Just a couple of photos of our Halloween trick-or-treaters. Savannah is an Elegant Witch while Charlotte is Charm School Witch. Their cuteness wove an irresistible spell on everyone...

Provence, France

In September Lesli and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. To celebrate, we took a trip to the Provence region of France. We were able to do this through the kindness of Margie & Van, who stayed with the girls for the 8 days we were gone, and the generosity of our friend Marianne Schneider, who hosted us during our stay. Here we are in our driveway, headed to the airport, courtesy of our friend Liz... I booked our flights carefully - we took a non-stop redeye from Los Angeles to Amsterdam and then onto Marseille, the largest city in Provence. Here is the nose of our big, beautiful KLM 747 at the gate in Los Angeles... Marianne owns a home along with a studio loft. She generously gave us the studio for our stay. It has plenty of room, lots of windows and a very pleasant veranda outside the sliding glass door. Thru the lavender in this picture you can see me in the doorway of the slider. We spent many a leisurely breakfast drinking coffee and eating pastries at the patio table...another view of the property... this was taken from the patio table, looking out on the garden... Each morning I walked 5 minutes into the little village of Roussillon for pain au chocolat and our daily baguette. This is a view of the quiet road and the typical roadsigns that took some getting used to (ask us next time you see us)... Roussillon is as picturesque as anything we have seen! A tiny village, perched on a hilltop since the middle ages, the surrounding earth is ochre and all the buildings have that lovely rust-red coloring. It had all the trappings you'd expect from a movie set - hourly church bells, narrow cobblestone streets, dogs sleeping under the table while their owners linger over coffee at the outdoor cafe...Roussillon But if you've traveled with us, you know we like to explore, and Provence is rich with ruins and food and villages and wine... So toute suite, on our first day we set out to see it all. Many days of this trip began with a stroll through a farmer's market. Each village had at least one per week, brimming with olives, cheese, sausages, produce, flowers and wine. Here is a nice one in Lourmarin... On our first day we went to a big market in a tiny town, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue a village built on a small island in the Sorgue river. Lavender grows readily in Provence. The story goes that the flower got it's name because the Romans added it to their washing water because of its clean fragrance - "to wash" in Latin is lavare ... Since L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is a village built over a river, water is everywhere - unusual in this relatively dry region. During the industrial revolution, the townspeople harnessed the power of the river with dozens of iron water-wheels. Many are still operating, and now have a thick coating of emerald-green moss... We left town with our bounty from the farmers market. Out in the countryside we found this picnic table for our feast. Carved out of local limestone, we called it the Stonehenge picnic table... our meal: prosciutto, baguette, olives, grapes, red wine and Banon cheese - a goat cheese made mild by the locals who wrap it in chestnut leaves. The tannin from the leaves softens the flavor of the cheese... Relaxed and full, we tooled over to Gordes - a hilltop village similar to Roussillon. It's medieval arched lanes are a perfect compliment to its magnificent perch... Staying up on the hilltops and ridges and a short drive from Gordes you get this birds-eye view of the 10th Century Abbey of Senanque. For 1,000 years Cistercian monks have been living and worshiping in this steep-walled valley. There is a pervasive aura of serenity and timelessness here... Just as we were able to comprehend a 1,000-year-old abbey ("that's 4 times older than our country"), we stumbled onto the Pont Julien - built 2,000 years ago during the reign of Julius Ceasar! The bridge was so well constructed, it was being used for car traffic until 4 years ago. The hollows in the bridge aren't decorative - when the river floods, they release water pressure on the structure. The Romans didn't use mortar, relying solely on perfectly fitted stones. Boy, these guys were good! During the trip I was amazed at how many of these old Citroens were still on the road. It seems that the owners weren't car collectors, but were just using the gangly cars for daily driving... behind Lesli is our rental car - a diesel Hyundai... You've probably guessed that I'm a fan of Roman civilization, so its no surprise that we went to the most famous Roman ruin in Provence, the Pont du Gard, an amazing bridge built to carry an aqueduct across the Gard river. For 900 years drinking water traveled across the top of the structure. The details of the functional and thoughtful engineering simply adds to the aesthetic beauty of the structure... In the 1950's the Gard reached a terrible flood level - water flowed thru the middle tier of arches. Several modern bridges on the Gard were destroyed, but this engineering marvel was implacable... look closely at the graffiti on this shot of the Pont du Gard - it is in Latin! Nearby is the city of Avignon, made famous when the Catholic church moved the Papacy here from Rome. With all their money they built a bunch of big gray buildings, fortresses & walls. Here is a view atop a defensive wall, looking across the Rhone river...Avignon has a famous bridge (Pont St. Benezet) built in the middle ages. After it broke in half several times, the locals just gave up. Having just come from the still-standing and fantastically older Pont du Gard, the novelty of this bridge is lost on me... We eschewed most of the tourist shops, and frequented village markets for souvenirs & sundries. One interesting discovery - here in the U.S. our kids quench their thirst from juice boxes. In France, they sell wine in the same