The moules marinières et frites are accompanied by a crisp Provençal white wine and a plate of olive tapenade and crostini. The fries are hand-carved and scooped out like a canoe, perfectly salted and served upright in a heavy tumbler. The mussels are small and drenched in a cream curry sauce with an ample amount of butter. It’s possibly one of the best lunches I’ve ever eaten, here by the sea. When I flew into Nice a few days ago, we came in so low it felt like we were skimming the water. This was my first glimpse of the Mediterranean and the Côte d’Azur, bright blue and captivating. Now the sea has darkened, and the rain comes down hard. I’m here on business and to work on a novel that has been troublesome, time spent in solitude to work out the knots. But in my notebook now, I write: I should have taken the risk.
June is a season of transition. Kids on the cusp of adulthood are set to graduate and make big decisions about the future. Some will go on immediately to college or university. Others will travel instead. In 1989, at 17, I had the opportunity to study for a year in the south of France. Officially, I turned it down because I would return a year behind academically, and would be unable to graduate with my friends. Unofficially, I also had a new boyfriend, and whenever I tell this story, I always end it like that, with a hint of regret: I turned down France for a boy. You think about things like that sometimes – the way certain turns and missteps can completely change your life – and I wonder how different it all would be if I had made the leap.
I step out from the restaurant in Cannes and open my umbrella. The French army patrols the train lines in groups of four, cradling assault rifles. It’s evidence of a city on high alert, and disconcerting. I head east to the Musée Picasso in Antibes, where the artist lived and painted in the summer of 1946. There are more than 200 works on display, and seen up close – the brush strokes and ghostly outline of corrections, the sea and splendid Old Town a perfect backdrop through the windows of the former Château Grimaldi – they are almost overwhelming. It’s impossible not to feel inspired or fall in love with this place, especially when the sky clears. At the end of the day, I count 12 variations of the same photograph: shutters flung open, flower boxes providing bursts of colour against ancient stone walls. I am smitten.
Of course, even at 17 you would be glad you came, even homesick and pining for the boy you left behind, but would you really understand the value of the experience? Maybe those details we find so charming now – the history of a building, the tumbled stone of an ancient archway, the bins of bright tomatoes in the market, the weight of a tasselled hotel key in hand – would have meant little then. Isn’t that what the wisdom of age brings – the ability to appreciate these things?
Catherine Lummack spent a year in Nice in 1993 when she was 18 and says her year abroad was single-handedly one of the most significant experiences of her life. “I soaked it all in,” she says. “It shaped who I am today and absolutely changed the trajectory of my life.” Lummack now lives in Toronto but recently bought an apartment in Nice and maintains an unbreakable connection with the south of France. She is also a staunch advocate for the gap year, in which students take a year off before deciding what to do with their lives.
“It’s an ideal time to see the world,” she says. “That extra year also fosters a different level of maturity that is so valuable when starting university. Everyone came into their own selves in Nice.” It’s a refrain I hear over and over, and it makes sense: These years – 16, 17, 18 – are formative. Chandra Rice – a red-headed, freckle-faced, 17-year-old with buck teeth and glasses in 1988 – had been bullied for years before she moved to Sweden for a year. The experience allowed her to thrive. “Sweden gave me a whole new sense of myself,” she says. “That year changed who I was and how I saw the world. I came back a different person.”
A year away can be difficult. Lummack’s roommate in France, Amanda Mathieson, was so homesick she almost quit but decided to stick it out and appreciates the experience more in retrospect for what it gave her: the ability to travel anywhere in Europe, and the independence to enjoy it. “It changed me in every way, all for the better,” she says.
At 16, Henry Robar left Anchorage, Alaska, for a hobby farm in a small village outside Salzburg, Austria, in 1988. His host family lived a simple lifestyle radically different from his own upbringing. “They heated with solar and wood, ground their own flour, had chickens and sheep which were eaten when they stopped producing eggs and milk, rarely drove, demonstrated at nuclear-power plants, played in the village band and rode their bikes everywhere. I grew up in a city, listened to Mötley Crüe and loved cars and white bread.” For Robar, the lasting effects were not immediately apparent, but now, at 43, he understands the significance of his experience and is quietly thoughtful about what that year away did for him. “I learned to adapt to my situation and see things through a more tolerant lens,” he says from the home he recently designed and built in rural Quebec. “Everything is a matter of perspective.”
