Why ThisTrip: The main purpose of this trip is to ‘audition’ towns that would be good to live in (specifically to live in for members of the Try-Out-France community). I started this community* (Facebook/Zoom/Website and now blog entity) and one thing I wanted to accomplish is for people to have a friendly experienced information source that might give them a good shot make this France dream a success. I knew enough to know all towns weren’t for all people. I wanted to be able to feel like I would be a helpful matchmaker for people dreaming of living in France. Though I know quite a few, there were towns heartily recommended by swaths of France-saavy FB posters that I didn’t know. This trip was to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, and assume that I could share that with this community. But I know Vence. Well. So What’s it doing at the top of the list?
Why Vence is First:
No real good reason. Mainly because there is so much curiousity in this community focussed on the South I wanted to get here sooner. So, starting with the South meant flying into Nice. And if I am near Nice, I will involuntarily gravitate to Vence, partly because I love it, and partly because I think other people will love it too. I think, over the years, I’ve spent nearly a year in Vence (in 3 month increments; it now feels a bit like home, so perhaps I landed here first because I am a skosh anxious that this trip will be too hard for me, so I started with an easy town)
Why it’s on the “best towns” list:
Easy to get to: The bus to the Nice airport from Vence takes less than an hour and costs less than 2 Euro. Nice has direct flights to the States (in the warmer months) . As of this writing, the only two French airports that you can get a direct flight from the States are CDG, Orly or Nice. (Apologies for the US-framework this community often displays; there are lots of other nationalities in our group, admittedly mostly English-speaking, but yours truly is US-based, so practical transportation wise that’s going to be what you get from me..
Jet Lag gets worse with age: The trek from airport to first pillow you can lay your weary jet-lagged head down on needs to be as short as possible. Jet-lag has become a state of mind in which I am evenly divided between wanting to lay down and die, or slap anyone silly who looks at me wrong. You don’t want to know jet-lagged me. So I’m in Vence partly to catch my breath and recover the more sunny, intrepid side of me and partly to make me feel like I can actually do what I’ve set out to do by exploring a town I already know.
I found a good property source: Accidentally poking around on the internet, I found a great source of properties. Not only does this guy do real estate rentals, short, middle and long term — he actually seem to instantly grasp the 3 months-ish thing. When I tell most people that I want to help people ‘try out living/ retiring in France” I get a lot of side-eye skepticism. “Who wants to do that?” When I tell them that a lot of people do, and of that group, a decent amount would like to try-it-out before making the leap, they don’t get any less dubious. This guy did. He likes the idea. The three apartments he showed me, plus the nice one I am staying in range from modest and fine, to pretty darn fancy, but not exorbitant. That sounds like a good match to our group.
