The Lyon’s share of the easy life
Becoming parents at 43, after multiple miscarriages, Julia and Matt Clarke decided they’d have to move overseas to get ahead. Saddled with a ‘‘huge’’ mortgage on their Auckland home, they were making ends meet (just), but weren’t able to offer their two children, Connor, now 5, and Sienna, 2, the lives they’d envisioned for them.
Discovering they could buy a property freehold in France and enjoy an ‘‘easier’’, more relaxed lifestyle there, they put their Auckland house on the market and found themselves on their way to Paris just a few months later.
‘‘We had waited so long to get our children that we wanted to be able to live life with them, not just get by, and a number of factors meant France was a great choice,’’ Julia, now 45, says.
As Matt is English, it was fairly straightforward for the rest of the family to get visas and, with Brexit on the horizon, they knew they couldn’t afford to wait around.
Like many travellers before them, they fell for Paris immediately, but Julia was well aware that the spell of their ‘‘beautiful and romantic’’ honeymoon period in the city would be broken.
Initially settling in a small village near the medieval town of Sarlat-la-Caneda in Dordogne, the couple found it a bit too quiet for their liking outside peak visitor season, so bought a house in a larger settlement in the Charente-Maritime region on the west coast. It didn’t take them long to realise, however, that they were city slickers at heart and so they shifted again, this time to Lyon, the capital of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region.
‘‘Lyon is the gastronomic capital of France, and very much like a little Paris,’’ Julia says. ‘‘It looks and feels like Paris but is a smaller, more manageable city – very cultural with lots of food and festivals and totally walkable. We have utterly fallen in love.’’
Still, it took them much longer to settle in than they had imagined.
‘‘You can’t up sticks to the other side of the world with two very small children and not have challenges. The French lifestyle is very relaxed but there is a lot of paperwork and, of course, there is the language barrier.’’
Their biggest challenges were professional, with Julia working to set up a business as a wedding florist and event designer, while Matt looked for work. With limited French, it took him a while to land a role but, after working on his language skills, he found a job he enjoys.
Julia, meanwhile, is now as busy as she wants to be working on high-end destination weddings in the South of France for primarily English-speaking clients from England, the United States, Dubai, and Australia.
‘‘Honestly it is amazing. I get to travel throughout Bordeaux, Provence, and the Riviera doing stunning weddings at gorgeous chateaus. I think I am living the lifestyle most florists dream of.’’
The business, Floret, is doing so well Julia is offering free five- to seven-day workshops for those wanting to learn how to do the flowers for weddings and other major events.
She’s hoping at least a few Kiwis will sign up, describing it as a great opportunity for anyone wanting to visit some of France’s most beautiful chateaus over summer, while learning a new skill.
The children have settled into their new environment well, Julia says. After a year at a French school, Connor speaks the language fluently, although she admits that she still struggles with it herself.
Devoting much of her free time to ‘‘eating, drinking wine, exploring France with the children’’ and trying to become as good at her second language as her son, Julia finally feels she is living rather than simply surviving.
Naturally social, Julia found it easy to get to know the many other expats, saying she starts conversations with pretty much everyone she hears speaking English. The couple is also making French friends, largely through chatting to other parents outside the school gates.
Speaking of school, they can send their son to a private one for €170 (NZ$290) a month, which includes a four-course meal with cheese each day.
The family has absolutely no regrets about moving, Julia says. Having less long-term financial pressure and more time together as a family are among the major reasons for that, as are ‘‘the food, cheap, delicious wine, being able to travel easily and cheaply’’.
‘‘It has been one of the hardest years we have had, but we have grown closer, learnt a lot, and experienced more than we could have imagined. We are now in our happy place and loving every minute.’’
Julia’s top three travel tips:
1. Research where to eat. In France, there are two kinds of restaurant: amazing and awful. If the food is good, it is superb; if it is bad, it is plain awful. So Google, look for ratings and choose wisely. Just walking into somewhere that looks cute can end in a not-so-good dining experience.
2. Hire a narrow car. French roads are tight and hard to navigate. Use Google Maps rather than an in-car GPS. We called our GPS Nancy, and Nancy was called a lot of expletives during our travels. Some of the places we were sent were very weird directional choices. In saying that, we have had some laughs because of Nancy.
3. Don’t book everything in advance. You can pretty much get as good or better deals through booking sites on the day, so allow yourself to roam and stay at places you love for longer or move on if a place doesn’t appeal. We pre-booked everything on our travels, and found we were stuck in some places we really didn’t want to stay in (in some cases we actually took the hit and left early). If we had our time again, we would just go with the flow.