My Crazy France Dream

 Hey there friend,

I have been dreaming of spending several summer months living in the South of France, eating amazing food, like duck pate on fresh baguettes, with my husband and baby. For a while, it seemed like something so far-fetched that I would never be able to achieve it! But I am actually writing this from France! Last time I shared a method for tackling your dreams and bringing them to life, and today I will share how that process helped me make an altered version of my crazy France dream a reality.

Please note that the process was a lot more messy and anxious than it seems listed here. Also, I developed this method for following your dreams while I was struggling to get this dream into the real world. 

Step 1: Dream big!

My dream started out a bit vague. I wanted to live in the South of France with my husband and baby for three months, and I had the notion that it should be after my husband graduated from college. When I mustered up the courage to express this to my husband it began to seem remotely possible, so I began to dream a little more specifically. As things started to fall into place I thought more and more

I dreamed of how I wanted to feel living there on vacation, compared to living my regular life in Idaho, and I began to type my dreams up as text files on my laptop. I imagined us shopping at local markets and bakeries, exploring everywhere, and taking in what was different and how. I imagined eating delicious food, not struggling to decide what to cook, and not struggling to cook alone. I imagined living in a house that stayed clean and beautiful. I imagined how it would feel to not feel the pressure of keeping life running, just relaxing, working on my art projects, and exploring a new place with my favorite people. While I was dreaming I realized that a big part of what I was aching for was more help in mundane tasks and an environment that was beautiful and would stay beautiful.

Step 2: Assess the roadblocks

There were two types of roadblocks to this dream: Logistical roadblocks, and the Life Habits/Modes of Being roadblocks. Logistically, my husband was set to graduate from college in the winter (I wanted to go to France in the summer). Also, France is far away, hard to get to, and expensive. Also, what good would it do us to spend all our money in Europe, and have no liquid cash to rent an apartment when we came back? In regards to the other roadblocks, if I have a hard time asking for help here, and we let the dishes pile up here, why would France be any different? To conquer logistical roadblocks we need solutions, but to conquer the modes of being roadblocks we need to learn new systems. 

This is where the process got muddy. Steps 3 (Start breaking down roadblocks) and 4 (The leap) happened together all over the place as I started making and carrying out plans. The major points of no refund were buying the plane tickets, not renewing our lease, and the Airbnb free cancelation date which was about a month before our reservation. The point of no return was getting on the airplane.

The Logistics of Getting to France

1. My husband cleared up his 12 credits of required electives by taking a Spanish FLATS test (foreign language achievement testing service) to get college credit for the three introductory Spanish classes. He would be able to graduate a semester early, in July 2023.

2. Luckily we do not have any student debt to pay off, and we got a great tax return in 2023 because my husband is crazy and worked full time while going to school full time in 2022. We have money for things!

3. My parents wanted me to take my younger sister along, so they covered the apartment where we would be staying so we could get one with an extra room. We had somewhere to stay! 

4. My grandma offered to cover the flights for us with frequent flyer miles to and from France. With her help, we purchased the round-trip tickets in May. We were able to get there and back!

5. We got a couple no foreign transaction fee credit cards with 0% intro interest for 15 months to cut our costs abroad by avoiding transaction fees. The credit cards would also let us pay the balance later (before 15 months) with no added interest, which will be helpful if we need cash to move and pay a security deposit on an apartment after we return. We won't be broke when we get back!

6. We all applied for passports and they came eventually. We were able to actually leave now!

7. We got a U-box shipping/storage container, which we put all our stuff into when we moved out of our apartment. Now our stuff won't be a hassle or a worry until we have to unpack it!

So by the end of June, I had the logistics basically figured out. But there is more to a good vacation than being somewhere else--a good vacation is enjoying being somewhere else.

Learning Systems to Enjoy Living

In my daily Idaho life, I regularly fall into a Spiral of Despair where I don't ask for the help I need, then stuff piles up and I get overwhelmed, and after a while, I am hungry and overwhelmed, which makes me angry. A big part of my dream vacation involves not falling into that loop, which means doing something different! The obvious solutions to my Spiral of Despair were to ask for help, have a clean kitchen, get help with the baby, and have a plan for the upcoming meals. Obvious solutions, but not easy. However, during the months leading up to this vacation, we made significant progress in developing some systems to prevent the spiral from beginning. Here are the systems we developed and a little about how they came to be.

0. STOP! Ask for help: It's hard to ask for help, but it's easier and better than doing everything alone! It just takes practice.

1. Clean kitchen: My husband came up with this system for a manufacturing efficiency class, and I must say I'm thrilled. The system involves putting all of your dishes away, except one of each type per person, so if a dish is used it also is cleaned. And because you can't get more out, you don't build a mountain of dirty dishes. One person would be in charge of doing the dishes each night, so we start the next day off with a clean kitchen.

2. Help with the baby: A week after my husband graduated I hit crunch week in my book dummy project. So every (almost every) morning I would leave the house at about 8 and sit in the lobby of an event/business center near my house and draw for about 4 hours. If I had the energy to go back after lunch then I would. What I noticed about this week was that I didn't get baby crazy once. When I came home I was happy to just be with my husband and baby, and I wasn't trying to do a mountain of other things. I suppose my need for 'me-time' was being met and I didn't feel the need to carve out more.

3. Planning what to eat: I have been trying to come up with a system for meal planning for a while, and I am starting to understand what works for me and how I think. First, I need to know what kind of foods we want to eat or what we usually eat. Then we need to put in a few landmark meals--Wednesday is pasta for example, and Thursday my sister cooks. On Sunday we have a picnic after church, and later we heat up a casserole for dinner. From there it is easier to think about the gap days and start listing what foods you can make with what you have, what foods you want to eat, and what ingredients you need to buy. The key to a good menu is to stay as close to what you want to make and to what you have as you can, and that starts with the landmark meals. I like to write all of this down on a piece of printer paper that I have folded into a rough month or two-week calendar and then post it on the fridge. This way people know what is for dinner or lunch and can help start making it when they get hungry.

4. Other skills to practice: To really enjoy our trip, we started going on long walks and tried learning a bit of French.

Step 5: Enjoying the process

As the date of departure loomed I began to feel anxious, but I knew I had already done all the preparation I could, and just had to wait and see how my planning and preparing stood up to reality when it came. So far it has been just fine, including the regular amount of collateral disasters... but nothing we couldn't get through, or barely avoid by the skin of our teeth!

I hope this is helpful for when you go grab your dream and bring it into the real world, until next time!