ABSOLUTELY ILE DE RE

Nothing ever changes on this pristine, out-of-the-way island off the coast of northwestern France, and that’s precisely the point. THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS traverses the Île de Ré’s miles of bike paths, samples 22 flavours of ice cream, and meets a few donkeys wearing coloured pants.

- THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS

A DECADE AGO, my French wife and I moved from our apartment in Brooklyn to the Right Bank of Paris. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a challenge to acclimate myself to the rain and low skies that ruthlessly blot out the winter sun in northern France. On the other hand, there’s nothing like a European summer. Vacations are prioritised, and you can travel between a dozen countries with the ease we Americans move up and down the Eastern seaboard.

The summer of 2020 was, for obvious reasons, the first in 10 that we didn’t set foot outside France. We’d abandoned our home in Paris back in March, days before the nationwide lockdown, to hole up with friends in a village in the Loire-Atlantique, just below Brittany. In July, we doubled down on our urban exodus and found a rental house in a tiny port town in Brittany itself, on the Côtes d’Armor, where we télétravail-ed from the garden, drank the excellent local cider, and swam in the cold, clear ocean.

By that point, some of our friends reflexively began to look again to Italy, Greece, and Spain for their vacations, willing their lives back to some semblance of normalcy through stubborn habit. But our stint along France’s bracing northwestern coastline had turned my wanderlust inward, reawakening in me an appetite for this country— an embarrassment of both natural and cultivated riches—that open borders and too-cheap flights had dampened.

And so, in early August 2020, we continued our exploration of the beguiling Atlantic and headed for the Île de Ré, an 85-square-kilometre oasis of sand dunes, marshland, and sprawling vineyards off the coast of La Rochelle, which is just two and a half hours from Paris by high-speed train.