Google Photos introduced a new feature that allows you to see on a map where the photos in your library were taken. This turns out to be an expressive travelogue summary for me. Since nearly all my photos after 2008 are in my Google Photos library, I can see where I’ve been. Here’s the section of the map for France:
That’s a lot of places to have photographed! It breaks down into a few different trips.
Paris and environs (2013-2020)
I worked in Paris for a summer in 2013, and went back a few times since, most recently with my family over New Years 2019-2020.
You can see there’s some coverage outside of Paris. The spots to the northeast are Charles de Gaulle airport. The spot to the northwest is Conflans Sainte-Honorine, where we had lunch in 2013 at the friend of a cousin. West-southwest is the Palace of Versailles, of course. The spot east of Paris is Bois de Vincennes and the château there, tourist destinations both. The nearer spot to the southeast, just outside Melun, is the Château de Vaux le Vicomte. It’s a tourist site, and one of my favorite – like Versailles but way less crowded, more human scale. Finally, the far southeast spot is Samois-sur-Seine, near Fontainebleau. A co-worker lived there (commuted to Paris every day!), and hosted a summer party for the office once.
Tours (2014)
There’s a small spot on my France photomap just to the east of Tours. In 2014 I worked in Paris for a couple of weeks, took a weekend tour of the Loire valley Chateaux. I confess, it was quite challenging booking the tour on the phone (in French), and trying to comprehend as they told me that the tour started in Tours, and it was my responsibility to take a train from Paris to Tours and get to Tours by 10am to meet the tour. The brochure didn’t mention the meeting site somehow, only said it was a Loire valley tour from Paris, so the existence of a city named Tours was nowhere on my radar. It all worked out though, it was a nice tour, and Tours was nice too.
Dijon and Beaune (2017)
In 2017, I had a work trip that took me to Zurich, Switzerland. I took the occasion to tack on a few days of vacation in Dijon, France, which is only a few hours away by train. It so happens the my wife’s cousin is a French professor at a college, and runs a student exchange program with a college in Dijon. He has spent many months there over the years, and so was able to connect me to his network of friends there. I had a great time getting to know these friends, seeing Dijon, and getting a VIP tour of the wine-producing region of Beaune. It was a short visit, but wonderful.
Roye, Compiègne, Amiens (2018)
In 2018, my daughter and I did a homestay immersion program in Roye, a small town in Somme, about 120 km north of Paris. We studied with our host / teacher each morning, but spent the afternoons being tourists with or without our host. We toured the cathedral in Amiens, the château in Pierrefonds, the palace of Compiègne, and the World War I battlefields around Albert. I took a solo visit to the museum on the site where the November 11 Armistice was signed in 1918. They were busy preparing for their centennial, but the museum was already chock full of photos and artifacts. Overall, the trip was outstanding.
Nantes, Bordeaux, St. Emilion (2020)
Loire and Atlantic 
Bordeaux wine country
After welcoming the arrival of 2020 in Paris with my family, I bade them goodbye at the airport on January 2nd and began a 4-day solo road trip. My eventual destination was Aurignac, a small village southwest of Toulouse where I planned to spend a week. But before that, I enjoyed un petit périple down the Atlantic coast. I rented a car, drove the highways listening to French talk radio, stopped at rest areas often. I spent a night and a morning in Nantes on my own, a half-day in Les Sables-d’Olonne with my French teacher’s family, a night and a morning in Bordeaux. From there I hopped over to St. Emilion for a 24-hour stay including a winery tour, a gourmet dinner, and a luxurious stay at the Château Hôtel Spa Grand Barrail – a bargain and a splurge at the same time. I left after breakfast and drove south, arriving in the afternoon at…
Haute-Garonne: Benque (2020)
I enjoyed my 2018 homestay immersion program in Somme so much that I arranged to do a second one in January 2020. I spent a week in the tiny village of Benque (population 162), which is outside Boussan (pop. 213), which is outside Aurignac (pop. 1,200), which is the site of a famous cave. The nearest big city is Toulouse, about 75 km northeast. I had a great time studying and living with my host family, baking bread at a neighboring farm, making lemon tarts in the village shop with the local pastry baker, and rambling the countryside. Beautiful, quiet landscape, my first extended solo vacation in decades.
Carcassonne, Narbonne, Avignon (2020)
The vagaries of airline pricing meant it was cheaper to fly home from Marseille than from the much closer Toulouse. So I did one final day of long distance driving at the end of my homestay in Benque, ending up at the Marseille airport hotel shortly after nightfall. To break up the drive, and to get in some sightseeing, I stopped in Carcassonne, Narbonne, Sète (outside Montpellier), and Avignon. While in Benque I ordered online a number of books that my host recommended, and arranged for them to be delivered to a FNAC in Narbonne. Separately, I met a board game designer in Aurignac and enjoyed playing one of his games with him. I researched game store locations and visited three that fell along my path to Marseille. It was a fun way to have a reason to visit smaller French cities for 45 minutes at a stretch.
Marseille (202x ?)
I didn’t see much in Marseille beyond the inside of the hotel and the inside of the airport. I slept at the airport hotel following my 10 hour driving day, caught an early flight in the morning. But I should like to go back sometime and visit it properly.
Ah, going back. As of this writing (July 2020), Europe has imposed a ban on travelers from countries with high level of COVID-19 infection, including the United States. When I first thought up the title of this blog post, I meant “My last 4000 French photos” as in “my most recent photos”. But given the way things are going, it’s hard not to worry that these could in fact be the last ones I ever take. That would be make me very sad…