An afternoon nap on the French national holiday, July 14, 2011

Paris, July 15, 2011 – I had a delicious nap on the afternoon of le Quatorze Juillet, the French national holiday, known outside of France as Bastille Day. There had been the annual military parade down the Champs-Elysées in the morning. In the evening I would go out to dinner with three friends then to watch the fireworks from along the Seine. But that nap was the highlight of this year’s holiday.

During my long nap I was both traveling and writing, aware that lying in bed on a holiday afternoon was the best place to be doing both, even while truly doing neither.

For at least an hour children in the otherwise calm street below were setting off firecrackers every minute or two or three. On other days the occasional pop of the firecrackers and the screams or laughter may have disturbed a nap, but here they served as a happy reminder that this holiday nap was well deserved.

I had been traveling in France a lot for the past six weeks, since early June, and even when at home in Paris I had appointments most days, so a guiltless afternoon nap like this was well overdue.

The articles that would result from those travels and appointments were also overdue, or at least they hadn’t yet ripened into actual text. For a travel writer, travel, pleasurable as it may be, is indeed work; for me that means napless days of research, encounters, visits, tastings, tours. It’s the kind of work that is practiced “in the moment” after a certain amount of logistical planning.

It would be great if the writing end of travel work could always be equally in the moment. Sometimes it is, in which case writing is as fluid a gesture as taking a train while watching the countryside change out the window (a bit like this page). But most often it isn’t; travel writing and the associated research is a struggle between moments past, present, future, along with the nagging desire for “being there” to have been work enough.

That’s why napping on a holiday is such a wonderful state for both travel and writing; no logistical planning is involved, no attention to detail, no ordering of thoughts, no rewriting. In fact, napping on Bastille Day in Paris while children set off firecrackers outside produced some of the best travel and writing I’d done in months.

And so I was able, without moving a hand, to write the opening paragraphs and assorted, telling anecdotes about many of the places, people, landscapes, history, hotels, meals and wines that I’d sought out or come across during my travels over the past six weeks, and to show how interconnected everything was:
– while in Champagne visiting small sparkling wine producers and stopping by the Cathedral of Reims on the 800th anniversary of its construction,
– while in Biarritz for the opening of Cité de l’Océan, a major new museum dedicated to the ocean, taking a surfing lesson, and visiting the town’s most notable hotels,
– while in the department of Alliers in the Auvergne region to visit the national Museum of Costumes of the Stage and to get to know Saint Pourcain wines, local cheeses and local beef (Charolais),
– while in Burgundy, where I tasted over 30 different wines from that mini-parceled area around Beaune, toured a Anis de Flavigny candy factory, and where I was reminded of how beautiful the green rolling hills of the region are,
– while in Paris at various wine bars, shops, exhibits, restaurants and hotels.

And while I was inspired during that nap, I worked on texts about prior trips from the past year or so that I’d yet to adequately cover, trips to Alsace, to Deauville, to the Riviera and to the Chevreuse Valley just outside Paris.

For about an hour I wrote and traveled and wrote with peaceful and inspired fluidity while firecrackers punctuated my imagined texts from the street below. There was then a long flurry of pops as a succession of about 50 firecrackers went off. Either the had decided to end their firecracking session with a bang or they had mistakenly set off an entire roll. I listened for sirens or screaming mothers, but luckily none came. The street was silent. I was awake enough to contemplate getting up from my nap and set down some of the words I’d written horizontally. But I drifted off before resolve took hold.

Today, the following day, the street is just as quiet. There were a few more firecrackers in the morning, but none now. The French vacation period is now semi-officially underway. Other than a 2-day trip to Picardy next week to learn more about the American presence there during WWI, I won’t be doing any significant work travel until the end of August.

It’s time to sit down to write some of those texts, vanished, perhaps, but now ripened from my Bastille Day nap.

(c) 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

For a snippet of Bastille Day fireworks in Paris click here (then click again): Bastille Day 14July2011 DD