The Dordogne doesn't announce itself. There's no glamour moment, no view that stops you mid-sentence. It just slowly becomes the only place you want to be.

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I've been coming back to this region in my head for years, obsessing over the way the river bends through the valley, the villages that sit on clifftops like they grew there, the markets where the vendors know each other's names and nobody is performing anything for anyone. There's a particular kind of France that exists here that feels less like a destination and more like a discovery. You have to earn it a little. That's the whole point.

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Château de la Bourlie is where we're staying, and I won't oversell it. You'll arrive, you'll see it, and it will do the rest.

Seven days in the Périgord. We'll eat well (embarrassingly well) because that's simply what happens here. We'll find the caves and the markets and the hilltop towns. We'll drive roads that don't go anywhere in particular and find that they go somewhere better. There will be afternoons with no agenda and evenings that stretch long past the point where anyone is keeping track.

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They call this region the land of a thousand castles, and once you're here you'll understand why that number might actually be an undercount. Every ridge has one. Every bend in the river reveals another tower through the trees, another set of walls that have been watching over this valley since before anyone thought to write it down. We're staying in one of them. It never gets old.

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By the end of the week you won't want to talk about highlights. You'll want to talk about the specific lunch, the light on a specific afternoon, the thing nobody planned that turned out to be the whole trip.

xo, 
Stephanie