Migrating to Bretagne
A new chapter begins at 41 years old - somewhat familiarly – with my family, in tents
It’s strange to be pulling on a full 3mm wetsuit just a week after escaping the relentless heatwaves of the southwest, yet here I am, feeling a little chilly despite the sun poking through patches of smoky grey clouds. Sahara, with a full belly of breast milk, is crawling around Remy’s legs in the soft white sand, eyeing a cluster of smooth rocks to climb. Hunter, impatient with his newfound passion, has already run off ahead, while Ryder waits for my return—we’re sharing a board. I trot off to the shoreline; it’s low tide, and I carefully cross palm-sized pebbles to place my Christian Bradley fish-tailed surfboard, set up as a thruster (three-fins), and give my body a gentle stretch. It’s only my second attempt at surfing postpartum, and last time I couldn’t even stand up.
I wade through the turquoise shallows. With the tide out, a manageable crowd of longboarders, beginners on foamies, and a couple of decent surfers on fish boards like mine are spread out across the A-frame (where a wave breaks left and right) in front of me, and I’ve got my eye on the left-hander. It all looks so gentle, much calmer than the southwest, and I recognize an old friend, confidence: Today, I WILL stand up. I know I can.
It's a peculiar feeling to have begun surfing 29 years ago, having filled most of your adult life with periods where being a ‘surf rat’ was compulsory, only to spend the past five years mostly out of the water. Various factors kept me away: heavy shore breaks teeming with aggressive surfers in southwest France, extensive work travel, a pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, recurring miscarriages, surgeries, a complicated pregnancy, and most recently, a year of postpartum fatigue. My body has changed more than I’d like to admit; the two-to-three years of miscarriages brought on a rapid aging jump, and raising a highly energetic baby at 41 has left me tired. I even started losing my eyesight after Sahara’s birth; suddenly, everything was blurry, and now I wear glasses every waking moment—an astigmatism that’s likely always been there, now aggravated by postpartum fatigue.
I’m up to my waist and jump on my board, beginning to gently paddle towards the first line of whitewater, duck diving easily. Two more lines of water to pass, where Hunter is catching the inside reforms, and then I’m out the back. I rest for a few minutes to catch my breath, squinting to get my bearings on the shore, staying to the left of the rocks exposed on the sand.
A small set arrives, and I take my pick, turning to face the shore and paddling as fast as my wobbly arms will allow, feeling the gentle nudge of my old friend, Mother Ocean. Surfing is not exactly like riding a bike; there’s a certain baseline fitness worth maintaining to play at length upon waves. But it’s a good day to make a quiet comeback as an unfit mum. I scramble to my feet and crouch, release my hands from the board, and I’m surfing. Being slow to stand up means the wave breaks faster than you can ride the ‘green face,’ and I quickly find myself riding the leftover, washy white foam. I jump off in waist-deep water and catch a glimpse of Remy on the beach, fists pumping the air, my number one supporter, Sahara cruising around beside him.
I paddle back out with a smile on my face, thinking, I’ve still got it!
We arrived in this wild and wonderful peninsula in the Finistère region of Bretagne six days ago, after driving almost 800 kilometers from the southwest of France to begin a new chapter: self-building a 41ft wooden catamaran. The plan originally was to move to Lorient, in the Morbihan region about an hour south, where work for Remy, school for the boys, a football club, and a boatyard were already lining up. But as I wrote in our Floating Stories Lab Substack last week, an impromptu visit to Finistère changed all that. We ditched the old plan and followed our hearts in a migration that felt, frankly, more aligned with our values.
We sold everything that wouldn’t fit in a small storage container (quite pricey at 140€ per month so we’d better get it out and into a rental as soon as possible) and left our old life—including Remy’s job and family—behind to set up camp in a quiet council campground overlooking coastal headlands. We’re taking each day as it comes (necessary with the remarkably inaccurate weather forecasts here!) and hoping to find a place to live in the nearby town before school resumes in early September. Moving from rental to rental is not economical—the outgoing and incoming costs hit hard—but moving in summer is especially challenging. As in many parts of the world, long-term rentals are scarce, with homeowners preferring to let from September to June before raising prices substantially for summer vacationers.
We’ve camped before, on the east coast of Australia, when I was between travels with the kids—it’s how Remy and I first met and began living together in my cozy tent. Our setup here, though, is somewhat overly basic, and the famed Breton drizzle and fog caught us by surprise—it’s summer, after all—and forced an out-of-budget upgrade when two out of three tents began leaking. Now, with a new communal shelter tent, our BBQ gassed up, and a deep freezer available in the common room to re-freeze our Esky’s cold bricks each day, we’re a little more comfortable.
A little comfort is necessary considering the boys have already begun pre-season football training at their new club, a 30-minute drive through the countryside from camp, which we’re making three times a week already. Ryder even played a ‘friendly’ match yesterday, and I have two assignments due for my Masters (it’s not summer vacation in Australia, where my university is based!). We’re under pressure (from the kids and ourselves) to transition from tent life to finding a temporary rental while we look for a place to buy and begin building our boat.
