On traveling door-to-door between homes in California and France.
By Megan Harlan
I’ll return to the joys and delights of part-time French living in the next post. But in this one I’m going to be honest about just what it takes to get us there.
We call it “le schlepp”: Our 20-hour, door-to-door, California-to-France house haul. From the moment we hand the keys to our Bay Area house-sitter to our arrival at our front door in Dinan, it’s 20 hours of non-stop travel—by plane, train, and either bus or automobile.
I know that sounds bad. And honestly? It can feel not great. Though it’s amazing—and we’re wildly grateful—that nonstop flights can whisk us from the American Pacific coast to Atlantic Europe in about ten hours, it’s also not news that commercial air travel has gotten, well, slightly more unpleasant in recent years. No matter how well you plan, some annoying and unforeseen glitches are bound to await you at the airport—and are now just part of the deal in enjoying the incredible convenience of flying.
just getting through it: security at SFO
Thanks to my globe-trotting childhood and years as a travel writer, I’m game for and accustomed to long-haul adventures involving uncomfortable lay-overs in places like Jakarta, Karachi, or Frankfurt. But I wasn’t traveling with a teenager of my very own then. International family travel where you are the parent in charge comprises its own class, Parent Class, which is, metaphorically speaking, always seated too close to the restrooms. So while the extra weight of parental responsibility naturally mitigates some of the exhilaration and sense of freedom when traveling—those magical feelings that make the irritating moments worth it—our son is in fact an excellent, good-natured traveler, and we count ourselves very lucky that he’s up for these schlepps.
Myself, I’ve been to France five times since the country reopened to visitors in June 2021. For four trips, we drove directly to Dinan after arriving at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. Only once have I taken the train for that final stretch to Brittany—and this, dear readers, is a far more humane option than what I am about to relate. (I took the TGV, France’s high-speed train, when I brought my mom to the France House, on our first mother-daughter trip ever, and such a brilliant one it deserves a future post.) Because my family-of-three has wanted to explore Brittany beyond Dinan, we’ve had a car on each of our trips, though in the future, our plan is to take the train and then pick up a rental car on a need-to-drive basis. You’ll soon see why.
What follows is a time-line of our usual 20-hour travel itinerary heading to France from California, this one from July 2022:
11:30 a.m. Sunday: We leave our Bay Area house, get a quick ride to our local BART station (the Bay Area’s train system), and are en route to San Francisco’s airport by 11:45. An hour of Duolingo French lessons later, we arrive at SFO.
12:45 p.m. Sunday: What a gorgeous airport SFO’s International Terminal is—easily the most beautiful in the United States. Checking in at the Air France counter, I even feel some of the old glamour of air travel, whose heyday I hit the tail end of during my peripatetic 1970s childhood. Indeed, many of the Parisians (I’m guessing) in line around us are dressed as if for a chic lunch date; I, sporting leggings and sneakers, am not, but I really appreciate their effort! (At least my family is not wearing jammy bottoms, which I’m sorry to report continues to be a trend among American air travelers.)
1:30-ish p.m. Sunday: All checked in, we wheel our bags—teeny-tiny international travel-approved carry-on spinners (19 inches tall!)—over to security. Let the games begin! We’ve ponied up for TSA Precheck (definitely worth it), so we zip over to its designated, much shorter line, where we also don’t have to remove our shoes, liquids, or laptops. All is well until they find the full travel water bottle my son put in his backpack and we forgot to drink on BART. The TSA agent won’t let us drink the water right there, so our son has to go back to the end of the line, empty the water, and do the entire security check again. Our bad; complete amateur move on our part. But still: Why wouldn’t they let us just drink the water?
2:30 p.m. Sunday: We window-shop the boutiques and do the usual flipping through magazines, purchasing of $4 protein bars, and sipping of coffees before heading over to our gate. We ponder, as names are endlessly called over the speaker there: How do we get upgraded again?
