514 - Join Us in France Travel Podcast

Table of Contents for this Episode

Categories: Moving to France, Occitanie

Discussed in this Episode

Autignac
Languedoc
Béziers
Mediterranean
Pyrenees
Faugeres Wine Appellation
Provence
Deux Chevaux
Renault 4
French Immersion School St. Paul Minnesota
Collège
Lycée
Lycée La Trinité Béziers
Occitan
Vendange
Narbonne
Les Halles de Narbonne
Sète
Plage de la Baleine
Marseillan Plage
Etang de Thau
Bouzigue oysters
La Garrigue
Cistus flowers
Wild thyme
Wild rosemary
Wild fennel
Côte Vermeille
Bagnouls
La Guinelle
Collioure
Mussels
Razor clams
Fresh oysters
Les Tuiles de Sète
Octopus pie
Water jousting in Sète
Pont du Gard
Grands Buffets Narbonne

[00:00:00] Annie Sargent: This is Join Us in France, episode 514, cinq cent quatorze.

Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.

Today’s Trip Report

[00:00:31] Annie Sargent: Today, I bring you a trip report with Steve Hoffman. In this episode, you’ll immerse yourselves in French culture through the eyes of Steve, an American author who visited France a few times, then decided to transplant his family to a winemaking village in the Languedoc.

He shares his deep insights into French village life, local cuisine, and unique travel experiences that emphasize connection over novelty. This is all about how you can fit in once you move to France. And this episode offers practical tips that will enrich your understanding of French culture, and inspire your own travel adventures.

Podcast supporters

[00:01:11] Annie Sargent: This podcast is supported by donors and listeners who buy my tours and services, including my Itinerary Consult Service, my GPS self-guided tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, or take a day trip with me around the Southwest of France in my electric car. You can browse all of that at my boutique: joinusinfrance.com/boutique.

Patreon Supporters

[00:01:31] Annie Sargent: Patreon supporters get new episodes of the podcast as soon as they are ready, and ad-free. If that sounds good to you, be like them, follow the link in the show notes.

After the Interview

[00:01:41] Annie Sargent: For the magazine part of the podcast, after the interview today, I’ll discuss the reopening of Notre Dame in December 2024.

There is a lot going on.

Bootcamp 2025

[00:01:52] Annie Sargent: And an important announcement about the bootcamp for 2025, the dates are set, I’ve sent an email to people who asked to be on the waiting list, as they get first dibs. Next, I’ll be opening up spots for patrons, after that it will be open to all listeners. The bootcamp typically sells out quickly, so if you’re interested, make sure to keep an eye on your email, Patreon messages, and of course, the podcast for more updates.

Spots go fast, don’t miss out.

And if you are new and have no idea what bootcamp I’m talking about, you can hear all about it by listening to episodes 445 and 498.

Or email me Annie@joinusinfrance.com

Steve Hoffman, book author

[00:02:45] Annie Sargent: Bonjour, Steve Hoffman, and welcome to Join Us in France.

[00:02:48] Steve Hoffman: Bonjour Annie, it’s a delight to be with you.

[00:02:51] Annie Sargent: Wonderful to see you. Your publisher reached out to me because you wrote a book about France. Introduce the book just in a couple of sentences, we’re not going to talk about the book very much until the end of the episode, but I would like you to say the name and so people have an idea.

[00:03:07] Steve Hoffman: Sure, the book is called A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France, the Other Southern France being the Languedoc Roussillon, as opposed to Provence. And it is the story of our American family of four’s immersion into a tiny winemaking village, in the Languedoc, just north of Béziers, so about 50 minutes north of the Mediterranean, about 50 minutes east of the Pyrenees.

[00:03:29] Annie Sargent: Right. And this is a part of France I know pretty well, although I’m going back to Béziers in a few days with Elyse because we want to just get reacquainted with the landscape. I used to go all the time when I was a kid, and so this is an area that I love and the beach there are nice cause they’re mostly sandy beaches.

We had chat before we decided to go ahead and record this episode and also you sent me a file where I asked you a bunch of questions.

Immersing in Languedoc: First Impressions

[00:03:55] Annie Sargent: And one of the questions is: what is a good theme for our conversation? Your response was the richness of narrow and deep travel experiences of staying in one place long enough to let it start telling you its story rather than chasing newness and adventures.

So why don’t we start there, because this is not your typical trip to visit a country, is it?

[00:04:18] Steve Hoffman: Correct. Correct. This was intended as an extended stay from the start. I’ve spoken French for all my adult life, I took it in school, I took it in college, I had an internship, I had a stage in Paris when I was 23 years old where I sort of transitioned from being a French student to being a French speaker.

And then our children went to French Immersion School in St. Paul, Minnesota, where we live. So the initial motivation was really just to have the kids go to school in French schools. So that it would cement those language skills. Their curriculum was in French, but still in an American school, there’s still an awful lot of English that gets spoken at the lunch table and on the playground, etc.

That was the initial motivation. And I think my wife, Mary Jo, and I had an idea that we would sort of figure it out. And when we arrived, it was very, very different from what we had expected. We understood that we had chosen the Languedoc because it was more affordable than Provence.

[00:05:09] Annie Sargent: We tend to like offbeat experiences rather than sort of traditional experiences. And yet, even then, I think, our visions of the trip were informed by overflowing flower boxes and beautiful cobbled walls and visions of, you know, a two seater…Deux chevaux?

[00:05:25] Steve Hoffman: Renault 4?

Grace Kelly in a scarfdriving along the cliffs of the Côte d’Azur.

Settling into Village Life

[00:05:31] Steve Hoffman: So, we did arrive to a very dusty, very tiny 800 person village in late summer, with the cicadas singing, and it was very much a rural agricultural setting, which we were not at all prepared for. In the end, I think it was exactly the best thing that could have happened to us, but it took a long time for us to shift our expectations from what we had thought it was going to be, to what the place was telling us to be.

And in the end, I think it also, in some sense, adjusted what we value in travel, which is picking a place and understanding thatalmost any place on earth, if you stay there long enough and you engage with it deeply, is full of diversity and richness. And here was this little place that’s the equivalent of, you know, Des Moines, Iowa in the United States.

It was nothing special at all, but it was our having been forced to be there and take it on its terms that turned it in the end into a kind of a magical place and a place that we have kind of committed a portion of our lives and our adult attention to.

[00:06:32] Annie Sargent: Right. So what’s the name of the village? And you rented a place, right?

