One week in the south of France with kids during lavender season

Planning a road trip around the south of France in July? We spent three days in the French Riviera and four in Provence during lavender season, and it was unbelievably gorgeous. Highlights: Nice, Arles, Roussillon, Gordes and Bonnieux

Note: This post holds the dubious distinction of longest time between trip and writing about trip. Reason? General life insanity, of course. We spent a week in France, pretty much came home to do laundry, then left for five weeks in the United States less than one week later, then came back to (somehow) even more insanity: Operation Allies Refuge, job interviews for Chris, various panicked trips once we realized we’d be leaving, etc. 

Frolicking through Provence during lavender season has been a bucket list item of mine for a while, and this past summer we had the chance to make it happen! It was as pretty as I envisioned, and we got some great family photos taken by the extremely talented Ashley at Curious Provence. I highly recommend that you schedule a shoot with her if you are heading to Provence with kids. Not only will you end up with gorgeous photos taken in a field NOT swarming with tourists (I’m looking at you L’Abbaye de Senanque), but she will have other useful information about swarms. Specifically, the epic swarms of bees.

Yeah, for some reason it never occurred to me that “frolicking through the lavender fields” would mean chilling with I think is most accurately described as a metric fuckton of bees.

I have never seen so many bees, and I’ve literally hung out with bee keepers on several occasions (small town journalism, what can I say?).

The good news? Ashley informed us that the bees would not bother us in the slightest, presumably because they were busy getting jacked up on that sweet, sweet lavender goodness. This also turned out not to be a lie designed to get us to smile for photos, as we ran through these flowers for more than an hour with no issues whatsoever. Yay! So even if you happen to have a crippling fear of bees, it really is no big deal, promise.

But, to back up: this incident — and also the unfortunate situation that resulted in us paying Ashley partially in a large amount of coins — was actually in the middle of our trip. So, let’s start with:

One week in the south of France with kids: our itinerary

Note: Some of what we planned did not end happening because of Covid (Monoco) or because Lochlan got sick and we were stuck at our house (Avignon)

Day 1: Fly into Nice in the morning, check into our Old Town AirBnB and wander the city (focus on parks!)

Day 2: The beach!

Day 3: Phoenix Park

Day 4: Road trip to Curcuron, family photos near Bonnieux

Day 5: Carriere des Lumieres in Les Baux de Provence, visit to Arles

Day 6: Lochlan sick! We stayed in our AirBnB most of the day as he recovered. Poor fella.

Day 7: Roussillon (the red city), Gordes

Day 8: Flew home from Marseilles

Visiting the French Riviera.

We originally intended to come to the Riviera and Provence in July 2020, when — after much debate — we ended up selecting France for a big family reunion with my parents and siblings. We rented the most gorgeous house in Cannes, and I’m still a little sad we never got to go together. Still, the five of us had a lovely time in Nice in 2021! We did not go to Monaco as planned — we intended to visit the oceanographic museum, see various gardens, and hunt for Prince Rainer’s fancy cards on display around the city — because at the time people were required to get PCR tests to enter. That was a hard NOPE from all five of us.

WHAT TO DO IN NICE WITH KIDS

NOTE: I would like to give a shout out to our AirBnB, which — despite its fourth floor walkup location — was basically the ideal location in Old Town Nice. The only thing I will tell you, particularly if you are traveling with your school-age kids, is that the bedroom doors do not lock. That’s all I will say, but consider yourself warned.

1. Promenade du Papillion. Our AirBnB was very close to this park and we visited it every day. It’s various wooden climbing structures were shaped like animals and way fun, plus we found trampolines and a water fountain to play in. Crowd-pleasers, all. 2. Visited the beach at Castel Plage! Right off the bat, I will warn you that the beaches in Nice are rocky. I knew this going in, but when the time came to decide about whether to pack our water shoes, they still didn’t make the cut. (We didn’t bring much luggage). That said, this particular beach experience was AWESOME because we uncharacteristically went fancy.

We originally planned to seek out a sandy beach in one of the nearby towns, but when the day came around we just couldn’t seem to mobilize. Instead, we ended up going to Castel Plage, where we promptly looked like hayseeds by trying to order something at the bar and were told by our horrified “beach boy” (this is verbatim how he identified himself) that this was HIS JOB. So a couple minutes later we had a bucket of ice with a bottle of wine, some snacks and three lounge chairs.

Lochie, being an amazing baby, reverted back to his traditional beach self-defense mode of immediately falling asleep on us. Honestly, that’s pretty much like having a babysitter so we were psyched. The big kids, meanwhile, were delighted by the rocks and sat there for approximately 100 years gathering up different varieties into a collection.

Getting into the water was a bit of a challenge because we didn’t have water shoes, but not nearly as challenging as getting out. Luckily, the beach club had helpfully supplied a rope so people could drag themselves out. The water itself was perfect though (other than the occasional jellyfish).

