Do it yourself in the south of France

My friend Karin turned 50 in May. Her plan was to celebrate in a large, 10-sleeper villa in the south of France. After a lot of toing and froing, a spectacular currency crash and some unexpected setbacks at the 11th hour, only three of us made it to Karin’s party. And what a time we had! Here’s how we did it:

Stay at an Airbnb

Airbnb is a very cost-effective way to travel if you’re prepared to live like you do at home – which for us was the whole point.

Look for a place that gives you use of the entire property. Our host, Francois, and his son moved out of Las Barthes for the week that we were there. It was great to be able to move the furniture around to suit our needs, play Annelie van Rooyen at full blast till midnight, drink champagne on the lawn, hang our delicates up on the line and generally poke about the place at will (in a totally non-judgmental kind of way, of course).

If you’re looking for 5-star pampering, this might not be the best option for you. But for us, it was perfect.

 

Rent an automatic car with a GPS

In this day and age, a GPS is vital for an exploratory holiday. It’s rather expensive rand-for-euro (about 13€ per day), but with all the money you’ve saved by renting at Airbnb it’s a very worthwhile investment. We called our GPS voice “Suzy”, and she became our fourth on road trips. She did go on a bit sometimes, but there’s always someone like that on a holiday.

In a country where they drive on the right, an automatic car is a non-negotiable. As it is, I tend to open the passenger door to get in, reach right to put on my seatbelt and look left to check the rear-view mirror when driving a left-hand-drive car. Having to remember to change gears with the wrong hand would have been one step too far. Traffic circles are difficult enough to negotiate as it is without having to worry about stalling on top of it.

Talk to people

Download an offline dictionary. Use your high school French. Part of the fun of going to a fresh produce market in rural France is trying to communicate. We caused a fantastic sensation wherever we went, and always ended up with amazing food and wine. And don’t think of it as “They don’t speak English.” Why should they??? Think of it rather as “We don’t speak French.” If all else fails, just point at things. I downloaded an app called Fr-En Dict from the App Store, which was excellent.

Our food and drink bill was just over 10€ per person per day, by the way. Invariably this involved at least three meals and a bottle of wine each, plus snacks. We also spent a fair bit on cleaning materials, notably bleach and some version of Handy Andy. Francois (our host) seems like a bit of a hippy, having made a good life as a beekeeper in Paris before moving down to the south of France to get closer to nature. Las Barthes is a “bio” farm (we think, but can’t be 100% sure because of our bad French) so we took the leftover bleach and ammonia with us when we left… just in case he gave us a bad rating on Airbnb.

Buy fresh bread daily

We found the little corner café in the village nearest to our chateau (as we called it) and popped in for a baguette every morning. There’s nothing like freshly baked bread, crispy on the outside and squishy on the inside, with your cheeses, strawberries, charcuterie and yoghurt for breakfast in the morning. Yesterday’s bread simply will not do!

Make a plan every day

You don’t have to decide at the beginning of your trip what you want to do and see. We went on to www.francethisway.com every morning to see what might tickle our collective fancies that day. Then we would hop into the car and ask Suzy to take us there, which she would do with amazing accuracy and only a little bit of exasperated nagging if we decided to ignore her.

It would be awesome! Or it would be a bit crap. Or we would decide halfway to go somewhere else, much to Suzy’s chagrin. So maybe we missed some famous church or castle in the area; but we did buy delicious fish and goat’s cheese pancakes from a crazy Moroccan woman who we dubbed Tannie Couscous, get lost in a teeny-tiny town with the narrowest streets I have ever seen, and find fresh strawberries wherever we landed up. Karin even baked a cake for her birthday.

 

Everything is closed from 12.30 to 2.30

(Sometimes 3.30.)

If you want to catch the markets, you have to get there in the morning. We were spectacularly bad at this, and only managed to get to one or two markets while they were still open. In fact, most of the time we ended up reaching our destinations when the entire village was closed. Totally our own fault, and well worth a giggle whenever it happened. We would wander around for a while, have an ice cream or a coffee, investigate the church and then hit the streets again once everything was open.

Travel with like-minded people

This is probably the most important tip for any holiday, anywhere. The three of us were all in total agreement about the tone of the holiday. Wake up when you want to wake up. Have breakfast. Decide if you want to go somewhere. Then go. Or don’t. Read a book. Whatever. There were no squabbles about whose turn it was to cook or wash the dishes. No one got upset if we went left or right. We ended up where we ended up, laughed at ourselves for arriving during the siesta again, and appreciated the journey.

And that’s what holidays are meant to be about.

 

 

Details:

We flew to Toulouse on Air France via Paris and rented a Renault Kadjar from Europcar through rentalcars.com (an excellent app, by the way). We used Airbnb to rent Las Barthes (a.k.a. Les Barthes on some maps) near the village of Pailhès (pronounced “pie-yes”) in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The house has wifi, or, as the French call it, “le weefee”. I didn’t think I wanted le weefee, until we had it. It was very useful in helping us to make plans, download books and, of course, stream Annelie van Rooyen.

Neem my op vlerke, indeed.