Explorer Genes

France: It’s a (Quick) Wrap!
It’s no secret that France is the most visited country in the world.

And, like many dreamy teenagers, it positively beckoned me.

That shimmering iconic tower…that sexy intonation…Audrey Hepburn’s influence and of course….the possibility of amour. All this is pretty much why I naively decided to plunge into French, not Spanish, in high school. (A decision I often regret!)

But it certainly wasn’t my first visit to Paris in 2008 that blew me away.

Paris is a splendid city, but my expectations were undoubtedly too high, and it was a bit of a letdown. Also, on that visit to Paris, I stuck to the tourist sites, which were grotesquely crowded and often overrated. But, alas, I was a much different traveler back then anyways….

What actually made me fall for France was our last trip in 2022 when Greg and I visited numerous enchanting medieval villages in the southwest and central regions, particularly in Aveyron.

This five-week rendezvous was a journey that made me fall head over heels with the country, and surprisingly, despite his prior resistance to traveling here, Greg fell for it too.

For this year’s trip, we snagged a housesit in Thonon-les-Bains, a lakeside community on the southern shores of Lac Léman (known in English as Lake Geneva.) It was a drastically different side than the other visits and just continues to prove France’s diversity.

That said, we’ll be back. This was a quick visit and there is a LOT to explore here.

Below is our personal list of stats, money saving tips, and personal upsides and downsides.

Time Spent: 9 nights
Money Spent: $356.63 or $39.62/day* in USD/two people, which breaks down to:
$0 (Accommodation)
$189 (Groceries)
$130 (Transportation)
$20 (General)
$18 (Restaurants)

Our itinerary:
(9) nights, Thonon-les-Bains
Day trips to Yvoire, Annecy, and hikes to Mont Forchat and Chapelle de Hermones

Would we return? To France, absolutement. But probably not to the Lake Geneva area

Best budget saving tips:
-If you’re going to use them, book train travel as far in advance as possible to get saver fares.
-However, in lieu of that, we recommend using Bla Bla Car to save even more, which are plentiful and less expensive. Bla Bla car is a rideshare program where you join a local going from Point A to Point B, and you’re basically paying for a seat in their car
-Housesit for free accommodation! France is absolutely loaded with opportunities through THS* (Use our link below to save 25%)
-Use the Too Good to Go food waste app to purchase discounted groceries (see also below!)
-Shop at Lidl or Aldi supermarkets, both fantastic and cheaper European options
-Grocery shop close to closing times for even better discounts

Our Upsides
-Travel and living in France is easy, organized and comfortable.
-You can pay with contactless cards pretty much everywhere, although we did ride one local bus to Yvoire that required cash.
-Public toilets and fountains are plentiful, and free
-The trail network is outstanding with color-code hiking trails making village to village hiking a fantastic adventure, as well as walking paths
-The undeniable charm of its villages
-The country is the world’s best (in our experience) for artisanal products, display and crafting….everything. From cheese, to wine, to beer, to olives, to honey, to dips to, the list goes on and on. And, these things are available at reasonable prices for the craft.
-The French take over processing seriously and do well at avoiding unnecessary or toxic additives in food, cosmetics and wellness products
-Food waste is illegal in France so there are always great deals on TGTG, and at the supermarkets at the end of the day
-A terrific selection of fruits and vegetables, all which taste amazing
-The people: France gets a bad rap for having rude people. We’ve found that so long as you’re away from incredibly over-touristed areas, this is completely inaccurate. But yes, make sure you’re using appropriate niceties (aka bonjour and merci beaucoup when speaking to them!)
-The grocery prices are a good value. An egg costs $.18, a baguette $.45, a block of quality artisan cheese can be $3, a corked bottle of beer was $3.45 and a delicious bottle of wine for $3-6. This said, it’s very easy to fulfill your vices in this country.

Our Downsides
-France often lacks the solitude in its villages that we enjoy in places like Bulgaria. Even when it’s more off-the-beaten-path, it still feels “busy.”
-It’s common to find French people are often resistant to speaking English, (even when they know it.)
-Although we loved the nearby Alps hiking options, Lake Geneva area wasn’t really for us. It felt a little too…sophisticated.
-If you can’t manage to get train tickets early, they can be very expensive. There are long-term stay and local discounts, however.

If you’ve traveled throughout France, what would you add?

Today we are officially home free again as we celebrated a very happy REMOTE closing day on the sale of our rental property! The offer came in two days after we listed it for $2k over the listing price, so we were ecstatic. 🤩

For our Evansville, Indiana friends, if you’re looking for a real estate agent, please know our experience with Casey McCoy and his team couldn’t have been more smoothly executed and we strongly recommend them.

Part 2: (May 15-24) We are so grateful we contacted Andy and Libbi, who were looking for housesitters on the popular nomad FB group, Go With Less. It led us not only to new friends with similar interests, but to this beautiful location overlooking Lac Léman, an incredibly sweet cat, and nine days living la vie français, which we haven’t got to appreciate since our five week stint in 2022. Also, I was able to walk this time, which was a much more satisfying experience 🤣

Just a reminder, if you’re interested in travel for free by pet sitting or having your pet watched for free, we have a code to save 25% off THS in the comments below!

