We seem to write a lot on this blog about where to settle in France and that’s for a couple of reasons. It’s the second most requested topic of information that we are asked for; budget is the first. Once you realize that you can afford to live here— “hey, those two guys are retired and they seem happy”—you next want to figure out where to go. There are, by the way, 34,955 French communes (villages, towns, cities) to choose from so there are lots of choices. Over in the right hand column you’ll find a tag marked “Where to live in France” that will take you to more than 20 posts that we’ve published on this subject. An online newspaper had an article that grouped several websites covering this question, so I thought it would be helpful to do the same here.

The headline on CNN Travel read, “This US couple bought a house in France for $36,000”, so of course we had to read that story. Author Tamara Hardingham-Gill recounted how California residents, Robin and Jim, were visiting friends in Cajarc (about 2.5 hours north of Carcassonne) when they began fantasizing about living in France. By chance, a cousin of the town’s mayor was selling her 800-year-old house for $36,000, an affordable figure for which Jim said they could either buy a new car or a house in France. After spending $12,000 on renovations they now have a comfortable home where they spend their summers enjoying a simpler life and less consumerism than they find in California. I wondered if bargains like this were still available.

What happens when you put Cary Grant and Sophia Loren on a dilapidated and leaking houseboat moored on the Potomac River somewhere in the countryside outside Washington, DC? If it’s 1958 then you get an Oscar nominated romantic comedy called “Houseboat” with a happy ending. If it’s 2023 and you move the location to France, replacing the Hollywood actors with real boat owners, do you still get romance with a cheerful conclusion? I wrote about our brief consideration of life on the water in Narrow Dog to Carcassonne which explains why we’re on dry land but we still get questions about canal boats. An online article in The Local (France) prompted me to investigate what it means when “a man’s/woman’s home is his/her castle” floating in a river.