Planning Our Next Visit to the Languedoc

We have forgone our annual visit to our little village house in Cazouls-les-Beziers this year. It was a difficult decision but one must eat and, if this one is to eat, this one must work. Besides, we have special plans for the spring of 2010.


Pictured at niece Maggie's graduation from Bryn Mawr are, from left to right, wife Cathey, brother-in-law and Maggie's dad Paul, Maggie, Cathey's sister and Maggie's mom Connie, Connie's twin Liz, and Liz's partner Sharon.

When the twinnies turned 50 (we call them twinnies), Connie hosted a birthday bash in her home in Houston. We decided that to celebrate the twinnies' 60th birthday, we'd host them in France. Just Connie and Paul, Liz, and me and Cathey. After much checking of schedules and a series of long-range negotiations, we settled on the last two weeks of May. The weather should be beautiful - daytime highs about 70F, lows around 60F.

Have you ever traveled in a group in a foreign country? Not a tour group. I'm talking about a group of intelligent, curious, related adults including three sisters each of whose middle name is Drama. (That may sound a bit extreme but I'll stand by it.) There's a simple way to deal with it, really. Obvious. You have to treat your time together as though you ARE on tour. You just can not wake up in the morning wondering what you are going to be doing that day. You have to have a plan...and not a plan drawn up by committee. You have to have a tour leader.

Me.

Every minute of every day will not be carefully planned. Oh, no. But out of our fourteen day stay there will be outlines for at least ten of them. Here are some examples:

Light breakfast, drive to Domaine La Croix-Belle for a lengthy tasting and to stock up on wine, home for a light lunch, second tasting at Chateau Cazal Viel, home to freshen up, dinner at Auberge de la Croisade - a fine restaurant in the country along the Canal du Midi.

Light breakfast, drive to Sete to give the girls a taste of Mediterranean oysters for lunch, back through Beziers to shop at Au Marchon for any houseware needs we discover and for groceries. Home for a light dinner.

Full breakfast, free day for the boys, the girls cook dinner for our Brit friends from Capestang.

Light breakfast, day trip to Albi - home of Lautrec, find a place for lunch, home late for a light dinner.

That may sound like a very loose schedule but it's really not. The tasting rooms of vineyards are not necessarily open every day, their schedules are seasonally adjusted, and they usually are closed for a long lunch. Lunch is served from noon to 2:00 PM in the countryside and if you show up at 1:45 you won't be seated.

So there are rules, a framework to follow. It works. I know. We've done it. You should try it next time. It works better than trying to herd cats.

Renting Our House in France - Analysis Over Time

The 2009 French holiday rental season is just about over. It’s the fifth season that we’ve rented out our little village house in the small working class village of Cazouls-les-Beziers in the Languedoc region of southern France. The first season, the summer of 2005, doesn’t really count though. We didn’t put up a website and we didn’t contract with any of the holiday rental websites. Instead, we arranged a long-term rental with a single woman whose house in the region was undergoing extensive renovation. That rental served as a sort of shake-down for our house before we put it up for rental on the open market in 2006. So, four years…

In the fall of 2005 we put up our website:
http://www.southfrancerental.com/.

Take a look.

In the ensuing year, we received about a half-dozen inquiries through the website and three or four modest bookings. Not enough traffic. Not enough bookings. We spoke with folks that we had met who had a vacation/rental property near ours. They were quite satisfied with VRBO – Vacation Rentals By Owner – www.vrbo.com. We did searches on Yahoo and Google using the search terms +”vacation rental”+France+Languedoc. VRBO came up highly ranked. We booked on their site in September of 2006.

We received a few more inquiries. Business improved during the 2007 rental season. But not dramatically.

We spoke with a friend in England with rental property on the Isle of Wight.

“Americans take vacations,” she said. “Brits and English-speaking Europeans go on holiday. I use holidaylettings.co.uk.”

I went up on Yahoo and Google again and sure enough, changing “vacation rental” to “holiday rental” made a world of difference. So we kept our ad on VRBO and added holidaylettings.co.uk for the 2008 season.

Again, a modest increase but no great shakes. One final adjustment. We cut our rates.

Cazouls is a pleasant little town but it’s not a ‘destination’ town. It’s not on the Med but it’s less than a half-hour drive away. The Canal du Midi (for boating, walking and biking) and the Orb River (for swimming and kayaking) are each five minutes away. The Haut Languedoc National Park (hiking and climbing) is a half hour away. Abbeys and cathedrals and all sorts of historic sites from prehistory through the Middle Ages abound.


And the house itself has no garden or pool although the patio is private and has a bbq. There’s no internet connection – the tourist office is three blocks away and offers high-speed access at reasonable rates. Satellite television. Full service kitchen. Beds and sofa beds and a futon. A good place to hang your clothes and spend the night while you and your friends tour the region. So…

We cut our rates. There was a world-wide recession in the works, after all.

Presto. The best summer ever.

After four years, we think that we’ve finally got the formula right. Our website plus a website catering to North Americans plus a website catering to Brits/Europeans. Do I sound confident? We’ll see how the summer of 2010 shakes out.

JULIE & JULIA - A Review, Sort Of

The Southern Woman That I Married and I had a date last week. Yes, after nearly 40 years together we occasionally date. We have to. We're busy folks. If we want to be certain to spend time together, time that does not involve the television, we make a date.

But I digress...

TSWTIM and I went to see Julie & Julia last week. We are both great fans of Julia Child. TSWTIM because she learned to cook in great part thanks to her Francophile Uncle Johnny, who in turn provided his sister, TSWTIM's mother, with several French cookbooks and urged her to use them. Me because I learned to eat at an early age. And for both of us, Julia's unapologetically enthusiastic style of cooking that embraces richness of flavor and, more importantly, BUTTER satisfies our culinary needs.

But I digress…

TSWTIM informs me that the movie is reasonably faithful to the book. That is, the movie moves between the lives of Julia Child and Julie Powell. Julia, beloved wife of mid-level diplomat Paul Child, refused to play the part of a bored diplomat’s wife with too much time on her hands and, with the unwavering support of her husband, changed the landscape of the American palate through her love for French cuisine and her desire to pass that love on to her countrywomen. Hence, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a seminal cookbook in the lives of many American women of a certain generation. Julie Powell was a bored low-level bureaucrat whose modern marriage, like so many, seemingly consisted of rooming with a man with whom she had sex. Bored with the job, her friends and, presumably, the man and the sex, Julie decides to cook all of the recipes in Julia’s magnum opus and blog about the experience.

Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and the players who surround them are simply marvelous. How does Meryl do it? At one and the same time you are keenly aware that Meryl is playing a part and that she is so immersed in the part that she’s no longer Meryl. How DOES she do it?

The young folks who play Julie and her ilk are who they are…who TSWTIM tells me they clearly are in the book…self-centered, uninteresting Gen-(Pick a letter)ers.

Thus, the movie is an exercise in schizophrenia…periods of engrossing, wondrous acting alternating with periods of wondering why we should care about the people on the screen. If I were a mental health professional suggesting a cure for this illness, I would prescribe radical surgery, the excision of all things Julie, leaving twice as much room for the lives of Julia and Paul. It wouldn’t have been true to the book but it would have been one hell of a movie.

As it is, Julie & Julia is well worth watching.