A Villa Holiday in France

It started at a lunch party one Sunday. Why not rent a villa in Provence? We had two young children and our friends also had a child. We could share the costs and even share baby-sitting.

After a mountain of research (the bit I enjoy the most!) and many hours of surfing the net we found a villa that looked just right; four bedrooms, a pool and a large garden with enough space for both families to be private. Booking was simple and the final price included the ferry crossing, although we opted to upgrade this to the Euro tunnel. We are used to driving on the continent and both our girls are good travellers but our friends flew Ryan Air and hired a car on arrival.

We set out at the crack of dawn one September morning, - this was pre-school so luckily we weren’t tied to school holidays. We shot through the tunnel and were on the Péage by 10:00 French time. We had planned our route using www.mappy.com (much cheaper than GPS and it even calculated our fuel and toll charges). Our route took us via Paris and the infamous périphérique and within 3 hours of leaving Calais we were on the A6 heading South of Paris. Having two young children we’d decided to break our journey at a French B&B (Chambre D’Hote). We’d looked on the web and found the brilliant Alistair Sawday guide, Special Places to Stay in France. (www.sawdays.co.uk) Sawdays has never let us down either in the UK or in France. The guides contain specially selected places to stay (all over the World) often on a spectacular scale. We were heading for our halfway point at Saône et Loire just South of Dijon at the Abbaye de la Ferté, which turned out to be a fabulous Chateau with 60 bedrooms (www.abbayeferte.com). We stayed in the Gatehouse and had two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and dining room to ourselves for about 80 Euros all in. What a bargain!

The next day we had an easy four-hour drive down the Péage to “our” villa in the Vaucluse in Northern Provence. The last half hour was the most exciting when we pulled out the directions provided by the villa owner, which proved to be perfect. The anticipation was tremendous, would the villa be as good as it looked in the photographs? What if we didn’t like it? In the event as we turned into the drive the girls said “Wow!!!” The garden was huge and the villa was everything we had hoped for. Built in an L shape around the pool with French windows from each of the bedrooms leading out onto a pretty terrace. Inside was a huge living room and super American style kitchen. After a few minutes a beep from outside announced the arrival of our friends in their hire car. Their flight had gone perfectly and they’d picked up the hire car at the airport. They too “wowed!” around the house and within half an hour we had unloaded the cars and allocated bedrooms to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. We now had two glorious weeks to laze around the pool and explore. The days passed easily, sometimes sitting at home, Mums and Dads reading and swimming and the children almost constantly in the pool. On some days we set off on joint expeditions for lunch, a picnic or exploration of neighbouring sights, Avignon was not far, Aix and the hill villages of the Luberon a little further. We found a wonderful little guide “Lazy Days out in Provence” an ideal way to find interesting places to visit and good restaurants for lunch. We found that French restaurants were quite relaxed at having small children sitting down to lunch, in fact we relaxed, the children relaxed and the meals were altogether less stressful than would have been the case at home.

Special days stand out. We visited Bonnieux, in the heart of Peter Mayle Country, a beautiful hill village and then toured neighbouring Menerbes and Lacoste (home to the Marquis de Sade!) and bought cases of wonderful wine from the Chateau de xxxxc our favourite wine from this region. Most of all we enjoyed visiting the local markets; every village seems to have a Market on a different day of the week. These were especially good for buying food for picnics and dinners at home, delicious cheeses, fruit and vegetables. We also loved searching out and buying all those things that make Provence so special, lovely lavender, gorgeous Marseilles soap, Herbes de Provence, Provencal Honey, olives and olive oil. We also scoured the art galleries and antique shops looking for “Objets” to take home.

On a couple of nights we either baby-sat or our friends baby-sat for us and we were able to go out for a romantic dinner à deux. On one long days drive, we headed down to the Mediterranean and visited St Tropez, but surprisingly even in the September “off season” the roads were congested and we were happy to return to the peace and quiet of Provence Profond where the only traffic tended to be local farmers and their tractors bringing in the grape harvest. At this time of year (mid September) the air is filled with the smell of the grape. All too soon the end of our holiday arrived, our friends headed for the airport and we headed for home (via Euro Disney) by car.

Was it a success? You bet it was!

Since this holiday we’ve returned to France every year, always staying at different villas and in different regions of France.