Fun news: We’re Moving to France for a Year!
My family and I are moving to France! We leave near the end of the summer, we’ll be living in the south of France, and we’re going for the full school year. This will be the second big, crazy adventure we’ve taken as a family, and I’m not sure I can properly explain how grateful I am to be typing that sentence.
A few weeks ago the visas came through, and last night I bought tickets to a France national team soccer match in Paris in October. That’s the moment it finally felt real.
Before I get into more details, here’s the short version of how we got here.
One quick thing before the story: Nothing is changing with Travel Freely. I’ll just be sharing more updates from our travels instead of from the suburbs. I have a great team, and I’m much less worried about the timezone than when I lived on the opposite side of the globe in Australia and New Zealand. (I still cringe thinking about the 2:30am wake-ups when big card offer news would break).
2001: A teenage France Odyssey
I played a lot of junior tennis growing up. The summer after my senior year I was poised to play in the biggest tournaments of my career. I’d made my way through sectionals and played in just a couple national tournaments up to that point. Being 18 in the under-18 boys’ division meant this was my best and last shot at some of the prestigious national tournaments you dream about when you’re younger.
But, I skipped them.
I gave up those opportunities and my ranking status, and my parents drove me from Nashville to the Atlanta airport where I flew to Nice, France, and then took a train to a small town on the Mediterranean to play on red clay instead. It was an adventurous alternative, a different kind of dream to play tennis on the famous red clay, and a bet that instead of playing national junior tournaments, I’d play semi-professional tournaments in France that would make me a better player before college.
Long story, short. It was amazing. I loved every minute of it. Playing competitive matches on red clay was such a dream come true. My high school French held up, and I had the time of my life.
The not-so-great rest of the tennis story is: I did play in college, but I hurt my back during my sophomore year and eventually had to quit tennis entirely.
The summer in France didn’t pay off the way I sold it to myself. But there were other things at play, and I like to view that trip differently now. “When I was 18, I went to France for tennis. That trip changed my life more off the court than on it. It was a major milestone that cemented my overall love for travel and different cultures.”
2010: The proposal I couldn’t afford
For about ten years afterward I carried around one specific dream: I was going to propose to my wife in that same corner of southern France. Not “in Europe.” That coast. At a specific spot overlooking the Mediterranean.
The problem was that I was a teacher and I did not have fly-two-people-to-Europe money. I ran that math more than once and it never worked.
Then a friend showed me that a single welcome bonus, earned on spending I was already doing, would cover both flights. I didn’t believe it at first, but it was that simple. No cleverness required. A few months later I was standing on the Mediterranean with a ring in my pocket. And the proposal was successful!
Then that turned into a job
People started asking how we’d pulled it off. I was a teacher teaching PE classes at the time, but I went deep, explained it to anyone who’d listen, and eventually built a website and app to help as many people as possible. I went full time with Travel Freely right before the pandemic hit in 2020.
Here’s the full story of that proposal and Travel Freely’s origin.
2023: Australia and New Zealand
Fast forward to 2023. We did something that genuinely felt crazy but exciting. We took a one-year-old and a four-year-old and spent nine months in Australia and New Zealand.
It was an incredible adventure, the first of its kind for us. Nine months of what I started calling “deep travel”.
Then we came home and settled back into normal life. But something had changed about what felt possible in the future with the confidence of that major adventure under our belts.
How this actually came together
Last summer Virginia and I went back to southern France for our anniversary, all these years after the proposal. That trip report is here.
While we were over there, we found out about an open house at a nearby school. We went out of curiosity with no major commitment of any kind. What was a small seed grew and grew after we returned home.
In December, we flew back and looked at a few more schools and places to live. That trip started as due diligence, honestly so we could either rule it out or see if that seed would sprout. By the flight home we weren’t asking whether we could do it, we felt really excited about the possibility of making it happen. Soon after, the visas came through, and it became very real.
Our first stop is Menton
When we land, before we ever get to the town we’ll be living in, we’re spending a few days in Menton.
That’s the town from the story above. The one I flew to at eighteen. The one I came back to in 2010 with a ring in my pocket. The one Virginia and I returned to last summer for our anniversary.
Now I get to walk my kids down those same streets, and we’ll be living close enough to Menton to keep going back all year.
A few practical notes on the shape of it. We’re staying in one place rather than hopping around. The hope is a regular life: the same bakery, the same faces, a community we’re actually part of instead of passing through.
I studied French in high school and college and used to be pretty good. I’ve lost a lot of it. Getting it back is one of the things I’m most looking forward to, but it still feels daunting. Virginia doesn’t speak any French at all, but I anticipate her being a quick learner.
The kids will be at an international school, in English and French. I have no idea how the French will go. I’m cautiously optimistic, based mostly on how fast kids pick up languages. We did a few lessons with a neighbor friend this summer so the language wouldn’t be completely foreign, and they seemed to enjoy it.
The Wednesday situation
Here’s my favorite thing I’ve learned so far.
Schools there don’t run the American model of a full day plus activities crammed in afterward. They take Wednesdays off and use that time for sports and activities.
So my kids are about to have a mini weekend in the middle of every week, for a year.
I don’t think they’ve fully processed this yet, but that should be fun.
Why France, for me
Apart from my previously mentioned love for France, I took the Enneagram a few years ago and laughed out loud when it told me that my type tends to love France. Nailed it.
It’s the landscapes, the food, the language, the history, the Mediterranean, art, sports, and mostly the general approach to life. All of it lands for me in a way I’ve never been able to explain.