[00:06:36] Steve Hoffman: Correct. We rented a house from an Irish landlord. He happened to be the first one who responded when we basically, you know, flung a series of electronic darts at southwestern France and one of them landed on Autignac, which is the name of the village. And Bill, the landlord, got back to us.

It looked like a nice place and that was about as much planning as we did. So Autignac is one of the five villages that make up the Faugeres Wine Appellation, which is a Languedoc, a small Languedoc Appellation that has a reputation for high quality in a region that is not necessarily known historically for great wines.

It’s often considered the lake of wine, it had an era when it made a lot of very inexpensive wine for the army and so on.

[00:07:17] Annie Sargent: When I was a kid, it was the worst possible wine you could buy, not that my family drank a lot of wine, but yeah, you know, it was known that it was like ‘the vin de table’, but the very cheap ones.

[00:07:30] Steve Hoffman: Exactly. Yep. Yeah. There are stories in town of, you know, in early or late in the last century, or even early in the last century, part of the daily nutrition of the vine workers was three liters of wine. Of course, it was eight or nine degree wine, so it was terrible wine, but it was at least considered part of their… so they would drink their three liters of wine, work all day, and then come back the next day to drink their next three liters of wine.

[00:07:49] Annie Sargent: Dear God, yeah. Yeah, okay. Yes. This is a very rural place. You hadn’t even been before, you just went there because you found a place that you could rent.

[00:08:03] Steve Hoffman: That’s correct. And because it was going to be a fall semester. The other half of my career, I’m a food writer and author for the second half of the year, but the first half of the year, I’m a tax preparer in the United States. And that’s a very intense, very seasonal career that happens between February and the end of June for the most part.

So that allowed us to commit to being in this place for quite a long time because I generally make most of our annual income in the first half of the year. So we were there in a fall semester and part of choosing Languedoc was the climate, frankly. We live in Minnesota, it gets very, very cold beginning as early as November.

And this is at least a place that was going to be warm and of all the warm regions in France, you know, the Languedoc North, the Béziers was going to be among the more affordable.

[00:08:44] Annie Sargent: Right. Right.

Educational Adventures in France

[00:08:45] Annie Sargent: How old were your children when you did this?

[00:08:48] Steve Hoffman: Joseph was nine, my son, and my daughter Eva was 14.

[00:08:51] Annie Sargent: Right. When did you complete this adventure?

[00:08:54] Steve Hoffman: This is in 2012.

[00:08:56] Annie Sargent: Okay, so it’s been a long time. You’ve had plenty, you have plenty of time to reflect on…

[00:09:01] Steve Hoffman: Correct. Correct.

After that first trip, we did go back several times. So the kids went to school in those same schools or they moved up, you know, through the elementary school to the collège, to the lycée. We did go back, you know, both in 2014, 2016, and then 2019 as well.

We went back with our son. He went to then private Lycée La Trinité in Béziers.

[00:09:22] Annie Sargent: Uh-huh. And would they do part of the year in France and part of the year in the US?

[00:09:27] Steve Hoffman: Correct. They would do the fall semester in France and then come back to their home schools for the second semester.

[00:09:32] Annie Sargent: Wow. Did that create complications?

[00:09:35] Steve Hoffman: It was surprisingly easy on the French side, which surprised me. I expected a lot of bureaucratic fighting from the French government, and we didn’t get much of that at all. They were very, very open and welcoming. You know, there are not a lot of English speakers in this area, and the ones that are tend to be British, so the fact that we were American made us a little bit of a novelty. And they were just really surprisingly non bureaucratic and non resistant to this. It was almost more trouble in the US schools because the curriculum is fairly strict and they wanted to make sure that the kids were getting the right history and the right chemistry and so on.

And we had to sort of argue: ‘Listen, you know, if you’re about education, this is going to be about as wonderful an education as can possibly be imagined for these two kids. Do we really have to dot every single i about whether they studied, you know, George Washington?’ It was a mixed bag, but actually on the French side, it was extremely accepting and welcoming.

[00:10:27] Annie Sargent: Well, there’s a thing also in France, a school cannot turn away a kid.

[00:10:31] Steve Hoffman: Sure, there’s a spirit of that there as well.

[00:10:33] Annie Sargent: There’s a spirit of that, like, you show up with your kid, I’ve seen this when we had the people who do the weekend, well, it’s a long weekend fair festival thing that they put up like amusement rides and stuff. So they show up with these big huge trucks and they pull these huge rides that they’re going to set up, and they’re going to be in the village for a week or 10 days at most. And the ones that had kids, the kids went to school. For just those 10 days, however long. That’s just how it is because they need to go to school, and they are amazingly resilient because they change schools constantly. That’s really hard on the kid, but that’s not the situation here.

The Food Experience at French Schools

[00:11:12] Steve Hoffman: No. And I think what we found with the schools is that there was just a very strong emphasis on education being more than simply sitting in a classroom. Certainly, when we are there, I know this has changed in the years since we were there, butwhen we were there, there is also very much an emphasis on lunchtime being an education, that you were educating the palate. They would have a different cheese every day, and they would have a true French course meal with a salad and a main dish, and generally cheese, and then a dessert, and the dessert was usually a slice of fresh fruit. And I think they also saw this as a form of education.

This is going to be a new person with different experiences among classmates who was going to help to educate the French students in what a different part of the world was like. It was really refreshing and pretty great.

Village School vs International School

[00:11:55] Annie Sargent: Right, and this is very unlike a lot of people who moved to France with a family and just put their kids in the English speaking school, which we have several in large cities. But you made the choice to just send your kids to the local village school, which is also what I did. I didn’t even consider sending my kid… we didn’t know we were going to stay long term. We thought we were coming back to France for two or three years, was the original plan. And I just thought, no, no, she’s just going to go to the village school because that’s the only way your kids are going to get to know the kids locally. And especially ours is an only child, so I was like, yeah, no, she needs to get to know the kids in the village and make lifelong, you know, even if, even though she hasn’t turned out to be super close to any of them, but she still, you know, gets they are friends, let’s put it this way.

[00:12:48] Steve Hoffman: I also think there’s just simply a perception among villagers that if you’re going to their school, you’re a little bit more part of them, rather than you are commuting out of town every day and then coming back for dinner.

[00:12:57] Annie Sargent: Yeah, definitely. I’m assuming that your kids speak very good French at this point.

