I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that the idea for a journey through Provence on foot came not from a deep investigative dive into the terrain of southern France or a moment of wild, singular inspiration, but from Elizabeth Gilbert and Peter Mayle, multiplatinum travel memoirists and patron saints of the midlife-crisis crowd. The wind in the valley—so fierce that it has its own name, Le Mistral— would make a winter trek untenable, and the teeming hordes of summer would make the warmer months even worse.
The villages of the Luberon are spaced out at perfect walking intervals, leaving you with challenging but entirely manageable 10 to 15 kilometer walks each day. Conceivably you could wake up one morning and head in four different directions—or nowhere at all, depending on mood and circumstance. To do a trip like this the right way, freedom from the tyranny of reservations and over-planning seemed imperative.
Not only would a bit of French help me unlock culinary treasures reserved for locals and linguistically-gifted visitors, it might also prove vital should we find ourselves desperately lost on a trail with no one to ask but a farmer quietly working his way through his second liter of wine. No, my grim sense of the French has taken shape painstakingly over years of traveling, both in their country and elsewhere, where anecdotal transgressions have stacked up like evidence in a civil suit: the hotel owners who refused to accept my apologetic English as conversational currency; the throngs of French tourists in northern Spain constitutionally incapable of mustering an hola; the sneering waitress in Paris that single-handedly ruined an otherwise excellent meal.
Of course, every one of these acts of wrongdoing fits neatly into broad cultural stereotypes, which I am all too happy to apply as a means for a simple explanation for bad behavior.
The French do the same, no doubt, as soon as I perform one of the stupid or ignorant or less-dignified acts that confirms my American-ness.