The big kids also got a nice international bonding moment with some French children who spotted some jellyfish. In the spirit of international cooperation, they all picked up rocks and started wildly chucking them at them (the jellyfish, not the children).

3. Visited Parc Phoenix, a botanical garden and zoo (with an adventure park!)

This one was another crowd pleaser, and not just because Lochie got to use public transit to get there. There was also a high ropes course! We found a lot of these in the last five years, and the big kids always love them.

If you are going to Nice with kids, this place is absolutely worth a visit! We stayed for hours.

4. Walked along the Promenade Des Anglais! This 4-mile long promenade runs along the coast and the goal is to drink in the scenery. I actually came out here for a jog a couple mornings because it was so pretty. This is notable because jogging is NOT my favorite activity.

5. ATE! We had some great meals in Nice, and the top of the list was Pamir, an Afghani restaurant steps from our apartment. There was also a number of excellent bakeries in the area, a crepes joint called Creperie Le Trimaran, and a gelato shop run by a Sicilian close to our place. Regrettably, it has been so long that I don’t have all the names. Sorry, team! Definitely hit Pamir though.

We rented a car on our last day in Nice, and hit the road inland.

Four days in Provence with kids

When planning our four days in Provence, I really struggled with finding the perfect location for an Airbnb. Regular readers will know I am a strong advocate of setting up a home base for as long as possible when traveling with kids, so when visiting Provence I wanted to select one place and launch all day trips from there. Eventually, I settled on a farm stay in Cucuron. The house itself was not great, but the grounds were absolutely beautiful. (Bonus, I got to bust out my extremely terrible high school French because the landlord did not speak English). The beautiful grounds ended up being critical because mid-trip Lochie got sick (per usual) so we were confined to the property while he recovered. Fortunately, there were ample grounds to explore, a (FREEZING) spring-fed pool to swim in and various livestock to enjoy. Critically there were also three dogs, two of which were amazing for the kids to play with. Months later, I still hear talk of the famous Gatsby the Dog.

So, what did we do while in Provence? Here you go.

1. Visited Carriere des Lumieres.
   This place was truly incredible. I know these sort of projection art displays are common in the US right now, but I assure you that this place was like nothing I’ve seen before. It was held in an old quarry and thus the art was projected on an enormous scale. It really did feel like you were walking through the paintings. Unfortunately Lochie found the experience a little “scawy,” and Owen thought the music was too loud, so Chris ended up taking the boys out. My little artist, Fiona, would have stayed forever.
2. Walked around Arles
   After our visit to Carriere des Lumieres, we had a nice visit to Arles!Van Gogh lived in this gorgeous town and produced more than 300 paintings here in the late 1880s. We just walked around for a while, spent some time at the park, ate lunch and checked out the iconic Arles Amphitheatre. When the Romans built this around 90AD, it held about 20,000 spectators to watch chariot races and gladiator battles.

   

3. Roussillon. The red town! This town can only be described as otherworldly. Roussillon sits on a massive ochre deposit, which gives its cliffs a red hue. We walked on the Ochre Trail, which was absolutely lovely and exactly the right length. And now, I’m going to let the photos do the talking.

   

4. Gordes. After Roussillon, we made a quick stop at the Abbeye de Senanque in nearby Gordes. The abbey is a fixture of Provence photography, but was under construction while we were there. We ended up just hanging out a bit, buying some handmade lavender stuff and moving on. I think we would have been more impressed if we hadn’t already spent some time playing in a lavender field a few days before.
5. Hung out around our AirBnB. I was very excited to go to Avignon on our third day in Provence, but unfortunately Lochie came down with a bug and we ended up staying home. Fortunately, we picked a beautiful location to be housebound for the day! The kids had a fun day running around the pond, chasing ducks, swimming in the spring-water pond, trying out bocce and playing with the dogs.  

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   Another highlight was definitely watching soccer! The Euro 2020 (obviously played in 2021 because of the pandemic) was on while we were in France, so we had a great time cheering on Italy to victory!

7. Enjoyed Cucuron. We picked an AirBnB near Cucuron mainly because of its central location in Provence, but wow — did it turn out to be gorgeous. We walked into town each day, mostly to grab pastry and bread.

   

   We also had our best meal in France by a longshot at a tiny restaurant on our very last night in town. I had duck, Chris had a burger that he still dreams about. The kids had gelato for what turned out to be the third time that day, but what can I say? It came with the meal.

8. Photo shoot near Bonnieux. I talked about our photo shoot with Ashley at Curious Provence already, but I wanted to close by throwing a few more photos up from our wonderful shoot with her!

Well, that about does it for our France trip (9 months after we got back!), but since I can’t resist: here are some final favorite photos. Try saying those last three words three times fast.