Don’t pronounce the S in Nantes

April 2022: Oh, Nantes. We visited you in October 2021 as part of our three-week France scouting trip. Paris to Nice to Nantes to Vannes to Paris to Normandy (Rouen, Honfleur, Étretat, etc.) and back to Paris. You surprised us enough for us to declare that we could happily live in you as our starter city. You aren’t as touristy and busy and hot and humid as Nice (though Nice has better food!). You offered San Francisco Bay Area-like weather (or so we thought), not too south to be too hot, not too cold. Your covered food market, Talensac, made us swoon. Your mechanical elephants didn’t disappoint and were actually what got you noticed by us in the first place.

But, during Covid, Nantes became little Paris and shouldered the phenomenon of people escaping big cities for a slower life and bigger accommodations. Subsequently, houses to rent were hard to find. 

As part of our scouting trip, we had lunch with the head of the agency we hired to help us with our rental search. A long side story there, but yes, for you House Hunters International fans, Adrian is the real deal. Unfortunately, she and her team had come up with fewer places than Shelly’s months-long search. We were coming up short in our search and finding rentals that were either furnished (our container of house and everything stuff was due to arrive in La Havre in mid-April after some shipping delays thanks to the the supply chain/shipping problems due to Covid) or two small, had no garden, were multiple stories, and the list went on. Whatever was available got snapped up quickly. Shelly opened up her search to more cities outside of Nantes and voilà, Vertou became the bullseye and we got lucky … and very, very busy.