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Gordon (Goggs) McManus of Off The Boat singing on the deck of Saraphina, Canal du Midi There are surprises that are carefully advertised as surprises and consequently surprise nobody. And then there are the real ones. One evening aboard Saraphina, our barge on the Canal du Midi, Captain Finn casually announced that there would be a surprise before dinner. That was all he said. We were moored against the bank of the canal, somewhere in that wonderfully indeterminate world that

There are places where you go looking for something, and places where something seems to be waiting to find you. Le Somail, on the Canal du Midi, turned out to be one of the latter. We had arrived there aboard the barge boat Saraphina, traveling slowly along the canal through southern France. Le Somail is the sort of place that seems entirely comfortable with the passage of time. There is the old stone bridge arching over the water, boats tied quietly to the banks, enormous p

There may be no more famous street in the world. The Avenue des Champs-Élysées runs in a grand, almost theatrical line from the Place de la Concorde toward the Arc de Triomphe. It is monumental Paris: broad pavements, plane trees, cafés, luxury stores, traffic, tourists, monuments and history. The Arc dominates the western end of the avenue, reminding everyone who looks up that this is a place intended to impress. But when I walked the Champs-Élysées with a camera, I found my

There are words one encounters while traveling that seem simple enough - until one tries to translate them. During our travels through southern France, one of those words kept appearing on maps and road signs: Étang. Étang de Berre. Étang de Thau. Étang de l’Or. Étang de Leucate. And, during our travels through the Camargue, the magnificent Étang de Vaccarès. I knew enough French to understand lac. A lac is a lake. Simple. But étang? My translation apps generally offered pond

A wet ring on a paper napkin holds a secret world. I looked down at my table today and saw a wildebeest. Not an actual wildebeest, of course. There was no thundering of hooves, no dust rising over the Serengeti, no anxious glances toward a river filled with crocodiles. Just a paper napkin. My glass of cold water had been sitting on it for a while. Condensation had gathered on the outside of the glass, trickled downward, and soaked into the paper. When I lifted the glass, it l

Rue Saint-Ferdinand is not one of the great streets of Paris. It isn't the Champs-Élysées. It doesn't have the grandeur of Boulevard Saint-Germain or the fashionable mythology of Rue Saint-Honoré. It is only about 435 metres long, running through the Ternes quarter of the 17th arrondissement from near the Église Saint-Ferdinand-des-Ternes toward the Avenue de la Grande-Armée. And yet, after spending some time here, I began to think that this modest street tells you something

France is one of the great homes of street photography. And, in 2026, it is also one of the more complicated places in which to practice it. Walk through Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Narbonne, or Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer with a camera and the temptation is everywhere. A woman reading alone at a café. An elderly couple walking arm in arm. Children chasing pigeons across a square. A waiter smoking during his break. A man asleep on a bench. Two strangers arguing. Two others kissing.

We were sitting outside La Maison, having dinner in the little square in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. It was one of those wonderfully ordinary Paris evenings. Tables spilled onto the pavement. People talked over one another. Glasses clinked. Waiters threaded their way between chairs carrying plates and bottles of wine. Dogs lay under tables. People came and went. The square had that particular Parisian quality of being busy without seeming hurried. And directly across fr

You walk through Narbonne surrounded by history. Roman history beneath your feet. Medieval history above your head. The enormous Gothic choir of the Cathedral of Saint-Just-et-Saint-Pasteur rises toward the sky. Beside it stands the Palace of the Archbishops, part residence and part fortress, its towers and walls reminding you that medieval churchmen exercised temporal as well as spiritual power. And then you walk into the courtyard. And there she is. A woman. Naked. Crouchin

The restaurant district of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer was alive. Tables spilled onto the pavement. Glasses of wine caught the evening light. Plates arrived and disappeared. Waiters threaded their way between tightly packed chairs. Conversations overlapped with laughter and the clatter of cutlery. It was one of those wonderfully French scenes in which the distinction between restaurant and street seems almost to disappear. And then I noticed the old man. He was standing beside a w