[00:13:03] Steve Hoffman: Yes, our son went on one additional trip and it started younger. So his is better. And I pride myself on my French and my French accent. Although it’s interesting, it seems to deteriorate a little bit as I get older. But one of my son’s great joys, and one of my wife’s great joys, who does not speak French very much, and who doesn’t care about her accent, and her grammar as I do care very deeply.

You got great joy out of late in the process of our son getting compliments that he actually did sound like a native, and was had his accent was getting better than his dad’s.

[00:13:33] Annie Sargent: Good for him!

[00:13:35] Steve Hoffman: Yeah, it was great. He also got to learn some really great Marseille slang, which was fun as well. That kind of seeped into the local vocabulary.

And of course that left me in the dust. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he loved it.

[00:13:47] Annie Sargent: Yeah, so I asked you to rank your favorites and that’s the first thing you put up is, watching my kids become French school children, which goes to totally what you were just saying. It is true that within a few weeks, my daughter came home and she could speak French all of a sudden, and she spoke it with a Toulouse accent.

[00:14:05] Steve Hoffman: Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. Oh, I love that accent so much.

[00:14:10] Annie Sargent: So there you go. One time she asked me about, if I knew about David Beckham. You know who that is, right?

[00:14:16] Steve Hoffman: Of course. Of course. The British soccer player. Yes.

[00:14:19] Annie Sargent: Marianne, it’s David Beckham. And she said, Oh, everybody’s talking about David Beckham.

[00:14:25] Steve Hoffman: Our favorite story is Joe came home and had to do a dictée, and one of the words was house. And he spelled it because, you know, with the Midi, the southern accent, that you have those ings and ongs and add it to the end of words, and so he spelled maison phonetically, M É S O N G, mesong.

[00:14:47] Annie Sargent: That’s adorable.

[00:14:48] Steve Hoffman: That’s one of our favorite, one of our favorite moments.

[00:14:51] Annie Sargent: Yes, yes, that’s adorable.

Connecting Through Local Experiences: Winemaking

[00:14:52] Annie Sargent: The second thing you listed is picking grapes during the Vendange, so you actually worked.

[00:14:58] Steve Hoffman: I did very much so. What happened really is that we got there, and we were a month or more in and just really not becoming a part of things. There was a two fold pressure there. One is that we had arrived and my vision of France is, once you get there, it’s all done. All you do is just live there.

And, I like speaking French, I like talking to the local people, and early in the trip, there was a moment with my wife where she was sort of like, you know, this has to be different this time. It’s not just us, we’re here with kids, this is going to be among the biggest challenges of their lives.

We need more from you, Steve, as the French speaker in the group, than kind of showing off your beautiful French to shopkeepers and waiters. And the implication was, France is great, but France is your thing, and if you don’t make this something during this trip, then there’s much less motivation for us to have this relationship with France.

So I was very motivated because that’s been a huge part of my adult life. It’s one of the pillars of my adulthood, is this relationship that I have with France, and the French language, and French culture. So I was very motivated to try to then fit in and bring the family along with me into this place.

And it was not easy. It’s, you know, it’s a tiny French village. It’s very insular. There’s a sort of old Provençal, Occitan mindset, which is, you know, if you’re born even one village over, you’re an estranger, or an estrangé, it was very hard to fit in. And then, at some point, the light dawned on me, as I started seeing the traffic and activity increase in preparation for the Vendange, that we are surrounded by vineyards and vines.

The Practice of Wine-Making vs Talking About Wine

[00:16:27] Steve Hoffman: If you’re going to get to know this place, maybe it would be a good idea to get out among the vines. So I volunteered to pick grapes with our next door neighbor, who became a very good friend of mine. That led in turn to my actually working in the village, one of the village wineries that makes up the Fougères app appellation.

I met two winemakers there who’ve also become since very good friends. And so I had this interesting experience where I was, I would spend a lot of mornings in the vines picking grapes, and then I would spend a lot of afternoons in the winery watching the vinification and the pressing, and the moving from vat to vat. And I got a very accelerated, very surprisingly complete education in winemaking at sort of the ground level, not the sipping beautiful scents that arise out of a glass of wine, but the very industrial, agricultural, hardworking, blue collar element of making wine, which I absolutely loved.

And it really changed my relationship with wine from then forward. Getting to know the winemakers and the details of how they turn that raw material into something so beautiful and refined is a very big part of what I love about wine now, after being a, you know, somebody who’d like to sip it and like to know about it, but didn’t have that kind of deep relationship with it.

[00:17:36] Annie Sargent: That’s beautiful. That’s really fun. And there’s no better way to get to know people than to work with them.The recommendation I give to people is that they can, and should join associations, dancing, sewing, soccer, anything.

Join associations and volunteer your time. That’s how you get to know people.

[00:17:59] Steve Hoffman: Any chance at connection, exactly.

[00:18:01] Annie Sargent: Make connections, just show up and it’s going to be a little bit awkward the first time, the first couple of times and you’re going to go: ‘Oh, what am I doing here?’ But people, once they’ve seen you around a couple of times, that’s it, you’re part of the clan, but they do need to have had a chance to see you in their normal habitat, I guess.

How to Break the Ice with French People

[00:18:22] Steve Hoffman: Absolutely. And I think there’s a certain type of travel and a certain type of traveler that travels in order to gain knowledge, and they tend to also then be the kind of traveler who wants to impose their great knowledge on other people. And what, in the end, I didn’t know anything about winemaking, and I didn’t know much about this region.

And so there was at a certain point, I had to revert to a position of sort of wonder and ignorance, and it was amazing how many doors that opened. Because instead of me trying to prove myself that I was worthy, or that my French was good enough or that I knew enough to be accepted here, admitting my ignorance and giving the impression that I wanted to learn just opened the doors.

It was this huge invitation for people to share their lives with me, to share their knowledge with me. Once that attitude shift happened, the integration just was absolutely accelerated.

[00:19:13] Annie Sargent: Yes, if you want to meet a French neighbour, the best thing you can do is go knock on their door and ask them if you could borrow a litre of milk or a couple of eggs.

[00:19:23] Steve Hoffman: That’s fantastic, that’s fantastic, absolutely.

[00:19:26] Annie Sargent: Because, you will open the conversation, and then the next day you go back and you return the item, and that’s it.

You are now engaged. It’s a question of breaking the ice with French people. And asking them for help is an excellent way. I think it’s the best way to break the ice with French people. Say, look, I’ve never done this in your case, show me how you do this.

