Carnet de Voyage: a Beautiful Disorientation 

Travel notes from the real France. Carnet de Voyage is a weekly personal travel story in France sent in by readers. If you’d like to write a story for Carnet de Voyage, head here for details on how to submit.

When I first moved to France, I thought I knew what to expect. I’d sipped wine on cobblestone terraces, snapped photos of crooked shutters, and mentally bookmarked every cliché in the Provencal starter pack. But living here – really living – wasn’t sipping rosé under the wisteria. It was being woken at 6:15 a.m. by a vineyard tractor with a busted muffler. It was stepping in squashed grapes on the sidewalk. It was watching my golden retriever Sully bound through rows of Sauvignon vines like he’d been cast in a reboot of Lassie: Loire Valley Edition. 

The French have a word for the feeling: dépaysement. It doesn’t translate cleanly, but it’s that slow-drip sense of being unmoored, of having the familiar peeled away just enough to leave you blinking in the light. At first, it was disorienting. I was a grown man who didn’t know how to find or ask for charcoal in the grocery store. I once spent ten minutes pretending to browse mustard because I couldn’t figure out how to exit a parking lot with a pay by phone system I couldn’t read. 

But like the vineyard next door, dépaysement ripened over time. The strangeness softened. The silence of neighbors began to feel like respect instead of rejection. The early-morning tractors became background noise to sunrise walks with Sully along the river Cher, mist curling over the water like something out of a Monet painting, if Monet had also painted muddy paw prints on 200-year-old terracotta tiles. 

The biggest surprise, though, was how much this disorientation asked me to reexamine myself. Back in California, I knew the drill. My identity was etched in stone, sales executive, type A planner, man with a roadmap. But France doesn’t care about your resume. Here, you wait in line. You learn patience. You learn that not everything needs to be solved right now. And sometimes not at all. You start to notice things you never had time for: the smell of warm bread in the morning air, the way old French men greet each other with solemn nods that somehow say more than a five-minute conversation. 

There were moments, especially in the early months, when I questioned everything. Why had we left behind a comfortable life? Why had I swapped freeways for two lane roads that looked like bike paths, and language fluency for gesturing at light bulbs in hardware stores? But then I’d watch Sully gallop through the vines or see my partner D light up discovering a new brocante, or feel the quiet of a Sunday in the countryside, the kind that seeps into your bones, and I’d remember: we didn’t come to France to replicate the life we left. We came to be changed. 

Dépaysement isn’t just about feeling lost, it’s about discovering what you find in the in-between. It’s the moment you stop trying to control everything and start letting the new place, and the new pace, reshape you. You think you’re here for the scenery, but what you’re really here for is the transformation. 

I don’t mean to romanticize it. There are days when I still miss Target. Days when I’d pay a hundred euros for one clear customer service phone call. But most days, the tradeoff feels more than worth it. The life we’re building, slowly, deliberately, often imperfectly, feels more real than anything I left behind. 

The vineyard, like France itself, keeps changing with the seasons. And so do I. I came here to support D’s dream and find adventure. Somewhere along the way, I found my dream too.

Read our other Carnet de Voyage entries here.

Paul Blanchard is an American writer living in the Loire Valley. He shares reflections on French life and practical expat advice at WeGotFrenched.com.