Here’s a peek at our daily life in Thonon-les-Bains…

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Part 1: (May 15-24) Nestled along the southern edges of Lake Geneva, the spa town of Thonon-les-Bains is not somewhere we ever thought we’d visit. But that’s the beauty of housesitting…it takes you to places off the tourist trail….real places that are livable, and not just flashy.

Although it lacks the mega-charm of places such as Yvoire or Annecy, it still has plenty of its own attractive character and sits right where the Alps start rising beyond the lake, which makes it very accessible for hiking, morning lake walks, while offering a much calmer and practical vibe than we saw in other places we visited.

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Upon Andy and Libbi’s return, they took us on our second hike…this time to Mont Forchat, where thanks to the clear skies, we had our first superb view of the highest mountain in Western Europe, Mont Blanc.

C’est Magnifique!

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Exuding an idyllic aura of romance on the shores of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva), the tiny flower-shrouded village of Yvoire couldn’t look more stereotypically medieval if it tried. But what makes it unique is that it’s not a reconstructed village. It showcases extensive medieval fabric that actually survived…stone ramparts, fortified gates, a moat surrounding a legendary castle, and cobbled streets all complemented by crystal clear water, and a ridiculous view of the Alps resting over the lake.

But naturally, romance, nor tourism, were its primary purpose, despite the numbers that pepper its streets carrying scoops of gelato today.

It was actually founded in the early 1300s by the Counts of Savoy who needed a defensive stronghold to monitor trade routes and lake traffic between Geneva, the Rhône Valley and Northern Italy.

And it was a perfect half day trip from Thonon-les-Bains.

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Annecy, pronounced Ahn-see, is a petit alpine city located near the border of Switzerland, and commonly tagged as the “Venice of the Alps.” However, it seems significantly calmer, tidier and quieter without that overrated Italian label. The said, it’s still undeniably a place that tourists flock.

With good reason.

It’s nuzzled adjacent to a crystalline, turquoise alpine lake and ornamented like the pages of a storybook, unsurprisingly a place I’ve wanted to experience since high school French when I studied the geography of France and first saw a picture. This of course, was the days before social media, so you know that had to be a bit of a fluke.

Needless to say, since we are staying only an hour a way, we had to make a visit happen. So, rather than dropping over $100 USD on a round trip train ticket, we hopped in a Bla Bla car with Murielle on the way down, where I got to dust off my French from the recesses of my brain, and Yass on the return, spending a much more comfortable $35 total.

What’s Bla Bla Car? A rideshare app that allows locals to take travelers from point A to B in a direction they’re already driving for a small fee per seat. It’s a win-win for all of us, even more now with sky-rocketing fuel prices!

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We’ve arrived to the French side of Lake Geneva, which for the record, en Français is actually called Lac Leman. But we’ll get to that in future posts….

Here, we are staying with new friends, Libbi and Andy, Americans who we met through the Go With Less Facebook group and were delighted when they not only wanted us to watch their cute cat, but hang out with them for a few days as well.

For our first outing, they took us to our favorite European supermarket of Lidl where we stocked up for 102€, or about $119 for the week. (And…oui, oui. At least $30 of that was our “mandatory” splurge on French wines, craft beer, and mouthwatering cheese.) We found that most things were either cheaper or equivalent to the US and eggs came in at $.18/egg.

The second outing was a bit more dreamy where they dropped us right into what we’ve been longing for…a short hike with some delicious tastes of the Alps.

After another prolonged night incessantly batting our eyes to and fro ‘neath our sleep masks, we were met with a frigid blast upon departing the plane in Dublin.

Although we had been having second thoughts, this immediately made us content that Ireland was not our final destination and that we were merely passing through.

Still, we had eight hours to kill until our next flight and only one lounge to do it in. Since lounges typically have a three-hour maximum restriction, we still had to figure out how to score some breakfast, so we used one of the free lounge/restaurant passes from our annual FEE FREE US Bank Altitude Connect card. This is the same card that gave Greg his TSA pre-check, and supplies our bi-monthly Gig Sky global data plan.

Aka, it should be a no-brainer to add to every US travelers’ credit card tool box….

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We are off again and this time, we have new and improved matching dork shirts, enhanced by AI courtesy of our dear friends, Megan and Gordon. You may have seen them in a recent post and we’ll be seeing them again soon enough on the flip side.

Until then, we’re maneuvering in a different direction, for two weeks of semi-quick travel until our next one month slow-down in June.

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At what age did everyone start appending the words…”for your age”…to everything?!

Aka…you look great…for your age.

You seem fit…for your age.

You have a lot of energy….for your age?!

We’ll gleefully take all of it, regardless of whether it’s…for our age! 🤣

This said….Happy 48-years-young to Mr. Chase!!

This is the first one he has spent stateside in nine years, and our original plan was to spend the day bopping around getting US birthday freebies, which used to be offered with no strings attached.

Since all the businesses now seem to want advanced sign up for “rewards” programs, phone numbers, emails and s***m samples, we opted out and created our own day of good ‘ol Evansville exploration….

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