Some companies begin with a business plan. This one began with a footpath, a valley view and decades of wandering France alone.
I have loved France for as long as I can remember. It started early, with the France in the books I read as a child, and it became real at the age of eleven when I went to live with a French family near Paris as an exchange student. I was hooked, and I never really looked back.
In the decades since, I returned again and again, often for a month at a time, on my own. I walked. I wandered. I got happily lost in villages whose names I couldn't pronounce, ate lunch wherever looked good, and learned the country the slow way, on foot and without much of a plan.
The trip that started it
The idea for We Wander France arrived the way the best ideas do, quietly, in the middle of doing something else. I was traveling solo for a milestone birthday, somewhere in the rolling country of southwest France. I remember the warmth of the afternoon and a long view down a valley, and the thought that landed with unusual clarity: other people would love to travel like this. Not the rush of a coach tour, but this, the walking, the wandering, the small discoveries.
Walk a little, wander some, and find yourself off the beaten path.
That sentence had been my personal travel philosophy for years before it became a company's. The leap was simply deciding to share it.
Built by a solo traveler, for solo travelers
Because I had done so much of my traveling alone, I knew exactly what I wanted this to be, and what I didn't. No buses. No hotel-hopping. No single supplement that quietly punishes people for traveling solo. Instead, one beautiful home as a base, a private room for everyone, a small group of like-minded travelers, and days built around walking through the quiet heart of France.
It matters to me that first-time solo travelers feel especially welcome. I remember my own first solo trip, the nerves and the freedom of it, and I built this retreat to give others that same freedom with a little more company and care. You can read more about that on the solo women travelers page.
Not a tour company
We Wander France isn't a big operation with a catalog of departures. It's one guide, one carefully shaped week, and a region I know and love. If you'd like to know more about me, my story is on the Meet Your Guide page, and the week itself lives on the itinerary.
That valley view turned into a footpath, and the footpath turned into this. I'm so glad it did, and I hope you'll come walk part of it with me.
Meghan
Founder and guide, We Wander France. Read her story.