On a warm, bright evening in late June we sat outside an innocuous bar in a quiet street in Avignon armed with cold pints of beer, watching the city wind down towards evening. A newspaper clipping was pinned to the wall by the door. With our smattering of local tongue we read the owner had won the lottery, packed up his successful career in business, and opened a small bar. His fortune had allowed him to step back and live a life that gave him simple pleasure day in, day out.
He was living the dream, and it wasn’t grand or spectacular, merely the joy of an independent lifestyle where he could enjoy the company of his friends and neighbours.
His life was like a holiday.
We looked at the sum of his winnings, some 400k, looked at the tiny bar, at each other.
“What would it take for us to live like that?” I wondered aloud.
We were two and a half months into a long holiday. With a combination of hard work, fortune, and a shared dream, we were lucky to be spending most of 2013 travelling. After April and May were spent soaking up Parisian life, June found us making our way around France by train, spending time in different places every few days, experiencing the vastness and diversity of the country. From biking around the vineyards of Alsace, climbing mountains in Gap, to the heat and lethargic afternoons of Provence.
And so we found ourselves in Avignon, with an idea that lingered tantalizingly like the tannins of the region’s reds. The next night as we sat on the steps overlooking the town square, gypsy jazz drifting on the balmy air, our plans evolved with each breath—a chilli farm, a restaurant, a b&b. Everything seemed possible.
As we continued travelling around, the idea fomented. Each place we went, the people we met, all seemed to turn up fresh aspects of that dream. We wanted to integrate everything we saw and learned and experienced into some way of planning our own future. The challenges and opportunities of small communities, the joy of seasonal local produce, the diverse aspects and experiences of different cultures.
The most challenging part of living a busy city life is that it takes away your time to think. Some people are better than others at carving out their space, finding some time between tasks or workdays. For me it’s an ongoing trial, and I find that I need a really long time to relax properly. But while travelling, I found that after a couple of months my mind was open and fresh, ideas were pouring into that vacuum. Sometimes the hardest thing to imagine is that there might be some other way to live – but being on holiday really is a different way. Soon enough those ideas were focusing on how we could possibly make this lifestyle permanent. We wanted the holiday to last forever, but knowing that was impossible we wanted to make our lives feel like a holiday.
During a couple of months in the UK, the USA, Canada, we kept finding things that drew out ideas and passions. A quiet old house in south-west Ireland was the location for a beautiful b&b, surrounded by forest walks and wildlife and seemingly a world away from city life. In North Carolina we spent a few days at an Airbnb with some folks striving for self-sufficiency, and took a lot of inspiration from their lovely calm garden, an oasis filled with chickens and homegrown produce. But somehow our minds kept going back to France. And so did we.
Even then, when we returned to France for a couple more months in late 2013, it felt somehow like we were returning home. To where we needed to be.
Having grown up in a society that rewards individual achievement and encourages self-reliance, we reveled in the small communities we visited. Coming to understand how connections within community were fostered, how people in different places made do with their skills and the availability of resources was fascinating. It led us to believe that given the time and space, we could likewise find a way to connect with a community by focusing on those things that give us pleasure. No doubt there are people that find their niche this way even in big cities, but we had always felt that we needed more time and space to carry out our plans. There was no point doing it by halves.
Maybe it was coincidence that France was the destination. That the ideas came there, and that attachment was forged by that connection with the time and place. But we believe there is something inherently welcoming about the place, something elemental, that all those ideas and activities that brought us pleasure are central to life in France. Whether it be the vibrant fresh food markets in all the small towns, the focus many communities have on living local and regional pride, the diversity, the food, the wine, the climate, all of that and more clicked in place with our ideals.
Eventually we had to return home to Australia, and back to work. The hardest thing is to remember. All the sensations and emotions that you live seem so immediate and unforgettable, they are your present and this is how you live. Yet quickly all that fades to memory, just sense impressions, and even the insistence of remembering builds a sort of dreamlike quality about a time or place. We refused to let go of that sense of being where we wanted to be, of living life in a way that was at once so unaccustomed and strange, and so intuitive and simple.
That determination led us step by step to where we find ourselves now.
From the first spark of an idea, where we imagined a grand house in Provence with swathes of land attached, we began to realise that while it might be some sort of ideal, it was also unnecessary. Simplicity has its appeal. If we aimed smaller, it could happen sooner. And when we began to explore new areas, it was even more plausible.
From those fleeting images of a chateau in Provence, we were suddenly looking at property in areas we’d not only never visited but never heard of. As we explored, the idea went from a distant possibility to something that seemed achievable within only a few years. Ten years became five became three.
We worked hard for a year, changing the way we lived even then – simplifying, minimizing; as we’d done so well travelling for so long, the concept of what we needed changed rapidly. Looking at houses online became our escape from claustrophobic and busy city life. Each evening was a tour of a new department.
Within a year we were driving around southern France once more, exploring new places, falling in love with new towns. After a month we returned home again, and our idea was now a plan. Not some long distant retirement dream, but a change that was within reach, and the plan for how to get there.
In the end it was another stroke of luck that we happened across our house in France. Online searching led us to a house that we found we kept returning to, trying to piece together a plan from the photos, already organizing in our heads where we would put bookshelves, how to decorate the lounge, which bedroom gets the morning sun. We began to explore the region, the Gers, online, as well as some nearby towns. All of it seemed ideal, from the stunning landscape to the clean air, the culture to the food and wine. Before we knew it, we were on a plane, and one thing led pretty quickly to another.
Each day brings us closer to when we will make the full transition, hopefully in a year from now. With each visit and each concrete step we make towards that new life it seems more real, and more right. Working our way towards that goal is understandably the central thread in our lives, and what brings pleasure is thinking about how we can shape our behaviour and ideas to accommodate it, to build skills and knowledge that will be useful there. That part of the journey is even now under way.
