We walk everywhere. Without a car, that’s a given, but then we intentionally chose a city where we could easily get to all of our daily needs on foot. A new hometown also had to have an efficient local bus system plus a train station that could give us access to other cities in France and all over Europe. The monetary savings were apparent immediately: no car payment, insurance, fuel, maintenance, parking fees, tolls, cleaning and detailing. No stress of fighting for a parking place, dings and scratches, parking or speeding tickets, theft. What we hadn’t considered were the health benefits and we just read about how to make that even better.

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Thank you, Sally, for the link to an article in The Telegraph entitled, “France’s 20 greatest villages, ranked and rated.” British journalist Anthony Peregrine lives in Montpellier and has been reporting on France for over 20 years. His articles offer insights into French life, history, and travel as does this one we’re highlighting today. What I liked especially about this story is that he says it covers, “French villages that I get most excited about returning to.” Glancing down his list, there are a few that we’ve been to so we’ll add some photos from those trips with information about new locations to discover.

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There’s an online travel information source called “Global Wanderlist” who describe themselves as, “We’re here to fuel your wanderlust with detailed destination guides, must-see attractions, hidden local gems, and travel tips that help you explore more and stress less.” As the company name suggests, they publish lists covering worldwide vacation spots to help you narrow down the choice of where to visit, when to go, plus some tips to make the journey even more enjoyable. They are headquartered in India so their Bucket Lists favor itineraries for that country with intriguing names like Mysore, Spiti, Sikkim, and Lucknow. As exotic as those sound, my attention was drawn to their recommendations for France.

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It’s not often that the word little (petite) is used in the same sentence with Carcassonne. After all, with 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) of double walls surrounding it, we’re more likely to see descriptions including “Europe’s largest medieval walled city” or “giant fortress”  or even “most formidable fortified city”. That reputation has attracted up to 3 million visitors during an exceptionally busy year, half of whom were from nearby Spain. Historically, it’s that proximity to our former adversary, now ally to the south that required the construction of those protective walls. In fact there’s a string of fortifications along the French/Spanish border that provided security to this area for hundreds of years, including one in the village of Camon, also known as “La petite Carcassonne”.

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Although Vichy has been on our “must visit” list for years, I was reluctant to go because of the city’s connection to Nazi Germany. French Marshal Philippe Pétain, leading an autocratic government during World War II, dismantled the democratic institutions of the French Third Republic and consolidated power by creating a cult of personality around himself. His government, based in Vichy, collaborated with Hitler’s regime by imposing a police state controlled by censorship and propaganda. Luckily that ended 80 years ago, leaving behind a city where the painful memories of that era remain, but the beautiful Belle Époque architecture endures.

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Both of us were convinced that we’d already visited Aix-en-Provence, most likely on a quick visit to the area years ago. We’d been on a sleepless overnight flight from NY to Paris, a speedy train south, and still under the influence of jetlag early the next morning, a rail trip out into the countryside of Provence. As always, we took lots of photos but it was only upon returning to the US while reviewing our vacation pictures did we realize that we’d been to Arles and Avignon but not to that third “A” town, Aix. To remedy that, we scheduled a return stay in Marseille as home base with a bonus boat ride to the National Park of the Calanques.

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