[00:19:50] Steve Hoffman: Right. I had a similar experience. The village was small enough that we didn’t have a butcher, or a fishmonger in town. We did have an épicerie and we had a boulangerie, but we didn’t have a butcher or a charcutier. And so we would have a fishmonger come into town once a week in his truck, and we would have a shellfish monger come in from the Etang de Thau, which is just south of us near Sète. Yes. So the oysters at Bouzigue were delivered to us weekly,

[00:20:14] Annie Sargent: Fantastic. That’s my kind of place.

[00:20:17] Steve Hoffman: It really was, honestly.

And so once again, as an American in France, there’s this fear of coming off as the typical American who is ignorant, who doesn’t know things and kind of throws his weight around in an unpleasant way. I’d fought that for a lot of my time in France.

And I had a similar moment to what you’re talking about, which is I was in line, you know, Mediterranean fish is a very, very different thing from the fish of the Atlantic, and certainly of the Pacific, they’re small, and they’re spiny, and they’re bulbous, and they’re big eyed, and I had no idea what to do with it. And at some point, I couldn’t pretend any longer, and I just simply asked the fishmonger how he would prepare this fish that he was selling me, and I was immediately surrounded by people giving me their recipes, who then became advisors and consultants for the rest of our trip there. It was overcoming this fear of being the ignorant American, but in fact, being ignorant in an open hearted way was actually, it made them sort of accept me much, much faster, in fact.

[00:21:11] Annie Sargent: Right, and as a food writer, you know food, so it’s not like you knew nothing. You knew a lot.

Correct. Well, the interesting thing is I was not a food writer when we arrived. Part my food writing actually arose out of this trip.

So I arrived as somebody who had always loved food, who had a big appetite, who found huge comfort in restaurants going back to when I was a child, I had anxiety as a kid and restaurants and their rules were something that were very, very comforting to me.

So food had always been a huge comfort, but actually it was keeping a journal during this trip, that set me on the path of being a food writer.

The Basics of Mediterranean Cooking

[00:21:44] Annie Sargent: (Mid-roll ad spot) That’s fantastic. So you taught yourself, you mentioned, the basics of Mediterranean cooking. What are some things that you learned?

[00:21:55] Steve Hoffman: Well, one of my favorite things is the fact that in Mediterranean France, there’s a lot of outdoor cooking during the summer, a lot of grillade, and I began as a good American buy my lumps of charcoal at the supermarket and learning from our next door neighbor who owned vineyards that no, no, no, no, no, that’s not what we do.

In southern France we grill over vinewood. So you grill either over ceps de vigne, which are the stumps, the larger stumps, or the sarments, the branches. And the smoke is different and the heat is different and it just fits, it’s just beautiful. So that was one of the most important, and unfortunately it’s not reproducible in the northern half of North America, but it was one of my favorite memories, and every time I smell that smoke it brings me back to…

[00:22:37] Annie Sargent: Right, because we should explain thatgrapevines need to be replaced once in a while. When they get old they don’t produce as much, and so they have machines that will come dig them out. And I’ve seen this many times. My parents actually bought a piece of land that had a lot of old vines on it, and I saw the machines come and dig them all out.

And normally, you would then plant new ones. But then what do you do with the stuff that comes off the ground? Well, you cook with it.

[00:23:08] Steve Hoffman: Exactly. Correct. Even when the vine is still producing, there’s still the annual pruning. And so you cut the smaller branches and those then cut into sections and those become firewood as well.

[00:23:18] Annie Sargent: Yeah, they make firewood, they make really good mulch as well. I have a mulching machine. I have a vine that’s getting way too big.

And at the end I will chop it down and, well, I’ll chop most of it down andjust chop up the, you know, chop the bits and use it as mulch, is very nice mulch as well.

Right, and so you got to know the Garrigue, which is the type of land, the very dry, rocky land of this part of France.

[00:23:44] Steve Hoffman: Correct. It was very intimidating at first. First of all, again, we were expecting kind of glamour.

Discovering the Subtle Beauty of the Landscape

[00:23:50] Steve Hoffman: When you think of the south of France, you think of the Côte d’Azur, you think of, you know, Cannes, and then we got to this place, my wife is a photographer, an artist, her photography all has to do with nature and generally the nature that’s found right around her.

So, we came in as nature lovers. My son was an insect lover and a nature lover. And we were prepared to have a relationship with this landscape. But when we arrived, it’s so dense and so prickly, and so dusty, and so difficult to penetrate, that we were like, this is sort of this iconic Mediterranean landscape, you know, this is really what all that it is?

And in the end, Mary Jo takes a photo every single day and posts it to her blog, so we had to get out and we had to gather material. And so there was this slow incremental growing familiarity with that landscape, that was both in the end, sort of subtly beautiful, there’s a lot of thistles, which look intimidating, but their flowers are beautiful.

There’s a lot of very subtle small flowers. There’s the beautiful cistus flowers.

[00:24:46] Annie Sargent: Yeah, they’re everywhere.

[00:24:47] Steve Hoffman: It just sort of, it kind of crept into our hearts very slowly.

The Heart of Local Cuisine: La Garrigue

[00:24:50] Steve Hoffman: But the other thing that, for me, really became clear again slowly, but in a very rewarding way, was how the extent to which that landscape is absolutely lies at the heart of the local cuisine.

You go out in the garrigue and you’re going to smell, you know, you’re going to walk over wild thyme and there’s wild rosemary, and there are, you know, olive trees sticking their heads up above the brush, and there is a wild fennel everywhere.

[00:25:14] Annie Sargent: Oh, the fennel is so good.

[00:25:15] Steve Hoffman: Oh, I just love it.

[00:25:16] Annie Sargent: And you take a walk and you just grab a stick and stick into your mouth.

[00:25:20] Steve Hoffman: Exactly. It’s interesting because there is an attribute given to the wines of that region that there is this element in the grass, even in the liquid of garrigue, and it’s sort of this briery herbaceous, slightly resinous, spicy element to the wine. And, you know, there’s some thought that it’s the terroir, that it actually is the deep roots of the vines actually kind of draw these flavors up from the soil. But there’s also another school of thought that says, actually, the air is just filled with these scents, with these volatile aromatic compounds.

And the skin of the grape is waxy and a little bit sticky and there’s actually a, there’s a certain amount of the, literally the herbs of the garrigue that get attached to the grapes themselves. And when they’re crushed, there’s this microscopic little element of those flavors and aromas in the finished wine.

