It’s festival season, and as everyone is posting their Palm Springs travel guides as they head to the desert for the first touch of sun, I thought about the French equivalent-

Bassin d’Arcachon

Like how ‘50’s stars flocked to Palm Springs to escape LA for the weekend Or I guess you could also use the Hamptons & NYC for this analogy, the rich and famous French have been coming to Arachon for a beach getaway since perhaps Alexandre Dumas in the 1800’s.

If you make it to a café in Cap Ferret, you may get a glimpse of Marion Cotillard and Guillaume Canet relaxing after filming season, or Zinedine Zidane, who has a house there.

Bassin d’Arcachon is an hour’s drive west of Bordeaux. The wonderful town of Arcachon is a starting point of the bay and your visit.

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From there you can take a boat across the bay to Cap Ferret, there are numerous beaches, oyster beds, sea salt harvesting ponds, wooded nature preserves, and to the south lies the dreamy Dune de Pilat.

Arcachon has some beautiful belle époque homes in Ville d’Hiver (the Winter City). In the past, many would vacation here in the South over winter for their health. The town is where sea breezes off the Atlantic meet crisp mountain breezes off the Landes. This mixology of air was supposed to be a wonderful remedy for aristocratic consumptives.

In town, we hiked up to a park on a hill with the Observatoire Sainte-Cécile. It’s a whimsical wrought-iron lookout platform with a spiral staircase. It probably should have been a romantic panoramic moment, but it felt more like an episode of Fear Factor. I recommend this for the young and fearless !

The Bay of Arcachon is triangular, with some small islands. There is a long cape with miles of beach on the west/ocean side. Like the bays on the east coast of the US, the tide goes OUT, beaching boats. The Leyre River meets the sea to the east, and forms the Gironde estuary- for which this department is named. The bay is wonderful for a boat tour or oyster farm tour and the ocean side of the peninsula is has excellent surfing and wonderful sunshine for lying out.

We visited Arcachon just before tourist season, in early May.

Rent a bike and ride it around everywhere and anywhere. My boyfriend and I had planned on this but our plans changed I forget why. There is only one main road that winds around the bay, and countless bike paths. It’s a wonderful 50 mile bike ride from Arcachon to Cap Ferret, under the pines, past salt harvesting marshes and oyster farms.

We tried to walk instead and it got a little long. We ended up hitchhiking and snagging a ride to the beach with some twenty-something girls.

Need more beach? Check out my Biarritz city guide

Once at the beach, it was wonderful. Excellent waves for surfing. It was noon, and the sun directly overhead was HOT. The water was sparkling and cool. I could have laid on our towel there forever, it was wonderful. Simply miles of beaches.

I’m not big on seafood, but my boyfriend will eat anything. I am not one to miss an opportunity so we wanted to hit up some oyster bars. The region is perhaps the best of French ostréiculture. Many were closed by the time we made it across the bay. But if you walk in, expect a presentation, maybe a tutorial on how to shuck open one and some fine shellfish with a spray of lemon.

Before we drove back to Bordeaux, we saw the

Dune du Pilat.

It’s something out of a Dali painting. To the south of the bay, in a pine forest there towers a sand dune. It’s 2 miles long, 550 yards wide and 360 feet tall. It’s a product of the crossroads of winds I had mentioned earlier and is crowned the biggest sand dune in Europe. It’s a steep but short scamper to the top.

Once there, as far as the eye can see, it’s forest to your left, ocean to your right. Something out of a dream. Even now, I can’t believe it’s a real place.