Suppose there's a woman you've always desired, but her heart belongs to another. Or maybe there's a job you've always fancied, or a wristwatch, or a car. You wait for it. Or perhaps there's a sovereign nation that you and your family have always wanted to invade, but the moment never seemed right. What do you do? You wait. Almost nine years ago, a married couple I knew told me they'd just spent two weeks walking and eating their way through Provence.
These trails run from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from the Spanish border to the Belgian, linking almost every quaint little village in the country to almost every other one.
My friends walked these paths by day, slept in cozy village hotels by night, and sampled regional cuisine along the way. And every afternoon on their stroll, they would find some pretty spot perhaps a scenic ditch, near a lavender field and they would lay out a picnic lunch of baguettes, cheese, sausages, and French wines.
Then they'd get a little drunk and doze off together under the warm Mediterranean sky. The ditch, the cheese, the wine, the napβ¦I wanted all these things, desperately and immediately. But I had to wait. I had a marriage to dissolve first, jobs to finish, bills to pay. And I did finally find him, two years agoβmy Brazilian-born, French-speaking, wine-worshipping, tripe-consuming, uncomplaining traveler of a sweetheart. As soon as we met, I had an instinct about this man.
The way another woman might, on a first date, suddenly picture herself having a baby with the guy across the table, what I pictured was this: me and him, eating a duck's liver together in a French ditch. And lo, it came to pass. For on a recent Thursday morning, my companion and I landed in Paris to commence this journey. And in that small window of time between getting off the plane and hopping on the train to Avignon, we 1 bought a corkscrew, 2 bought a cheese knife, 3 ate two pains au chocolat , two croque monsieurs , a blood sausage, and a stuffed cabbage, and 4 drank an entire bottle of Bordeaux.