And it’s something that if you live there long enough, it’s impossible sort of not to fall in love with that.

[00:26:14] Annie Sargent: Yeah. Well, I once learned that a tree actually gets most of everything it needs from the air. What it gets from the ground is a lot of water. It just sucks water up because it needs that to, to keep itself alive, but it gets a lot of the nutrients from the air around it. So there you go.

Yes, and for people who are just visiting France, one of the places that’s very nice to experience this garrigue is if you go to the Pont du Gard.

There is a whole nature walk around the Pont du Gard that, they’ve actually tamed it a lot. They’ve created paths and signs and it’s a couple of miles long. It’s not very long, but it’s very fun to see all of these explanations of the garrigue around you. And it is, it can be very, very dense, like you said. It’s scrubby, short, but very dense. You better have boots on.

[00:27:09] Steve Hoffman: Correct. But it does have that sort of cultural, it’s a cultural touchstone in a way similar to the Northwoods, for instance, of North America. It’s this place that you go to, it’s a spiritual kind of iconic, almost mythological place.

[00:27:21] Annie Sargent: Mm-Hmm.

Exploring the Vineyards and Vinegar: Côte Vermeille

[00:27:22] Annie Sargent: So you visited a vinaigrerie,outside of Bagnouls

[00:27:26] Steve Hoffman: la Guinelle. La Guinelle.

[00:27:28] Annie Sargent: I haven’t been. What is it like?

[00:27:30] Steve Hoffman: Well, it’s this obscure little place. It’s up, you know, you’re right at the foot of the Pyrenees there. So to climb away from the coast, on the Côte Vermeille, the Vermilion coast, which is the eastern, the Mediterranean coast on the eastern side of the Pyrenees in France, which if you go far south enough, you cross the Spanish border, it becomes the Costa Brava.

[00:27:48] Annie Sargent: Right, it’s Collioure and Bagnouls.

[00:27:50] Steve Hoffman: Yep, Collioure and Bagnouls, right, exactly. And so, Bagnouls makes a beautiful, as a wine appellation, makes a beautiful dessert wine, a sweet dessert wine. Andthere is a little tiny place up in the hills, you’ve got to zigzag your way up through these hills, and you get this longer, and longer view of the Mediterranean, it’s a beautiful drive for one thing. And then you arrive at this little outpost where they are making some of the most heavenly vinegar in the entire world. It is, there’s really nothing else I’ve ever had like it. Maybe, maybe balsamic true, you know, true balsamic vinegar, but even I would say Bagnouls’ vinegarapproaches that in just sort of heavenly scent and quality. And so there’s a bunch of old, you know, oak barrels and they take this dessert wine, and expose it to the air and the ascetic acid eats up the alcohol and you get this beautiful, aromatic, fragrant…

[00:28:37] Annie Sargent: From a dessert wine, wow.

[00:28:38] Steve Hoffman: Yep, exactly.

Yep, so I use it as the vinegar in many of my salads, in many of my vinaigrettes, and it just sort of, it completely changes the character. It’s just…

[00:28:46] Annie Sargent: Fantastic. I’m going to have to try and look for some.

Market Adventures and Coastal Delights in Béziers and Narbonne

[00:28:49] Annie Sargent: So one question I have is if you had to go into town, did you favor, did you go more into Béziers or more into Narbonne? Because you were about equidistant.

[00:28:58] Steve Hoffman: About equidistant, we would, at first, we did go off into Béziers. There’s a beautiful section, sort of the centre ville de Béziers is quite beautiful. And there’s the Allées Paul Riquet, which are sort of a plain tree lined walking, pedestrian district, lined by shops and stores. That is quite beautiful, but for whatever reason, we didn’t go there often, we ended up going to Narbonne more often, and primarily we would go on Sunday because there’s the covered market in Narbonne, the Isle of Narbonne are really mind boggling, among the, I would think, five greatest covered markets in all of France.

I think when we were there, it was actually rated the second or third most beloved market in France.

[00:29:37] Annie Sargent: Of course, just like all of these covered markets, it’s probably open most days in the morning and then they close in the afternoon. Just so you know that, you know, if you want to go, you can go pretty much any day, but except for probably Christmas, or Easter, or something. But you have to go in the morning.

[00:29:53] Steve Hoffman: Correct, but on Sunday, then they will also, there’s usually a restaurant or two, in this aisle where you can go and do your marketing for the week, and then you stay, you’ll have a little light lunch, and maybe a glass of wine, and then you go home and start cooking your Sunday meal.

[00:30:05] Annie Sargent: Not always light! Not always light that lunch!

[00:30:07] Steve Hoffman: Not always light true, true, true!

So our two favorites in this region were actually, Béziers has one, but it’s a little more utilitarian. It’s very good, but it’s smaller and a little bit more just, it’s a place to just go get your supplies.

Narbonne is absolutely beautiful.

And the drive there from where we were, you’re driving in the direction of Carcassonne, you get the view of the Pyrénées in the distance. It’s a very beautiful drive. But our other favorite was actually Sète. And Sète is a coastal fishing village that was also about the same distance from us, about 50 minutes away.

And the beauty of going to Sète is, first of all, it’s also beautiful. It’s kind of situated on this Mont Saint Clair, which is a hill of rock with houses and beautiful views out over the Mediterranean, or right on the Mediterranean. But the Isle in Sète, because it’s a fishing village, and I’m a lover of fish and seafood, there you can go, you get your, and there’s also a very strong Italian influence in Sète.

A lot of Neapolitan fishermen settled in Sète and continue to do their work. So there’s a, in the hills of Sète, there’s a lot of Italian families and Italian history. And so you could get your homemade pasta, and then you could buy your materials for the week. But then you can sit in front of the Isle, outside, under sort of a canopy but in the open air and you could order your fresh mussels, and your razor clams, and your fresh oysters, and you can have a little glass of white wine and everybody’s talking and nobody’s on their phone. And it’s what, it’s very unromantic, it’s not a very attractive place physically, but the experience was so authentic and beautiful. That these are just people living their lives. You don’t hear any English at all. It’s all French. It’s all French with the midi accent. It’s just people there having a glass of something coffee or wine, having a little bite of something, smoking cigarettes and talking, talking, talking.

[00:31:50] Annie Sargent: Yeah, and they have this specialty in Sète, Les Tuiles de Sète.

