Enjoy France Through a Summer in Gascony : Kathika Travel Website

By Amanda Kendle

Mixx Facebook

Tweet This

There’s beginning to be a long tradition of travel narratives depicting glorious summers in the French countryside, and before you pick up Martin Calder’s A Summer in Gascony: Discovering the Other South of France you might be rather suspicious that this is just another one of them. In some ways it is, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – many of us dream of a life in France with copious amounts of wine and fresh cheese and a good dose of fresh air.

A Summer in Gascony is Calder’s account of a summer spent working on a French farm near the village of Peguilhan in the south-west region of Gascony. He was employed as a stagiare at the farm and the Auberge, which meant he had a seemingly endless list of daily tasks to do, but he still managed to both enjoy fitting in to the French family which ran the farm as well as forming a romantic attachment to Anja, another of the stagiares.

This book tells the story of the summer in a simple chronological form, pausing to examine some of the history of the region in more detail and then to look at some of the cultural quirks of the area, too. It’s easy reading for someone who wants to make believe for an afternoon that they’re also spending the summer in France.