When I started planning a three month trip, I knew we couldn’t afford fancy hotels nor was that really the experience I wanted for us. I envisioned renting an Airbnb in a medium sized city so we could avoid renting a car/van (another expense) and use public transportation. For entertainment we would walk around town, go to the library, the park, the shops and sprinkle in some museums. All the while, we would hope to meet some locals and practice French and try not spend too much on entertainment/food/transportation.

Taking the team out for a planning lunch. (Asa is not actually miserable, he just didn’t want to smile.)

While this first vision of our trip was amazing, when I heard about people pet-sitting or house sitting I was intrigued. Maybe we could get accomodations for free and have more to spend on food and entertainment? This dream was squashed when after following French house sitting sites for a year I realized not many people wanted a family of 5-6 housesitting, many pet sits are in isolated locations, and pet people want someone spending 10+ hrs a day with their pet (what fun is a vacation when you can’t go anywhere?). To confirm this, I put out feelers and got exactly 0 people offering a house or pet sit and 2 people who got a little hostile at the idea that we only wanted to pet-sit animals that did not require more than 3hrs of care a day. That idea was thrown away but my hopes were not completely destroyed. I still had one more plan.

The last plan involved a few French friends, a homeschool family or two and some cheap Airbnbs (can you say “air mattresses”?). Over the years I have made a few friends who live in France. One of these is Remy, who we hosted this summer. His mom runs a B&B in France and offered us a stay there in exchange for hosting Remy. To be completely honest though, we would have hosted him for free. We have hosted many students over the years for the experience alone. The B&B was a great bonus though.

Part two of this plan was homeschooling families. I’ve been following a few French homeschool groups on Facebook. Yes, my French friends, there are homeschoolers in France (they never seem to believe me)! One group has 6.5k members. I posted to this group that I was coming to France for 3 months with my kids and looking for families that would host us as a language and cultural exchange. We practice our French, you practice our English. I’ll cook American fare for you, you cook French food for us. I was hoping I’d find us one or two of these opportunities to live immersed in French culture and make some new friends. This next part still blows me away. From my post, I got over 30 offers of free lodging from these lovely French families.

Map of our offers of lodging or day hosts from friends old and new.

That leaves part 3 of this plan, cheap Airbnbs. We still might stay in a few of these if there are places we want to visit where we don’t have a contact. We will need a car after all (some of the places we will stay are off the beaten path) but I found some great rental rates on cars.

Now all I need to do is learn to drive stick shift.