Les Grandes Vacances -

It was the freedom of having no plans. And then comes August 31st. That specific melancholic gold.

You start to see the Cahiers de vacances (vacation workbooks) coming out of the bottom of the bag, half-finished. The rentrée looms on the horizon like a grey cloud. You pack the car, shaking the sand out of the towels one last time, promising to keep the slow pace alive once you get back to the city. Les Grandes Vacances

If you’ve never lived through a French summer, you might think a vacation is a week in July, a long weekend in August, or a frantic sprint to an airport. But Les Grandes Vacances is a different beast entirely. It is a slow, deliberate unplugging from the matrix of normal life. It is the mass exodus of July and the quiet surrender of August. Sometime around the first week of July, the cities empty. Paris, Lyon, Marseille—they hand their keys to the tourists and sigh with relief. The usual frantic pace of la rentrée (back to school) feels like a distant memory. In its place is the bouchon (traffic jam) on the A7 highway heading south. It was the freedom of having no plans

P.S. If you need me in August, you know where to find me. Don’t hold your breath for a reply. You start to see the Cahiers de vacances

May they last forever in our memory, even if they always end too soon. À bientôt, [Your Name]

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