrees in a clockwise direction. Unbelievably, miraculously, we had indeed made a heart shape - and a rather impressive one at that. When we’d ducked inland from the west coast to visit the village of Verteuil, we’d fashioned a clear inward pinch or cusp at what was now the top of the heart. Annecy, to the east of France and on the opposite side of the country, was now the pointed outward pinch at the bottom. Paris and Marseille marked the outer edges, with the arcs now looping around Brittany and the southwest.
“It’s a miracle, a romantic miracle,” I said.
“It’s a miracle that the scooter survived,” she responded.
We’d been in Paris for almost four years now. The real miracle would be if we could find another apartment and make it to five.