[00:31:53] Steve Hoffman: Les Tuiles de Sète, exactly.

[00:31:54] Annie Sargent: Yeah, so that’s, I find them a little dry. I don’t know, but maybe I haven’t had the right ones, but …

[00:32:00] Steve Hoffman: And they also have an octopus pie there as well that they’re very famous for. I’m trying to remember what it was called.

It’s an octopus, and a tomato, and garlic sauce enclosed in essentially a pie.

[00:32:10] Annie Sargent: So two questions. About Sète, did you attend the jousting? Did you see the jousting?

[00:32:15] Steve Hoffman: We did, we were sitting there having a coffee one day and it just happened. It happened, we didn’t go to see that. But yes, they have this water jousting where two ships row toward each other and there’s the jousters standing on the bow to try to knock each other off, and it goes back way, way back in the history of the city.

[00:32:31] Annie Sargent: And I love it because heavy people have an advantage.

[00:32:35] Steve Hoffman: Yes, right, right, right. And that’s the other kind of cool thing about Sète is that there are these canals. Yes, you’re on the sea, but then there is the canals actually penetrate into the city itself. And so you can have almost, I mean, it’s not Venice, but it has a little bit of that sort of romantic setting with the light bouncing off of the water of the canals. And boats, and fishing boats, and small craft kind of going up and down the canals on their way to and from the ocean.

It’s a beautiful place in its way, but it’s beautiful sort of in its gritty authenticity, I would say.

[00:33:05] Annie Sargent: Yes, yes. It was fun for me to watch the families, you know, people with their kids on the weekend, they just have their little boat and they just go out on their little boat. And these are not fancy boats, okay. These are not yachts. These are tiny little family boats that they probably had for a while, or I don’t know. Very simple kind of enjoyment of life that it doesn’t take millions to be happy, really.

[00:33:31] Steve Hoffman: That’s right. That’s right. And then actually just next door to Sète is there’s a long strip of beach that runs between the Mediterranean to the South, and the Etang de Thau on the North. It’s called the Plage de la Baleine. It’s between Sète and Marseillan plage.

And it’s a, you know, in the summer, every French beach is very, very heavily used, but it’s surprisingly underused compared to most French beaches. The Sunday trip to Sète was just this wonderful highlight. We would go visit the beach. We’d get our marketing in the morning.

We’d have our little lunch. We’d go to the beach. Sometimes my son and I would fish. And then we drive home, you know, at about sunset. It was a lovely but very, very simple day. There was nothing fancy at all. It was just being with family, having good food, looking at the sea, going home.

[00:34:14] Annie Sargent: Having had a pleasant day.

[00:34:16] Steve Hoffman: Exactly. Exactly.

Les Grands Buffets

[00:34:17] Annie Sargent: Okay. The last question I want to ask you is, did you eat in Narbonne at Les Grands Buffets.

[00:34:22] Steve Hoffman: I did not. No, no. I just saw the article about that in the New Yorker though, that it’s the talk of France right now, Le Grands Buffets.

[00:34:29] Annie Sargent: Yeah. It’s, it’s… not sure what to think. I mean, I ate there once, and I thought it was a good experience. It was a gift from a friend. So that’s the sort of place that people buy, if you’re going to buy an experience for a gift, this is one that people like because, you know, the meal is probably 70 euros or something.

So you might not treat yourself to that sort of meal every day. It’s not that far from Toulouse, so anyway. It was lovely, but I know there’s a lot of shenanigans. There’s a lot of political stuff going on because it’s not in a pretty building, and they would like to someone to give them a pretty building, I think.

And they haven’t found the sucker who will do it yet. But they’re looking. They’re really looking.

Reflections on Writing and Life in France

[00:35:11] Annie Sargent: But anyway, okay, now, we need to talk about your book for a while, because it, I didn’t read it, I apologize, I normally try to read these books, but I told you why. And one of the reasons why it’s, it wasn’t in audio, I couldn’t listen to it easily.

And I listen to things, I rarely sit down and read. So, now it’s coming out in audio.

So remind us the name of the book to begin with.

A Season for That, Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

[00:35:32] Steve Hoffman: Sure, the book is called A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France. The Other Southern France again being the Languedoc as opposed to Provence.

[00:35:41] Annie Sargent: Right, and you tell the story of your family.

[00:35:44] Steve Hoffman: Correct.

So it’s a memoir. And it is the story of what we’ve been talking about, which is our American family arriving to an experience they weren’t necessarily particularly prepared for. Putting the kids in school, trying to integrate into this French village, with some difficulty. And in the end, finding our way into the village through a growing relationship with Mediterranean food and home cooking, which is my sort of self-education.

And then a very accelerated and concentrated education in wine, and wine making, through my volunteering to pick grapes in the vineyards, and making wine in a local winery. And getting to know, not only wine and winemaking, which is such a part of the culture there, but getting to know winemakers and grape growers who then become good friends of mine and kind of get us not just integrated, but, very, very deeply integrated where we felt a part of things and felt as if we had become a part of this village and a part of the culture.

[00:36:34] Annie Sargent: And so you, you read your own book, you narrated your own book.

[00:36:38] Steve Hoffman: For the audiobook version, correct. Yep. I just got out of the studio a couple weeks ago to do that.

[00:36:42] Annie Sargent: Fantastic. That’s hard, isn’t it? Narrating a book.

[00:36:45] Steve Hoffman: It’s so hard. It’s such a different way of reading. You have to take breaths in weird places. And if there are long sentences, you have to break them up and do it in such a way that the editor can edit it back out.

It’s very, very disorienting way to read a book.

[00:36:57] Annie Sargent: Yeah. And you didn’t, did you edit your own book as you were reading it? Did you change things?

[00:37:02] Steve Hoffman: No, I could not. Nope. I had to, in fact, if I missed a word or pronounce or use the wrong word, they made me go back and actually rerecord to get it exactly right. So it exactly matches the text.

[00:37:11] Annie Sargent: I bet sometimes you thought, Oh, I could have said that better.

[00:37:13] Steve Hoffman: A few times, a few times, but not often. I’m a perfectionist and I comb through all of my sentences hundreds of times.

[00:37:19] Annie Sargent: So I’m assuming this book is mostly for people who are Francophiles and just want to read about life in France, and what it’s like to spend time there.

