In April, I took my first all-expenses-paid "fam" trip in over 20 years. On the last one, in 1996, I went to Tanzania, met a French safari guide, and married him. This is the danger of fam trips. They are either so wonderful or so horrible that in either case, you tend to lose your mind. In my case, it was wonderful, and the Frenchman and I are living happily ever after.
"Fam," as I'm sure you know from having read my book, stands for "familiarization." The people being fammed are often journalists, like me. Familiarized, that is, with the travel products that the sponsors of the trip want to sell. Luxury hotels, barge cruises, stuff like that.
Barges in Burgundy navigate on canals that were built 200 years ago—before WiFi, before railroads, before the telephone. The French were still using carrier pigeons to deliver the mail. I swear to God. In 1966, an Englishman got the bright idea of taking commercial barges, which nobody was using anymore, turning them into hotels, and floating them on various waterways in France. Today there are 75 hotel barges cruising European waterways.
With me on the barge trip was the French safari guide, now retired but still my husband and still French—the only Frenchman, as it happens, ever to have been a guest on the Savoir Vivre in Captain Richard Megret's memory. And Richard has been captaining the Savoir Vivre for something like 20 years. So either he has a really bad memory, or he was just kidding, or Patrick is a very exceptional Frenchman. I tend to think the latter.
This barge cruise lasted exactly one week, and the whole time, Patrick and I kept looking at each other and going, "This is so much like a safari."
1. The captain was adorable and laid-back and funny and a little bit weird, the kind of guy who makes you fall in love with him, or want to adopt him, or want to be him.
2. The French hostess and the British tour guide were beautiful and intelligent.
3. The Burgundy countryside was like something out of a movie. Example: a medieval castle on a hill with sheep grazing in the foreground.
You see where this is going, right? Replace the captain with Patrick, the barge with a Land Cruiser, the sheep with impalas, the beautiful and intelligent hostess/tour guide with me, and voila: an African safari! But that's not all.
4. There were only eight guests on the entire boat. Something magical happens when your group is between six and eight. I can't explain it. A group of that size becomes like a family. I know that's a cliché but it's true, right down to the one family member who annoys you. Add to that the bonding experience of traveling through a foreign land, and it's no wonder that people exchange email addresses and get all teary when they say good-bye at the end.
5. Things happened that I cannot explain. I don't mean to get all woo-woo, but life has been different since those seven days, six nights on the Savoir Vivre. Better, somehow. Not because the cuisine was haute and the napkins looked like they'd been folded by somebody who went to napkin-folding school and graduated summa cum laude. And not because the countryside was beautiful, although that certainly helped. It's something about being with your husband, whom you met once upon a time in the Serengeti, and he's an old man now, chatting away in the wheelhouse with the young French captain, and the two of them are giggling and you have no idea what they're giggling about, some private joke. And suddenly you are deeply grateful for this day, this moment, this reminder that life isn't only work and toil and that there are lovely people in the world, yes, indeed, and some of them are right here on this barge, folding napkins, chatting with your husband, and doing everything they can think of to make sure you get a good feeling whenever you remember this day.
Still to come: A Vermonter in Burgundy; Sadie Does the Cotswolds; and more . . .
Further reading:
What a Barge Cruise Is, and Why Some Prefer It to a River Cruise (WendyPerrin.com)
European Barge Cruises That Are Anything but Boring (WSJ, September 6, 2019)
All about the Savoir Vivre from the Barge Lady Cruises website
Our House in Arusha (Kindle; $2.99)
