House sitting in Rural France & the Diagonal Vide

House sitting to see far-flung France

We’ve just signed up for another house sit next month. It’s a good opportunity to explore a deeper part of France, well outside of the major cities. This one is further up the Loire along the Maine-et-Loire and Indre-et-Loire border, two regions within the UNESCO region of the Loire Valley and it will give us another sense of the country. It’s also a chance to see another part of the country we might want to explore further. While we love being near the coast, it may not be where we settle in the end.

We’ve used Trusted Housesitters for our sits and I’d highly recommend them. We’re hiring our own pet watcher to take care of the cats while we’re away for the 2 weeks. It’s a bit of a game of musical chairs with pets that way. All of the things that we’ve done with pets in Europe is well worth another post. However, there are many services in place to make all of that very reasonable and very easy to do.

The empty diagonal

Most French live in cities and the picturesque countryside is often just a place that many people. Where we’ll be is on the edge of what’s commonly called the “empty diagonal” here, although it can also translate poetically as the “diagonal of the void” or “the diagonal of emptiness,” if you want to be dramatic about it, or the “diagonal of low density” if you want to sound like an insurance adjuster. It’s about 750 miles of the least populated sections of France in a broad swath from the northeast toward Germany to the southwest toward Spain.  

A lot of this probably has a lot more to do with the kind of Paris-centric thinking of much of France, or at least city-centric. I have heard some French friends say, “it is where there is nothing to see, but so much of it.” Yet it’s also where about half of France’s national parks are and we’ve had some of our best wildlife sightings in these areas. In the media here, it is generally presented as depressed, a bit about how places deep in the South are talked about in the US, with a kind of superiority and an allusion to some Burt Reynolds movies.

Do we really want to live in the country?

Or do we just like to think that?

For us, it always raises that question and house sitting lets us explore it a bit like locals. We wind up in places that we would have been unlikely to find otherwise.

It’s a bit inconvenient, admittedly. One thing I love about our current city is how easy it is to walk and bike places, how easy mass transit is, and so on. A generation or two ago, it seemed like every village in France had its own cafe and bakery and decades of population decline have hollowed out many villages, but the country is starting to increase levels of investment in, well, in the country.

Efforts to increase rural internet speeds are improving quickly while Frane is also attempting to reforest and green as many places as it can. For the moment, you still might go several miles without a café or boulanger in these parts of the country, but it seems that you can register with some local bakers, and they’ll deliver bread daily or every other day. Local bars sometimes serve as impromptu post offices, recieving the Poste as well as packages from other shippers. You’ll need to go miles to get to supermarkets and the only signs of life are in the market towns on market days.

Nothing is actually very beautiful

And it is just stunning, even if it was so quiet in one place that when I sneezed outdoors one day, someone in the town below said, “à vos souhaits,” basically the French “bless you.” Not only could I not figure out where the voice came from, it was the only other voice (other than my wife) that I heard in the village for the entire month.

That was in another part of the Diagonal in the Dordogne. We used to go on long walks and not even see cars in the distance. Just rolling hills in the sparse winter. All services, including fuel and food, were at least 20km away through narrow roads winding through a series of small villages with collections of centuries-old buildings broken up by endless rolling hills of whitish-gray soil.

While ee thought the Dordogne was beautiful, it didn’t really seem to work for us. Yet there is still something about the middle of country that still draws us and we want to see more. House sitting is a fantastic way for us to sample that living for a while and see if another region of the Diagonal of the Void will appeal to us.

Deep wine country of the Loire valley definitely sounds good on paper.