I hadn’t considered buying in Bretagne until we first visited Finistère, content with pursuing a semi-nomadic life knowing we’ll embark on a circumnavigation of the world once our boat is ready in a few years. We’ve traveled the world extensively but hadn’t yet found a place we could see ourselves returning ‘home’ to; we just knew we eventually wanted a small plot of land with a modest cottage or barn to renovate, not too far from a coast with mild weather, to develop a Living Land Lab—a follow-on from the Floating Stories Lab project. We dabbled with permaculture during Covid before and have always wanted a simpler way of life, so it’s not a complete surprise that we now envision a ‘home’ here in Finistère, where we can settle into a minimalist, semi-self-sufficient, ocean-centric life on land while building our boat in the backyard, as many Wharram builders have done.
There are numerous values and life skills I want to instill in my kids that are often not taught in school. After five years in the southwest suburbs, a quieter, wilder, coastal sea change feels like a much healthier move for the entire family. The unknowns are scary - dry bank accounts and nerves around the boys’ integration into new social circles - but our first week has been, gratefully, a salty one. We’ve made numerous trips to the beach to surf, taken so many coastal walks that Sage—our Border Collie—is absolutely exhausted, and Sahara slept through last night for the first time in over eight months, leaving me to wake up in my sleeping bag early this morning soaked in my own leaking breastmilk.
It’s not all rosy. Tempers have been short, too. Two days of poor weather hit early after our arrival, making us question our desire to live somewhere with milder weather. Ryder and I prefer the fog and drizzle over the heavy rains and frequent flooding of the southwest, just “not when we’re camping,” as he bluntly put it. Remy is noticeably anxious about needing to find a job ASAP and, of course, better digs—we NEED to find a rental. Bathing Sahara is a bit of a nightmare; the toilet blocks aren’t equipped for parents with babies, but I’ve managed to find a groove and can get the job done, mostly with a smile on her face, except for the time she slipped on the ceramic shower floor and hit her head, for that mishap she screamed so loud the others could hear her back at camp. It’s a bit too cool for a wetsuit tub ‘bucket bath’, unfortunately.
The Bretons are welcoming, and our new friends, Megan and Luc, have extended their kindness. Megan helped Remy and the boys unload our house gear into the storage box in Quimper and sends us morning surf reports before we’ve even mustered the energy to get out of our tents. They live in a lovely coastal village just 10 minutes from camp, and meeting them is a big reason we chose to migrate to this part of Bretagne. After five years of isolation, mostly interacting socially through my computer screen for work and studies or while away on filming trips, I’m craving place-based community. We even ventured out in the drizzle and fog to a local fundraising fete, Hunter quickly hiding our umbrella when we discovered the outdoor venue was packed with dancing local Bretons completely unphased by the rain.
There are strong ocean-human kinship ties in this part of France. I suspect my writing will gravitate toward exploring these as I actively reconnect with an oceanic lifestyle that fills my own veins, too. With my Capstone Masters project commencing soon, my head is ready to balance books with place-based creative practice, alongside raising a family, building a 41ft wooden catamaran, getting salty and eating more from the sea, and navigating the various challenges that come with being an Anglophone foreigner living in France with limited (but improving) local language skills.
The coming newsletters will wind their way through varying experiences as they come; I’ll share them with the filters off, and I welcome you to comment. I envision this as a space to yarn together rather than just have me monologuing away. Substack has a decent ‘chat’ section (I’ll figure out how to use it properly) and I’ll drop short-form snippets and updates in the ‘notes’ function a bit like I do my personal Instagram. I’m going to tinker with audio—I’m not ready to launch a podcast with Sahara being in her VERY cling-to-mama phase and being busy with the Capstone, but I’m into the idea of capturing local soundscapes to accompany my stories, photos, and video snippets from time to time. I have a Zine project in mind, and this newsletter may be the place to test out its theme and content previews exclusively to my Paid subscribers (thank you, by the way, I see you all and am so grateful for the support).
Back on the beach, Hunter’s lips have turned blue, Ryder and Remy have finished their surf session (Remy’s beaming after letting loose on a few set waves), and sand-covered Sahara has filled her nappy with a gift for me to manage with the last three wet wipes—one of which I’ve just dropped in the sand. We’re going to need to upgrade to warmer wetsuits soon, adding to the list of items we should probably invest in to enable the ocean-active lifestyle we moved here for.
But first: a roof, jobs, and even before those urgent priorities, Sahara’s dirty bum has to be cleaned.
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What a beautiful life! Congrats for getting back into surfing. I also have felt quite “unalive” lately after years of miscarriages and procedures. I want to lift weights and run a marathon and do something that pushes me but for now I’m sticking to wild cold swimming 😊 Good luck settling into Bretagne.