There are ways of traveling that are designed to get you somewhere. And then there are ways of traveling that remind you that getting somewhere is not really the point. Traveling aboard the Saraphina along the Canal du Midi belongs firmly in the second category. Our journey from Homps to Le Somail was not measured in kilometers or hours. It was measured in locks, bridges, glasses of wine, conversations, extraordinary meals, villages glimpsed through plane trees, and long stre

There are places you visit to see something, and there are places you visit simply to be there. Cours Beauvais, in Aix-en-Provence, belongs to the second category. Nothing particularly monumental needs to happen. There is no famous painting to stand in front of, no cathedral façade demanding explanation, no plaque insisting that someone important once lived here. The attraction is more immediate than that. The attraction is life itself. Walk through Aix in the late afternoon

One of the pleasures of traveling is noticing small things. And in France recently, I noticed something very small indeed. The bottle cap wouldn’t come off. I unscrewed it, pulled it aside, and there it remained, dangling rather annoyingly from the neck of the bottle. My first reaction was that something had gone wrong with the cap. Then I noticed the same thing on the next bottle. And the next. It turns out that this is not a French eccentricity at all. It is European enviro

There are museums where we go to see paintings. And then there are places where we go to meet the painter. Cézanne’s atelier in Aix-en-Provence is one of those places. It sits above the city on the hill of Les Lauves, a modest building surrounded by trees and an overgrown Provençal garden. Paul Cézanne bought the land in 1901 and had the studio built for himself. From 1902 until his death in 1906, this was where he came to work, particularly in the mornings. It became the set

There are addresses that tell you where you are, and addresses that seem to tell you where you have been. 17 Rue Saint-Joseph is one of the latter. It is not one of the grand addresses of Aix-en-Provence. There is no sweeping staircase, no fountain splashing in a courtyard, no imposing façade announcing centuries of wealth. It is a small house on a narrow street in the old city, the sort of place you might walk past without noticing if you were hurrying somewhere else. But Ai

The Musée de l’Orangerie, at the western end of the Tuileries Garden, began not as a museum but as a winter shelter for the garden’s orange trees - hence its name. Built in 1852, the long, light-filled building eventually found a very different purpose when Claude Monet offered a monumental group of his Nymphéas (Water Lilies) to the French nation following the First World War. Monet was closely involved in planning how the paintings would be displayed, envisioning great pano

There is a particular kind of walking one does in Paris that has very little to do with getting anywhere. You begin with a destination, or at least the pretense of one, and then Paris interferes. A café catches your eye. A dog trots past with the confidence of a regular. Someone emerges from a boulangerie carrying a baguette under one arm. A narrow street seems more interesting than the broad one you are following, so you turn down it. And before long you have forgotten where

There are moments when you go to a museum to look at the paintings. And there are moments when the people looking at the paintings become every bit as interesting as the paintings themselves. This was one of those moments. We were in the Musée d’Orsay, in the Impressionist galleries, along with what appeared to be half the population of Paris and a substantial proportion of the tourists visiting Europe. The galleries were packed. People moved slowly from room to room in a gre

At a restaurant on the edge of the Place Saint-Sulpice, I noticed a family having lunch. There were six of them. Mother and father. Grandmother. Three children. The oldest was a boy with tousled hair. The middle child was a girl. The youngest was another boy, distinguished - at least in my memory - by a particularly unfortunate haircut. They were having a wonderful time. They talked. They laughed. They smiled. The children participated in the conversation. The adults listened

Your Turn by Alison Aubrey is scheduled for publication on September 8, 2026. In this blog I have treated Aubrey's published description and third turn framework as inspiration rather than implying that this four-part blog series is a review of the complete published book. Part 1 - Identity: The Third Act and the Third Turn: When the Career Ends but the Story Doesn't. Part 2 - Flow: The Flow State: When You Forget to Look at the Clock. Part 3 - Curiosity: Curiosity: The Fuel