You don’t know me, but I feel like I probably know you a little bit. You’re an English-speaking Francophile. Chances are, if you're reading Connexion, you live in France. And maybe even somewhere in France that isn't Paris.
Maybe you can help with a little plan my fiancée and I are formulating.
You see, for our honeymoon this autumn, we are going to travel around France for six weeks. But doing it in a car would be too obvious. Doing it on a motorbike would be too daring. Doing it on our little red Paris scooter, however, is just the ticket.
And seeing it’s for our honeymoon, we’re planning our route to be in a big heart shape.
But herein lies the problem. What exactly should we see along the way?
We have a rough plan. There's a list of the 20 main cities that make up the rough outline of the trip at the bottom of this article, but we're not truly interested in the cities.
We want to know the best villages, the best national parks, the best beaches, towns, sand dunes. The best place to pick grapes, milk cows, and taste cheese. The best place to understand France’s history, smell French lavender, and drink French wine.
There are good tips in the guide books and online - but we want to go deeper - and we hope you will be able to suggest great locations off the beaten track. From people who have been there, done that, bought the beret.
I’m Oliver Gee, I’m a podcaster, writer and blogger based in Paris, and I run The Earful Tower, a show about figuring out France. And I want to take a massive leap outside Paris and showcase the rest of this wonderful country. In other words, I want to share France with the tens of thousands of Earful Tower listeners and I want to show them the best bits.
It’s not just a podcast, it’s a series of YouTube videos, Facebook lives, and Instagram stories too. I’m really going to go all in.
And while it might sound like an unusual idea to share so much of such a private thing as a honeymoon, it’s the only way I can justify a six-week holiday on the salary of a podcaster.
Anyway, I’d really like some tips from you experts, so please get in touch via email, Facebook, or however you want.
And if you’re the kind of person who likes the sound of the adventure, please be sure to hit the various subscribe, like, or follow buttons and join us on this wild trip. You could even become a member, armed with the knowledge that your subscription fee would probably be enough to fill our little scooter with petrol.
As for the trip, it starts August 15, heads anti-clockwise from Paris, and will eventually return to Paris in late September.
So…. What shouldn’t we miss?
The 20 cities that mark the route: Paris, Giverny, Rouen, Caen, Rennes, Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Montpellier, Aix en Provence, Marseille, Nice, Monaco, Grenoble, Lyon, Dijon, Nancy, and Reims.
You can follow Oliver and his bride's fortunes here
Website: theearfultower.com
iTunes for the podcast: itunes.apple.com/podcast/the-earful-tower
Facebook:www.facebook.com/TheEarfulTower
Patreon:www.patreon.com/theearfultower
