La Belle Provence

I can’t remember exactly when we started talking about celebrating our 30th birthdays with a holiday abroad but, as I prepared earlier this month to meet nine of my best friends in the south of French, I felt like we had been planning it forever. And, frankly, I am super impressed with the fact that we pulled it off – though so sad it’s over.

In three different teams we descended on Provence to drink wine, eat baguettes and cheese, swim in the Med, visit adorable villages, and bone up on our French. Jill, Julia and Sophie arrived in France first, traveling from Toronto and visiting a few towns outside Marseille on their way to meet the rest of us. Lex, Lyl and Lindsay came through Marseille from Montreal, picking up Anne who had taken the TGV down from Paris. And I arrived with Jane and Kelly from London, where we had torn up Trafalgar Square the night before celebrating Canada Day.

Our meeting spot was the cutest little village on earth – Le Garde-Freinet – where Lexie has been coming to her family’s house for 25 years. Nestled in the Maures Mountains and 20 minutes north of St Tropez, the village is an ideal base camp for trips around Provence, and also to return to at the end of the day to enjoy delicious home-cooked meals, vase-sized pitchers of various cocktails, and catch up with amazing friends I don’t see enough of.

Out exploring the region we drove the perilous winding roads to a 12th century monastery, went into St Tropez to shop at the market and yacht-stalk, took a ferry to L’Iles Porquerolles to beach it up in paradise, shoe shopped in Aix in Provence, and had a lovely dressed-up dinner out to celebrate the start of our 30th decade.
Without getting too over-feely and cheesy, the week we spent in the south of France was truly one of the best of my life. I adore my girls, and I miss seeing them as often as I want, so those days together, cooking amazing food, drinking a lot of local rosé, exploring the gorgeous region, and laughing our faces off, will stay in my heart for a very long time.

One week after we all met, Anne and Lindsay were off to spend a few days in Paris on their way home, Lex was left behind in LGF to await the arrival of her family, and the rest of us drove back towards Marseille, with one night in the adorable beachside village of Cassis.

We lay on the beach for one last afternoon, strolled through the harbour in the evening, ate some adventurous French food (or at least I did, trying pieds et paquets marseillais which I can only describe as the French version of haggis), and were even greeted at the end of the night with a round of beautiful fireworks – the perfect end to a perfect holiday.

Though, for me, it wasn’t quite finished. Once I saw my Canadian besties off at the airport I had almost eight hours to kill before my flight. Left with my patchy French and without my helpful translators, I eventually found storage for my suitcase, and caught a bus into bustling, steaming, crime-infested downtown Marseille.

Clutching my bag to me, I managed not to get robbed, wandered through the harbour to see the views out to sea, the rising Basilique Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde on the hill, and the Byzantine-Roman Cathedrale de la Major. I even took a boat out to Chateau D’If to indulge my literary-tourist tendencies, visiting the real island prison that was used fictionally in Alexandre Dumas’ ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’. I was tired and so sweaty, not to mention missing my girls like crazy and not embracing the alone time, but it was a good last day in France.

And now, though some of us are still trying to get a handle on turning 30, we are casually making plans for our 35th or 40th birthdays. A villa in Tuscany in 2016, ladies?