How Traveling With Family Made a Familiar Route in France Feel New Again

In the mornings Andrew and I ate poached eggs and salt-crusted potatoes at an outdoor table facing the central allée of the formal gardens while the boys plumbed the mazelike box hedges, looking for frogs the size of pennies. On a lower tier of land, the jardin exotique—planted with roses, crocosmia, and delphiniums—is dominated by a scene-stealing circular swimming pool that’s rimmed by a thick lawn and blue-and-white-striped umbrellas. There’s a closet nearby, full of foam noodles and inflatable inner tubes, and once the boys sussed that out, most of my ideas for excursions were sunk. I’d say our vacation at that point was 15% culture and 85% cannonballs.

The kids ruled the roost just as much at our next stop, Domaine des Etangs Auberge in the eastern reaches of the Charente countryside. In the attic of this fairy-book castle, we found a wood-beamed game room with dress-up boxes, Foosball, and a billiards table. A chic outdoor playground, complete with trampolines and a zip line, is next to the potager garden, within shouting distance of parents sitting at dinner tables. The marshmallow roasting made it feel as if we were bunking at an unthinkably upscale summer camp. This impression was only strengthened when we took the kids to a local lakeside beach, Plage de la Guerlie, where you can rent canoes by the hour and loll in the sand.

Modern pops in a guest room at Domaine des Etangs Auberge

Ana Lui

The author’s sons, Kit, two, and Henry, five, in Saint- Émilion

Jo Rodgers

It was obvious by then that this holiday would not include museums, as mine and Andrew’s had years ago. We went sightseeing in Crestet and Séguret and took the boys to see the lavender fields at the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque. We ate omelets on the terrace at Hotel Crillon le Brave and artisanal ice creams at Léone in Vaison-la-Romaine. Overwhelmingly, though, we played checkers at the hotel and ate room service croque monsieurs on the balcony. Every single morning the four of us were the first people to arrive at the Crillon’s pool, pitched on the side of a hill with cypress trees.

The second-to-last stop, before a few final days of downtime on the Île de Ré off the western coast, was a compromise. The can-do travel agency Abercrombie & Kent was working with a fine-tooth comb to unearth a villa rental for us in the Côte d’Azur, but the places we liked were booked. Our agent sent one left-field option in a different location, which she thought was unusual enough to merit some rejigging: a newly renovated farmhouse east of Bordeaux, Maison Dubreuil. As we sped closer, over hillsides braided with vines, we ate ham sandwiches we’d picked up from Fortiche Club in Bordeaux. This was the only destination that we hadn’t intentionally chosen, and I was unprepared for the landscape sliding past: It was shaped by the wine industry but also verdant and big-skied. Later we’d find the terrain even easier to appreciate from a bicycle—slopes and woodland, limestone villages, narrow trails that sliced through the vineyards, pop-up markets in parking lots selling rotisserie chickens and drippings-roasted potatoes.