Traveling Under the Umbrella of Reciprocity in Stormy Provence

A harder landing in Provence reminds me how much sweeter a place tastes and feels when we choose to give and not just take

There are any number of ways we can convince ourselves that a place was really never meant to be our special place.

We might throw up our arms and say we just didn’t get it. It wasn’t our scene, the food didn’t do it for us, it was too hard to find something to hold on to and connect with. We might think all of that from a place of rejection or dejection, from a place of ignorance or close-mindedness, from a place of fatigue, depression or heartbreak.

Among other misgivings, we may blame circumstance, fate, hormones, sleep scores, work stress and even pitifully accuse the stars of falling out of alignment, just to explain away why a destination we had such high hopes for left us feeling underwhelmed, numb or wanting more.

These places we failed to click with, for whatever reason they didn’t land, sting us from somewhere hard to pinpoint deep inside.

Fortunately for me, much as it tried in our first thirty-six hours together, Provence was no such place.

I arrived in the middle of Storm Adam, which dumped an obscene amount of rain on the region. The record-breaking downpour was already well underway as I got into my rental car and started the trek to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. By the time it was over, some towns were reporting upwards of twelve inches of rain.

I am certain much of this rain had to have fallen during my fifteen-minute walk with luggage – without an umbrella – from the free parking lot outside the city center to my Airbnb.

This walk, charming though it may have been under different circumstances, applied a whole new use case to the notion of walk of shame. I mean, there’s walking in the rain. And then there’s walking as a you-know-better seasoned traveler in a deluge picturing your dry raincoat and umbrella in your front closet.

The next day, the very first thing I did was buy a hat and an umbrella at a lovely little boutique where a cheery shopkeeper was more than happy to dote all over her first willing-to-pay-anything customer of the day.

Once I was ready and able to brave the conditions, my sights were locked in on one thing: my first pain au chocolat of the trip. While the boulangerie was only a few blocks away, and any distance now with an umbrella felt infinitely more conquerable, I still had to navigate through cobblestone street rapids and detour around puddles perhaps better classified as sidewalk lagoons.

With Maison Spiteri in view, I approached the crosswalk utterly absorbed by the thought of the taste to come.

And that’s when it hit me out of nowhere.

A wave of gutter water from a passing car. I shuddered from the inside out as I tried to shake it off, as much mentally as physically. Thoroughly drenched now, I got the message loud and clear. It was time to surrender. I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all, especially the limitations of my $22 cheesy Paris-themed umbrella.

By the time I sat down to partake in that still-warm and flaky, buttery and chocolate-y deliciousness, I was truly soaked to the bone. My five-minute-old fake wool Celine ballcap was sopping wet. My feet were drowning in sloshy socks and shoes. My coat was heavy, having been positively saturated by the unrelenting Storm Adam.

But that first bite of pain au chocolat? In waterlogged France, no less?

I am certain there could never be another one quite like it. Only after I took that bite – eyes closing, taste buds exploding, a dramatic “mmm” escaping from the back of my throat – could I say that I had finally arrived in Provence.

As it turned out, the rains would go on to become an early catalyst for one exchange, one sigh of gratitude and one Provençal marvel after another. In an ironic twist, they had ended up perfectly priming me to love Provence from the start.

Something indescribable and exceptional had happened when I’d been asked to endure a harder landing. For one, the less-than-ideal circumstances had made me appreciate, in a whole new light, all my other movements in Provence thereafter. Not just their ease, but their crispness and brightness.

I felt, too, like I’d actually labored for how rewarding it was to move about there. I hadn’t realized, either, just how much I’d missed that feeling of putting something in to get something out.

I know the storm caused real damage, significant hardship for some and even death for others, so I don’t mean to selfishly reduce it to nothing more than a first-world lesson. But traveling in it had made me stop and realize how many times I’d smugly arrived somewhere expecting a red-carpet rollout from a place I only wanted to do a figurative smash and grab from.

It made me sick to my stomach to think that I’d fallen into a lifelong trap of showing up to a place assuming I’d get to extract something big and meaningful from it each time without putting anything substantive in.

I thought back to those places I just didn’t get: Copenhagen, Palma de Mallorca, Vilnius this last time. What if I had invested the energy, emotional intelligence and cognition to relate to them on their terms instead of purely my own?

This journey to Provence had gifted me with an unexpected and invaluable new lens from which to view places old and new. From this trip forward, I would approach movement with a much greater sense of reciprocity.

I had been hungry to visit Provence since reading Julia Child’s autobiography, My Life in France this past May. It’s beyond me that this part of the world was never on my radar in any significant way until I read that book. But then again, maybe I wasn’t ready for it just yet.

In fact, I know I wasn’t.

While soaking up Julia Child’s contagious love of France and the story of how she found her purpose in her late thirties, Provence went from a place I was once mildly intrigued by to a place that I had to visit. I had to experience it, taste it and touch it.

I had to feel it for myself.

No place has ever called me as strongly as Provence.

From the moment I landed here, this region of France challenged me to see the concept of place differently, with more empathy, humility and graciousness. What seemed at first like a thrown-down gauntlet to not only adapt to, but adopt a place’s rhythm, its pleasures and its afflictions, was really an invitation to wake up and taste with a place instead of merely in it.

There was something in the communion of that invitation that gripped hold of me and never let me go.

It made me wonder, too, if I now understood the sting we feel from those not-so-special places. Maybe it wasn’t so much our sting of disappointment as us sensing theirs for how we moved so blindly, with such detachment and disregard through them. I’ll be eternally grateful that my time in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence showed me that.

Mid-afternoon, when it became clear the rain wasn’t going to stop pounding Saint-Rémy on my first full day there, I suited up again to go out and look for lunch. These midday discoveries, like that first bite of pain au chocolat that morning, would go on to become some of my favorite tiny but mighty bursts of joy from this trip.

First there was ducking into the dry but pungent sanctuary that was La Cave aux Fromages. There, a very patient, enthusiastic cheesemonger gave me a one-on-one informal lesson on cheese from the Alpilles. By the time my brief lesson with her was over, she was carefully packaging up a creamy Banon AOP, which is aged in chestnut leaves and has the texture, at least to this cheese novice, like brie. She also added at my request a much stronger Chèvre des Alpilles affiné au Romarin (an aged Alpilles goat cheese with rosemary).

I immediately fell gluttonously if not lustfully in love with the first, and by the third day had come to accept and even crave the sharp smack, kick and whack of the second.

But my favorite exchange with taste that afternoon had to have been at La Pintade Chaponnée. When I first spotted it, I couldn’t believe my good fortune that such a place existed AND was open. I felt as though I had walked into the most marvelous daydream. And damn if it didn’t smell like a marvelous daydream should, too.

Inside the small space was a warm and cozy spread of homemade French everything – terrines, pâtés, soups, meats, sauces, quiches. I bought the most soul-warming bacon cheese tart, a slice of pork pâté, a jar of butternut squash soup and, to lighten things up a bit, a bottle of Chablis and a cold octopus salad.

And yes, none of those things except the Chablis went particularly well together. And no, I didn’t mind a bit.

Thirty hours after touching down in Provence, my last walks in the heavy rain would come to and from dinner at Maison Favier. As promised throughout all my research, it was a truly charming spot and one of two culinary and hospitality highlights of my time in Saint-Rémy (the other being lunch after Market Day at Aux Envies). Best of all, Maison Favier felt tucked worlds away from the drag of the storm.

I’m still hard-pressed to say if it was the house foie gras or the fresh fig with homemade ice cream and gingerbread crumbles that made up for getting dried-out shoes wet all over again.