Yesterday's post and the great spring weather that we've had over the past couple days have brought back good memories of
Provence, one of my favorite places in the world. Olive groves, fields of lavender, aromatic honey, vividly colored cotton fabrics, the heads of bright red poppies waving among fields of green, vineyards, the tall slender dark green cypress avenues leading to buildings built from yellow and beige stone, the varied red hues of the rich earth of southern France that remind me of the equally rich soil in North Africa, the colors that inspired
Van Gogh and
Gauguin ... and
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh died in an asylum. Of course, among other things are
Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence (which resulted in Mayle's being
persona non grata there for a time because so many anglophones came to the
Lubéron searching for the local characters that he described that they drove the local people to distraction) and, of all people, the
Marquis de Sade. Mayle has been reinstated in French affections; the Marquis, not, at least not yet.
I first saw Provence very briefly while driving through it in 1972 on the way to visit Morocco with my first husband. That was several years before he became an ex. I returned in 1982 with HWMBO, but that was also a quick drive-through as part of a long trip that began in Morocco, continued through Spain and France to Germany, through eastern Switzerland and the Lake District in Italy, and then back via the Mediterranean coast to
Malaga, where we took the ferry back across
the Strait of Gibraltar to
Ceuta and from there, back across the border into Morocco. It was our full-circle farewell to this side of The Pond for several years. So it was not until 1993, when HWMBO and I went to Provence as part of a bike tour, that I finally got to experience its real flavor for more than a few fleeting moments. That particular tour began in
Montélimar, known for its world famous
nougat, and ended in
Cassis.
We did not cycle all the way to Cassis, thank heavens! But we did pedal every bit of the way between Montélimar and Aix-en-Provence. From Aix, a bus carried all of us across the rugged hills to Cassis. After our arrival, the more adventurous among us (neither HWMBO nor I counted as "adventurous" for this purpose) decided to cycle the hills around Cassis. We chose instead to enjoy the lovely cliffside swimming pool at our hotel. We also explored the port. Believe me, it was much the better course.
We both enjoyed the area so much that we decided to return to Provence again for our Easter break in 1995. We had relocated to Switzerland in October 1994, so it was merely a matter of driving down to the Lubéron from Geneva, bikes packed on our rooftop carrier. We based ourselves in the city of
Gordes and, from there, took day-long bicycle excursions around the area during our stay there.
One thing that we had mercifully forgotten from our previous visit, although it did not take long to refresh our recollections, was that most of these beautiful and picturesque villages, having been built during the feudal period in Europe, were perched on hilltops. This meant that after a long day's biking, a steep hill climb back to the hotel usually awaited us before we were finished. But we managed to do it, even though we were generally huffing and puffing quite a lot.
We visited the
bories, the
Abbaye de Sénanque with its fields of fragrant lavender, and
Roussillon, with its ocher cliffs.
Roussillon seemed uncannily familiar to me, uncannily because I had never been there before. But while I was walking through the streets of the village, and continuing to the overview for the magnificent cliffs, it came to me. Even though the village was full of tourists while we were there, it was still the village from the famous
Laurence Wylie classic,
Village en Vaucluse, that I had read in my second-year French classes ... many more years ago than I care to remember. Wylie, who had not named the village in his book, was an American sociologist who lived there for a year shortly after WWII. His descriptions and photos clearly rang true, even though the village has changed enormously since he lived there and even since his book was first published in 1957.
For the last full day of that visit, we decided to take the car and go a bit further afield to visit some other sites. To be continued ... .
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