4:15 p.m. Sunday: We’re on the plane. Per usual, the three of us are happily snapped into our own seating island of three-across window, middle, and aisle seats. Also per usual, we’re in coach, but at least we’re in something like our own private coach.
4:45 p.m. Sunday: Airborne! I set my watch nine hours ahead—France-time. About ten hours to touch-down.
The next 10 or so hours: There are two types of plane travelers: those who can sleep (my partner) and those who can’t (my son and me). My son, reasonably, watches movies the entire time. My partner, who will have to drive once we land, is zonked out against the window, muffled from all sensory stimulation, having donned noise-cancelling headphones, sleep-mask, and a blanket over his head for good measure. I’m sometimes staring at my Kindle, listening to podcasts or watching a movie or two, writing in my journal, or writing in eerily focused short bursts on my laptop. After two meals, two movies starring Tina Fey, a quick read of George Sand’s first novel, Indiana, some hair-raising podcasts about the current state of American politics, a decent editing pass on an essay, and several laps around the cabin, it’s light again. And Paris is appearing outside our window:
below the middle of the wing, a very tiny Eiffel Tower
2:15 a.m. Monday, our time (11:15 a.m. France time): We’re on the ground—nine hours in the future because of the time difference. Charles de Gaulle is another architectural beauty of an airport, though one with an often comically confusing layout. Navigating it makes almost zero intuitive sense; if you suspect a sign is pointing you in one direction, you might as well head the other way. But I always love landing here, because it means we’re back in FRANCE.
3:00 a.m. Monday, our time (12:00 p.m. France time): Our passports have been stamped, and we’re on our way to the car rental counter, a weird set-up of multiple trailers just outside Terminal E-F. (Good luck finding it the first time.)
3:30 a.m. Monday, our time (12:30 p.m. France time): We throw our stuff in the car, and my partner settles in for the roughest stretch yet, one I am incapable of performing and marvel at every single time he pulls it off. You know the people who only need four or five hours of sleep to perform at top levels? Who have the stamina to be a U.S. President or Navy SEAL? Meet my partner. He’s a machine who can drive incredibly well under nearly any circumstances and with no substances besides the gratis espresso shots the nice car rental counter lady handed us. We set off for Dinan: 4 hours 20 minutes according to Google Maps.
6 a.m. Monday, our time (3 p.m. France time): This is what we’ve dubbed “the slapping hour.” My son is passed out in the back seat. I wear contact lenses that I’m not supposed to sleep in but am losing consciousness for whole stretches at a time—only to be awakened by the sound of my husband slapping himself hard in the face to stay awake: Slap! Again we have this conversation: Should we pull over? No! Only one and a half hours to go, he says, squinting hard at the road ahead. Then: Slap! Slap!
6:50 a.m. Monday, our time (3:50 p.m. France time): But there’s also this: Every time we drive the northern route to Dinan, we get to see the otherworldly island-castle of Mont Saint-Michel floating on the horizon. Photos of this breathtaking sight don’t do it justice:
view from the car of Mont-Saint-Michel, out in the Normandy Bay
7:45 a.m., Monday, our time (4:45 p.m. France time): We make it to Dinan in one piece, park near our street, and roll our bags to our house. Giddy with exhaustion, I’m nearly overcome with gratitude that we’re back in this beautiful town, place, home. Our house manager, aka “the House Fairy,” had turned on our electricity earlier that day, so the refrigerator is cold and the lights are working. My partner, incredibly, has a Zoom work meeting to attend. So my son and I run over to Monoprix—France’s one-stop-shop where you can buy everything from bananas to pretty cute linen t-shirts. Delirious with lack of sleep, we somehow make it back with all our bread and dairy needs, Illy ground coffee, pasta, delicious stinky Camembert cheeses, wine, and some random fresh fruit and vegetables bought in a haze.
After a quick nosh for dinner, we force ourselves to stay up until about 8 p.m., sleep like stones for twelve hours, and awaken to this:
view from “the nap couch”
For us, le schlepp is worth it.