Certainly, travelling alone at an impressionable age tends to make you more independent than your non-travelling peers, and more mature. Barbara Spanton, now 39, spent three months in Switzerland when she was 16 and was keenly aware of the cultural differences, from the food and the rituals surrounding it (“Oh, the cheese …”) to the higher level of responsibility afforded to teenagers. “I learned to feel more comfortable as an outsider in some situations and to really enjoy time to myself,” she says. “And I love to travel alone.”
Morag Paton, 40, who lived in Germany for three months when she was 15, agrees. “It made me more independent and comfortable travelling by myself,” she says. She is one of the most adventurous travellers I know: To date, she has visited about 30 countries, mapping out complicated routes over long weeks with her spouse and two boys.
Such independence means the return can be tricky, social relationships not quite the same. “I reconnected with most of my friends when I came home, but there was something missing,” says Rice, who lives in Hamilton. “Their stories centred around who got drunk last weekend, or which couples were dating. I had other things to daydream about.”
Almost everyone I spoke with struggled to reintegrate. “Returning was certainly harder than leaving,” Lummack says. “I came back a different person. I felt so worldly, on a different maturity level than most of my classmates. Frosh week was awful, everyone running amok and acting out. It all seemed so provincial to me.”
In 1987, 15-year-old Mika Forrester spent a year in Japan and returned to a vastly different social circle, from which she was largely excluded. She eventually switched schools. Still, she has no regrets. “I would go back in a heartbeat,” she says.
Exchange programs may not be for everyone. It takes a certain kind of teenager to travel overseas without friends or family for a year. Two people declined to be interviewed. One travelled too young. The other blames deep-rooted insecurities that did not prepare her well enough – mentally or socially – to deal with adolescent issues and pressures without the benefit of close family or friends nearby.
“Exchanges are tough,” Robar tells me. “You need to have the strong support of everyone around you, but it’s definitely worth it. There’s no way you don’t return a more rounded person.”
On my last day on the Côte d’Azur, I take a bus to the medieval village of Eze, perched high on a hill northeast of Nice, some 450 metres above sea level. Small boutiques and restaurants are cut into the sides of the walls or tucked away in corners and under archways. Sloping cobblestone streets tend to end abruptly, and without warning. The view over the Mediterranean and St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat from the botanical gardens and the terrace of the impressive Château Eza is simply spectacular.
Très belle, I say to my waiter.
Magnifique, he corrects.
I’ve been looking forward to my descent to the coastal town of Eze-sur-Mer via the Nietzsche Trail, so named because the German philosopher lived there for a time and thought the rigorous ascent to the village inspired creativity. (Others suggest the intense climb under a hot sun inspired only hallucinations.) Legend has it he composed part of Thus Spake Zarathustra on his regular hikes up and down the scrubby, sometimes difficult path. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” he observed. I set off enthusiastically. An hour later, somewhat wilted, I take off my shoes and walk gingerly to the water’s edge over rounded stones. I pass a fellow smoking on the beach, and he smiles at me pleasantly and lifts his hand. It takes me some time to realize he’s wearing a white button-down shirt and no pants whatsoever, but it doesn’t bother me: The walk has unloosened a particularly troublesome scene in my current manuscript, and I am filled with an almost giddy sense of accomplishment.
Back in Nice, I follow the map I have folded over and over until it’s a crumpled mess and climb the stairs to the Colline du Château, the highest point overlooking the city and the best place to view the Promenade des Anglais, the sweeping boulevard that follows the curve of the stunning Baie des Anges. Down on the beach, the pebbles are the size of golf balls, and the waves crash against the shore under a sky that has turned moody.
I didn’t take the risk, never made the leap – at least not at 17 – but it doesn’t matter now. Travel changes you, regardless of age. Every time you do something different, your world gets a little bigger.
I’m here at last, and it’s magnificent.