[00:37:28] Steve Hoffman: Yeah, it’s a very immersive story about what a lot of people dream about. What if we just left it behind for a part of a year, or a year or more, and lived in this foreign place that sounds romantic? It’s also, though, really, it’s very much a memoir, and part of what happened in this trip is I, as a 45 year old, had had some self-acceptance issues as a younger man, and getting accepted externally into the village and into the lives of these people that I saw as sort of heroes, you know, wine is religion in France, and these are the priests I was among, led to some self acceptance as well. And there’s a story, very much a story told about that, about my struggling with being a parent, about wondering if we had exposed our children to more than they could handle. There’s an internal journey of acceptance that sort of parallels the externaljourney of trying to become a part of this village.

[00:38:16] Annie Sargent: So, do you ever think, oh, I’d love to retire in France or something like that?

[00:38:19] Steve Hoffman: I thought about it very much and we’re in the midst of kind of discussing what that would look like. I don’t know that I would ever permanently retire to France, but I would really like to have there be some rhythm to our lives where we’re spending a part of the time in our current place, and a part of the year in, probably at this point, somewhere in Languedoc or Roussillon.

I don’t know that we would ever settle in Provence, but I think it would be in the South somewhere that just sort of really became a part of who we are.

[00:38:43] Annie Sargent: Yeah, and I got to say, when you were talking about garrigue, I was going to say, and I let it slip, but I’ll put it in now. It’s really annoying to French people that Americans think that Southern France has lavender fields and nothing but lavender fields.

There are lavender fields, but for the love of God, there is a lot more than lavender fields.

[00:39:05] Steve Hoffman: Honestly, honestly. Correct. Correct. No, there’s an entire world cuisine that has as its base this scrub land. And it’s supposed, you know, everybody’s telling us now it’s the healthiest cuisine in the entire world. There is a lot more than lavender going on, that’s for sure.

[00:39:19] Annie Sargent: You know what I heard yesterday? So my husband is trying to lose some weight. And he went to a dietician. The dietician told him that duck fat is almost as good for you as olive oil.

[00:39:30] Steve Hoffman: It’s so interesting. Our next door neighbor who has a cholesterol problem came back from his doctor, and his doctor said, here are the fats that you can have. And he recommended against olive oil, but recommended in favor of duck fat. And so they use that.

[00:39:41] Annie Sargent: Oh, wow. Okay. So this dietician said, you know, first, go for the olive oil, but second, it should be the duck fat. And I told him, the first thing that came out of my mouth was like, that’s Toulouse propaganda, surely. You know, that can’t be true!

[00:39:55] Steve Hoffman: Of course.

[00:39:56] Annie Sargent: Because it’s animal fat, how can it be good for you? And so I looked it up and it is good for you!

[00:40:02] Steve Hoffman: It’s very good for you. And the other thing about it, I think, is that at high temperatures, it actually you know, at high temperatures, olive oil can turn into a trans fat, which is very, very unhealthy. And animal fats don’t do that. So there is also something about sautéing, or frying in an animal fat that doesn’t have that transformation that’s very unhealthy.

[00:40:20] Annie Sargent: Yeah, so today I went to my local grocery store and I asked for the duck fat and she says, Oh, I think we’re out.

[00:40:26] Steve Hoffman: No.

[00:40:27] Annie Sargent: I was like, oh no, get some more. And she’s like, oh yeah, you should always have some in your fridge. She told me off like, really? You don’t have any? Because I said, I’m going to do a recipe with duck fat.

And she’s like, why don’t you have any in your fridge already, woman? Like, what is wrong with you?

[00:40:42] Steve Hoffman: It’s like not having salt.

[00:40:43] Annie Sargent: Yeah, exactly, not having salt.

Anyway, anyway.

Well, Steve, I’m really looking forward to actually reading your book, it sounds like it would be a wonderful few hours to spend.

Is it a very long book?

It’s 350 pages.

It’s a good size, yeah.

I really look forward to, and I think it’s right up a lot of people’s alley, because a lot of people who love France listen to this podcast and I’m hoping that they will get me, you know, tell me if when you read it, let me know what you think it.

Because, I would love to hear about that. And thank you so much for being so generous with your time and sharing all of this.

[00:41:20] Steve Hoffman: Annie, this is an absolute delight. I have loved every minute of it. I was looking forward to it actually all day, so…

[00:41:26] Annie Sargent: Wonderful. Merci beaucoup, Steve.

[00:41:28] Steve Hoffman: Merci aussi.

[00:41:29] Annie Sargent: Au revoir.

Thank you, patrons

[00:41:37] Annie Sargent: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready and ad-free. Be like them, please follow the link in the show notes. And patrons get more exclusive rewards for doing that, you can see all of them at patreon.com/joinus.

And a special shout out this week to our Join Us in France champions, Michael Moore, a new patron who joined at the Groupie du Podcast yearly. Thank you for doing the yearly. And Walter Walker who renewed his membership. Thank you so much. And to all my current patrons, it is wonderful to have you on board in the community of travel enthusiasts and Francophiles who keep this podcast going.

Support Elyse

[00:42:27] Annie Sargent: And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/ElysArt.

Zoom with Patrons

[00:42:34] Annie Sargent: Last week, I did a Zoom with patrons which included a Paris game, not as easy as all that. And me discovering a few strange occurrences on the France-Spain border, thank you Brian Revel for pointing those out to us.

I’ve also scheduled the Zoom links for October 12th and 13th, because after that I’ll be on a cruise and unable to commit to any given time zone.

Tour Reviews

[00:43:02] Annie Sargent: Here are some reviews that people left of my VoiceMap tours this week.

About Montmartre: ‘Amazing tour, I can’t explain how great it is to take a tour at your own pace, and stop in shops that interest you, or sit down to relax. I could not recommend higher.’

And this is an excellent point. Yes, with the VoiceMap tours you can pause and do whatever you’d like right in the middle of the tour.

I do not appreciate when I do tours in real life, when people try to pause me, but on VoiceMap, you can pause me all you want.

Another one on my Montmartre tour: ‘Wonderful tour. Guide was informative and had a good sense of humor. Yes, I do try to not to be too dry’.

And about my Latin Quarter tour:

‘Really worth it, well explained’. Yes. That’s one of my favorite, the Latin Quarter one. Although the Les Halles walking tour, the food tour in Les Halles is also, I like them all. They’re all my children.

Thank you very much for those reviews, and podcast listeners get a big discount for buying these tours on my website at the boutique.

