Le Beau Voyage

Le Beau Voyage moves through two countries in nine days, tracing a corridor that connects the grandeur of the English capital to the châteaux country of the Loire Valley before landing in Paris. The shape of the trip does a lot of the teaching on its own: students cross the English Channel on a ferry, touch down in Normandy, wind through the walled port city of St. Malo, and then follow the Loire River west to east before the final approach to Paris. That progression — island nation to the Continent, coastal Normandy to the French heartland to the capital — gives the itinerary a geographic logic that holds everything together.