While I’m not looking forward to the bureaucracy of France, there’s something special about a country that regulates its bakeries so carefully, with real standards and certifications, specifically so that any citizen can walk down the street and get a proper fresh baguette. That’s a country that decided ordinary daily life was worth protecting. I want to live in that for a while.
The year ahead
The other thing about being based in the south of France is how close everything suddenly is. Short direct flights to the big European cities, to smaller ones I’ve never heard of, and to Africa.
Here’s my bucket list for some side trips outside of France: Greece, which I want to get back to badly, and even more so after seeing The Odyssey twice on IMAX. Morocco. Egypt. Switzerland. Ireland. Probably somewhere in Scandinavia. And I’d love to visit friends in Africa doing sports development work similar to what I did in Belize years ago.
We booked our flights months ago when a great deal showed up using United MileagePlus® miles, which means I get to tell my son again that we’re on the kind of plane where the seats go down. His last business class flight was to Australia, where he spent sixteen hours sleeping, watching movies, and eating huge blueberry pancakes.
I’ve also planned for the hard days, because there will be hard days. So I bought tickets to the first NFL game ever played in Paris, in October, as a birthday surprise for my son. It will be his first NFL game, which is a small shame on me, because we’ve lived in Denver his whole life and I never got him to a Broncos game! But no one yet has been able to say, “my first NFL game was in France,” so that’s kind of cool.
What about the points?
While this post is not as focused on points and miles, I want to share a few notes:
Flights to France. As I said before, we found a great deal on business class flights with United miles. Those were locked and loaded a while ago.
Flights within Europe. This is the part I’m most excited about strategically. Short flights out of France are often cheap in both cash and points, so a lot of weekend trips become genuinely easy. We can also book last-minute if we need to. This is where points are going to do the heaviest lifting all year.
Hotels. When traveling, we’ll stay at Hyatts wherever we can. Their properties have been the best value for us for years and I don’t expect that to change. And frequent trips to Paris hopefully means more stays in the famous Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme.
Airbnbs. For a family of four, Airbnb is frequently the better deal, so we’ll use it a lot. You can’t book those with points directly, so we’ll put those stays on one of our Venture cards and then use points to cover the cost.
Getting my parents over. More on this below, but I was able to use PointsYeah and Seats.Aero to find great deals on non-stop business class flights to Paris for my parents to visit us.
Pro tip: Booking speculatively.
If there’s a big flight you know you’ll need well down the road, and you already have the points sitting there, I like to book it the moment I see a great option. Most award tickets can be canceled and the points returned, so you’re not locked in.
What that gets you is a baseline. You’ve got something in the bag, and then you can keep watching for something better all the way up to the trip, knowing you’re covered either way. It takes the pressure off completely. I often book these before I’m really ready to book, and I’m not stressed about it when I know there’s a free cancellation policy.
Two cautions. Check your specific program’s cancellation rules before you count on this, because they vary and they change. And know that if you cancel, those miles go back to the airline program, not to the bank program you transferred them from. Transfers only go one direction.
What I’m actually hoping for
Not a list of things that have to happen. Two hopes.
For the kids. I’ve been shaped more by other cultures than by almost anything else in my life. Being somewhere long enough to see how differently people live has a way of both affirming your own culture and challenging it, and I’ve wanted to give my kids that experience early in their lives. Not so they’ll be sophisticated. So they’ll grow up knowing the world is enormous and full of people who aren’t like them, and that their small corner of it isn’t what makes the whole thing go. If they come home with a sense of being part of a much bigger story, that’s my hope.
For myself. This one’s harder to admit. Living in the suburbs with young kids and working a ton has not been kind to the dreamier, more curious part of me. That part has been quiet for a while (except when I am traveling). If there were ever a place to go wake it up, France is the place. Getting my French back is going to be a big piece of that, and so is just exploring the new surroundings.
My parents, the proposal, and those tennis courts
My parents are coming over. They’re older now and not as eager to travel too far anymore, but I found them a great business class deal direct into Paris, and they said yes. (American Airlines flights via Atmos Rewards™ miles for the win!)
We’re definitely going to visit Menton, which by then will be a place we know well again. I want to show them three things: the town itself, which is as charming as anywhere I’ve ever been, the exact spot where we got engaged, and the tennis courts where I practiced when I was eighteen.
Those last two exist because of them.
They put a kid on a plane across the ocean, to play tennis tournaments on a surface he’d never played on, in a town none of us had heard of. That was a strange thing to say yes to. I’ve thought about that a lot more since becoming a parent.
Twenty-five years later I get to thank them by walking them through it. I don’t really have words for that.
Red clay
Somewhere in all of this, I’m getting my kids onto a red clay court. They’ve started to play a little bit and it will be really fun to get their clothes completely dirty with red clay.
My back is still bad and I tore my Achilles last fall (doing better now), so I don’t play much anymore. But I’m looking forward to getting my shoes and socks dirty with red clay again, too. Maybe I’ll find an “old man’s” club where the whole point is to have fun and not think too hard about the player you used to be.
I’ll be sharing updates from the south of France as we go, the same way we did from Australia and New Zealand. The good parts and the hard parts both.
So much gratitude – thank you
None of this happens without you. I am forever grateful to the community of Travel Freely users who have allowed me to have the flexibility to travel like this as a family. It’s humbling because it’s not something I’ve done on my own. It’s taken your support of Travel Freely and your participation in sharing your own travel successes so that we can inspire more people to live their travel dreams as well.
Below is a photo from our big trip to Australia and New Zealand. Here’s hoping the adventures in France are just as fun.