But if you buy directly from me, it’s a manual process because I do sleep. And if you want to read more reviews of these tours go to joinusinfrance.com/VMR, that sounds for VoiceMap Reviews.

Itinerary Consultations with Annie

[00:44:30] Annie Sargent: If the podcast is leaving you wanting more, I offer two levels of itinerary consultations on Zoom to help you plan your trip.

It’s all explained on joinusinfrance.com/boutique. This week I had to write two long VIP ones.

One was for a family, they’re going to France for a month, and none of it was in Paris or Toulouse, which are the two areas I know best, really. And so it took a long time to write, but I think they will have a wonderful time.

And the other VIP I wrote was for family, extended family going to the Alsace, Strasbourg over Christmas, and I really want them to have a good time. So I spent a lot of time dotting my i’s and checking my t’s to make sure everything is going to be just great for them.

And to book those itinerary consultations, and there’s also a Bonjour consultation where I don’t have to write a long document, and many people find that very helpful as well. It’s all explained on joinusinfrance.com/boutique.

Reopening of the Notre Dame de Paris

[00:45:35] Annie Sargent: All right, let’s talk about the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris, the cathedral that had a very sad fire on April 15th, 2019. So it’s been a few years already, and it is ready to be reopened.

So here’s what we know. Some of it is based on official sources, some of it is kind of informed guesses, based on chitchat between tour guides. Okay, I have to tell you that there are three organizations at work at Notre Dame. There’s Rebâtir Notre Dame, Rebuilding Notre Dame,

They are in charge of the restoration and its operations. There’s the Centre National des Monuments, CMN for short. They manage the bell towers. And the Diocese of Paris, of course.

So, this means that there are a lot of people involved and it takes a lot of planning. The official reopening is set for December 8, 2025, but the general public will not get access until December 16th.

Here’s the timeline for this reopening. On December 7, the Cathedral will be given back to the Diocese. They will get access to everything on that day. They will turn on the organ. They will have a liturgical celebration with the Magnificat, Thédéum and Vespers. And it will be clergy only that day. But if you stand outside, maybe you’ll hear the organ going.

On December 8th, official reopening with the first Mass, also for clergy mostly. And then December 8th through 15th, various celebrations open to public figures, major donors, and people who were part of the restoration team. I hope they invite the firefighters. On December 16th is the opening for the general public.

And I’m going to tell you more about that in a second. But starting in January 2025, a concert will be held in the cathedral every Tuesday evening. No details yet. I don’t know if it’s going to be free or if you’ll probably need tickets, but I’m not sure if it’ll be free or not. The Maîtrise de Notre Dame, which is a group of fabulous young people, young singers, will be the star of the show on many occasions.

This is good news because as far as I know, the Maîtrise de Notre Dame has not been doing regular performances at the cathedral for a long time. They would appear on occasion, but not regularly like they’re doing now.

There will continue to be various celebrations when the cathedral will have restricted access until June 8th, 2025, which is Pentecost.

And this will probably happen at all religious holidays. So, Catholics have a very set schedule of religious holidays, celebrations of various sorts. You can expect that for the first year, the cathedral might be closed to the public for a day or two, so that they can invite clergy from all over, probably, to come participate in celebrations.

So, you’ll just, you know, be patient. It’s not going to be open all the time like it was, for a little while, until June 2025.

Will anyone who is not an official be invited between December 8th and 15th? Perhaps. This is where the speculation goes in. I think, they will probably invite local practicing Catholics who will be invited to come pray at the cathedral, but this is obviously not open to everybody. If you’re one of them, you already know.

Visiting Notre Dame will continue to be free, as is the visit of all churches in France, but there will be a fee for visiting the towers. That’s also common in France. That’s the way it was before. They will probably charge about 10 Euros per person to go up the tower. I bet there’s going to be a lot of interest because it’s been rebuilt, so people will want to see this. This used to be included in the museum pass, but it is not clear if that’s going to change or not. The rule is that there should never be more than 2500 people in the cathedral at any one time, with a maximum of 3000 for big events where more security is present.

How do you get in after December 15th? That’s what you want to know. They really don’t want masses of people queuing outside of any monument because this is a security risk. So will they let people stand there all day waiting to get in? Probably not. They will put in place an online booking system for those who plan ahead, and a free app as well, and you’ll be able to use that to book a slot. This app or website hasn’t been announced yet. I will let you know as soon as I hear. I suppose anyone who comes wanting to queue will be told by security to move along, install the app, enter all the info they ask for, and come back when you get a spot. This is going to be a registration to enter with a free ticket system.

They will also have physical security at the entrance, obviously. They would be looking for knives, guns, glass bottles, sharp objects. And they may allow small purses, but probably no backpacks, or at least no big backpacks. So this is bad news for people who are used to show up at venues with their big old backpack, no forethought whatsoever.

That’s probably not Join Us in France listeners, but there are lots of them out there in the wild world of travel. We are fully in the era of apps. Booking a ticket to enter, even if that ticket is free, and then you’ll have to go through physical security with as little as possible. So always check to see if there’s an app where you can get the ticket, rather than queue up, and always walk around Paris, and France really, with as little as possible.

American friends, I’m going to have to tell you this, you really don’t need to carry around a jug of water the size of your forearm. Bring the smallest possible refillable bottle, you will have lots of opportunities to fill it up.

Bring a raincoat, or an umbrella because it can rain in Paris even in July as the Olympics demonstrated. Take one credit card, maybe 40 euros in cash, some tissues, your driver’s license or passport card for ID. You need a pocket that zips where you can safely put away your phone as well. And I realized that many women are used to carry lotions, and makeup, and nail clippers, and God knows what else, if you bring a bag, make it the smallest possible. Think about it. Think about what’s the minimum I can bring. It’s really important. And I’ll talk more about the must haves in your bag in next week’s episode of the podcast.

My thanks to podcast editors, Anne and Christian Cotovan, who produced the transcript.

Next Week on the Podcast

[00:52:43] Annie Sargent: Next week on the podcast, I’m very excited about the episode coming up. It’ll be an episode about Lamothe Cadillac, the founder of Detroit with Kim Loftus. Great stories there. I think you will enjoy greatly. I enjoyed doing that very, very much.

And remember, patrons get ad-free versions of this episode, click on the link in the show notes to be like them.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together.

Au revoir.

Copyright

[00:53:13] Annie Sargent: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and Copyright 2024 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.

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Transcript for Episode 514: Experience France Like a Local