single-serving boxes! Probably not their proudest moment... A month before our trip, Lesli and I fell in love with this castle when we saw it in a guidebook. Tarascon is a classic castle with all the trappings - dungeon, tower, banquet hall, moat. We paid about $7 each for a self guided tour and thoroughly enjoyed it. Here's Lesli on the bridge over the moat... Built by Good King Rene and his queen, their likenesses are memorialized in the courtyard, though defaced by vandals (literally) Tarascon was on our way to Arles, another favorite haunt of the Romans, and 1800 years later, Vincent Van Gogh. The town cleverly put replicas of famous Van Gogh paintings right where the troubled artist would've had his easel when he created the art. Here is the replica of "A Starry Night Over the Rhone" ...and turn your head to the left to see the live version...This is an actor's view of the ancient Roman theater, still used today...and a shot of the outside wall of the Roman coliseum, which holds 20,000 and is used today for bullfights... We met an American who reminded us that we'd never seen the Mediterranean, so one day we drove to the tiny seaport of Cassis. It draws a lot of French tourists, but international tourists skip it for Cannes (about 3 hours further away). We had a good lunch of local fish and rose wine where I took these pictures... Cap Canaille, Europe's highest seacliff looms just east of Cassis. Hearty backpackers were hiking to the summit, but we thrashed our little diesel Hyundai to the top. In the U.S., a 1,200 foot shear drop would have fences, guardrails and barriers. In France, there's a simple sign (something to the effect of "Don't be stupid"). No fences. A Darwinian way of managing tourism! On our way back from the sea, we stopped for dinner in Aix en Provence. Aix is a combination of a university town and a wealthy place to see and be seen. New areas had chic shopping and the older areas had beautiful and well maintained architecture... Aix is another town rich with water and loves to flaunt it with opulent fountains like this one at the end of Cours Mirabeau which is Aix's version of the Champs Elysees... What better place than France for us to take our first wine-tasting tour? A guide book suggested a loop around the Dentelles de Montmirail which combined picturebook scenery with various caves (wineries) along the way. The vineyards were almost done being harvested - most had just been picked, but a few still had grapes lingering... Gigondas is a village on the route with a wine of its own. Here Lesli reaches the church at the top of the hill-town... We hit the next village during lunchtime. Everything in France closes from 12n to 2p. Everything. Siguret, the next village is no exception...but there was one cave with the door open and a guy on the phone. He hung up, invited us in, and was so entertaining as he gave us samples of various Cotes du Rhone wines that we bought a bottle of Gigondas from him (undoubtedly paying too much, but hey!). He insisted that he take this ridiculously pretentious photo of us during the tasting... ...and then insisted I take this equally pretentious shot of him offering a bottle to Lesli. Aye Yae Yae! We lunched in Vaison la Romaine. Since it was after 2pm we could barely find a place to serve us "dejeuner? maintenant?" ("lunch? now?). As you'd guess from the name, Vaison la Romaine is another former Roman outpost. Excavations and restorations are ongoing...On the western leg of our loop we got our best view of Mt Ventoux, Provence's highest peak at 6,000 feet... Le Crestet is an impossibly charming and nearly-deserted village atop the steepest hill we encountered. Most of it is in ruins, but we learned that about 20 people live here... Here is a picture of me trying too hard to look relaxed. It looks like I'm trying to hold the wall up... Lesli making friends with the locals - a matched pair of minature weiner-dogs. If they look nervous, just remember how much the French love sausages!!! A neat tunnel near the village of Suzette... Our favorite cave of the day was Domaine de Durban. We hit it just at sunset, and had the place to ourselves. Unlike our full-service experience in Siguret, Durban was no-frills, but full of local color. at the winery we met some cats. This one clearly had too much... This guy loved attacking my camera's wrist strap. For 3 Euros, he also agreed to pose for Lesli in this sweet photo... Nice sunset taken from the car near Carpentras on the way home... Our final full day was spent much like every other day, buying lunch in a farmer's market and having a picnic...Today's market was in the town of Lourmarin which sported a Renaissance castle - only 500 years-old. A veritable rookie... This was the spigot for filling a pool. I'm not sure if the pool was for bathing or livestock. Or both (grin!) The village center of Lourmarin. Every movie lot in Hollywood has a set that looks exactly like this. The only difference is that these are real buildings! here is a rare tripod photo of us with our trusty Hyndai... The view from our picnic table - autumn in Provence In the afternoon we searched high and low for the ruins of a once-impregnable fortress called Buoux. You can see it across this valley, precariously sitting on the edge of the cliff... the approach to the fortress takes you right underneath it - as we were hiking up the steep trail beneath and under the shear cliffs, it is easy to imagine how vulnerable an attacking army would be...
It is hard to tell the size of these solid-rock cliffs until you see Lesli at the base of this one... The day ended with a nice dinner in nearby Goult. When the restaurant's rickety credit card machine rejected my first three cards, I felt we might have stay and wash dishes! The 4th one worked, and later the British couple at the next table said they would've bailed us out! Here is a windmill in the quiet town of Goult. Well that's it! Thank you for making it to the end of our trip to Provence. It was everything we had hoped for, and we had high hopes! Until next time, Aloha (er, I mean, au revoir).