A slow week in Provence
Four towns, one car, no schedule after 11am. The itinerary we build when someone says they just want to stop moving.
The brief was three words long: 'somewhere I can stop.' No landmarks, no list. That is the easiest and hardest kind of trip to design, because there is nothing to hide behind.
We gave them Avignon for two nights to shake off the flight, then a farmhouse outside Bonnieux for five, with a car and a market schedule and precisely two fixed reservations for the entire week.
“The permit buys you a morning. Everything else you do buys you the odds that the morning is the one you'll talk about for ten years.”
The thing that made it work was the market schedule. Knowing that Tuesday is Gordes and Friday is Lourmarin gives a shapeless week a spine without giving it a timetable. They drove twenty minutes, bought lunch, and went home to eat it. Every day. For a week.
They asked for the same trip again the following year, with the same house. We changed nothing.
Writes for The Passage about the parts of a trip that don't fit in a brochure. Available to design yours.