I Left Los Angeles for Rural France. Now a Twenty-Minute Drive Feels Far.

I used to have about eight commutes a week and called it a life. My neighbor assumed a trip to Ikea meant staying the night.

We had been living here at our new home in rural France for a few months when a neighbor stopped me near the gate and asked what we had planned for the day. “We’re going to Nantes,” I said. “To go to Ikea.”

She nodded, and then asked how many nights we’d be staying.

I told her we were going for the day. Drive down, get some dishes and an armchair, drive back before dinner. She looked at me in much the same way you’d look at someone who had just announced they were flying to Denver for a sandwich.

Nantes is an hour and a half away.

I have thought about that conversation more than she will ever know, and before it becomes the kind of post where an American moves abroad and announces that France has solved traffic, let me say clearly that it has not. Paris has traffic. Lyon has traffic. There are French people sitting on the périphérique at this exact moment having a much worse morning than I am, and if you live somewhere rural in America you probably already have most of what I’m about to describe. I’m also not here to tell anyone that their commute is a moral failing. Plenty of people love the drive! It can be optimized or ameliorated with podcasts, great music, or even a breathing meditation. Not automatically bad.

What I’m noticing is smaller than a country. It’s the 30 kilometers around my house, and what those 30 kilometers have done to my idea of ‘far.’

If you’re new here, I’m Kamille. I write about the culture shocks, the neighbors, and the ongoing project of becoming a local in rural France. Two free essays a month, no charge, no pressure.

In Los Angeles we had several commutes, and it was considered normal. There was the commute to work, the commute to school, the commute to the good grocery store (which was a different store from the near grocery store and required more forethought). There was a commute to the pediatrician, a commute to a 4-year-old’s birthday party in Pasadena on a Saturday morning, a commute to a work thing we didn’t want to attend and then a second, worse commute home from it at 9pm.

None of this registered as unusual. It was just…the tax. You paid it in 20-minute increments, eight or nine times a week, and you got very good at podcasts, and you developed opinions about surface streets that you would defend at a dinner party.

Here, my kids’ school is 6 minutes away. So is the pharmacy with the green cross that blinks the temperature at you. So is La Poste. So is the boulangerie, and the small supermarket, and the garden store where a man once explained fruit tree pruning to me for about 11 minutes while I nodded along (with the confidence of someone understanding approximately one word in four).

6 minutes. All of it. And I don’t have to leave early for any of it. There is really no version of this drive that goes badly.

For anything bigger we go to the nearest proper city, which is 20 minutes away and which I now describe, out loud, to other adults, as far. Yes, 20 minutes. In Los Angeles that was the drive to grab a decent taco. Here I hear myself say “well, it’s a bit of a trek” and I don’t even flinch.

And the 20 minutes isn’t spent in traffic, because there isn’t any. There’s one roundabout that occasionally contains three cars. The rest is stone farmhouses with their shutters half closed, a field of sheep, a stretch where somebody’s cows graze in the sun (looking healthier than most American humans), and then the road dips and the whole valley opens out, and I have, at least twice, nearly driven into a hedge admiring it.

Yes, that’s what really gets me. Not just that the drive is short, but that the drive is nice.

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Which brings me back to the neighbor at the gate.

An hour and a half is not a commute here. C’est loin. It’s a trip, and a trip gets an overnight bag. It gets discussed beforehand and reported on afterward, at length, to people who ask. If you’re going to hand over three hours of your one life to a car, the French position seems to be that you should get a hotel and a very good dinner out of it, and not just, for example, a washable cover armchair named ROCKSJÖN.

We still do the long drives now and then, for the thing you can’t get nearby, though far less often. And I’ve noticed we’ve gone a bit soft about it. On a trip to Paris this spring, we hit real traffic coming in (true gridlock), and we did all the correct things (a podcast, then music, then the tense silence of two people not saying anything about the traffic), and I could feel my shoulders climbing toward my ears.

That level of traffic used to be a regular Tuesday, and we’d absorbed it so completely that I would have told you, with total sincerity, that it didn’t bother me. Looking back now, I can say that it did bother me, but the difference is that I’d just never had anything to hold it up against.

Happy to have that now. :)

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How to Commute Like a French Person (Without Moving to France)

Now, I realize there are few things less useful than the woman who moved abroad and came home with recommendations for everybody. The French people I know who do have long commutes are not ‘enlightened’ about it. They complain (they’re good at that), and then they go and eat lunch for two hours.

It was the geography that did most of the work for us, but something smaller shifted alongside it. We stopped treating the car as dead time to be survived at maximum speed. Nobody needs to move to a hamlet in France with a blinking pharmacy cross to do that, and I wouldn’t offer it as a traffic strategy anyway. These are free, and they work on a freeway anywhere.

Stop letting every podcast be about becoming a better version of yourself. You do not need to arrive at the office having optimized anything. There are people out there making beautiful hour-long shows about mushrooms, shipwrecks, the history of a single word, birds. Choose the birds sometimes.

Try sound instead of talking. Rain, or a forest at 4am recorded by someone with excellent equipment (and questionable sleep habits). It’s strange for about four minutes and then it’s just calming.

Build the playlist before you leave, and put things on it you’ve never heard. Turn the drive into a small act of discovery rather than a rerun. Maybe start with 10 unknown songs, and ask your friends or work colleagues for recommendations. No skipping for the first 30 seconds.

Take the pretty way when you can spare the extra eight minutes. Now, obviously don’t do this every time. Some days you need the freeway and a bad mood, and that’s a legitimate use of an afternoon. But the road past the reservoir exists, and Google Maps will never once suggest it to you.

And every so often, let a long drive be an actual trip. Pick the far thing, the aquarium two hours out, the town you’ve been meaning to see for six years, and give it the gift of an overnight bag and the good dinner. Let it be an occasion sometimes instead of an errand.

The French would never drive three hours for some Ikea dishes, and after three years here I’ve come around to thinking they might be right (though I would like it noted that the armchair has held up beautifully).

À bientôt,
Kamille

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Once Upon a Castle is where I write about all of it: the neighbors, the language disasters, the small daily collisions between the life we left and the one we’re building in the French countryside. Free subscribers get two essays a month. Paid subscribers get two more, plus the Castle Diaries, which is the unglamorous working archive of restoring a château without fluent French, a contractor network, or any relevant experience whatsoever.

If this one made you look at your own commute a little sideways, there is a great deal more where it came from.