Les Parents

After some negotiation, it was decided that the folks would come down to visit for the upcoming holidays – a four day weekend encompassing Armistice Day – and in return, I would go up to the Pfalz for Thanksgiving. The idea was for the folks to visit the south of France while they could still enjoy some warm weather and sunshine. Of course, as the weekend approached, the forecast worsened. But a prediction of four days of rain did little to dampen the spirits of my visitors.

I picked them up at the TGV station in Avignon Friday evening with bottles of water and wine in hand. I had arranged a room at Mme. Fabre’s establishment in Mollégès, so that they weren’t too far away and they would have easy access to the bars and restaurant in town. As the lavender room was taken by other guests, they were given la chambre tournesol (the sunflower room), a very bright and vivid yellow room decorated with sunflowers. Like living in a van Gogh painting. I agreed to join them for a croissant et confiture breakfast each morning at 8:30, and from there we would venture out to do some sightseeing.

I knew he would stand there.

Still looking for a place to eat.

Laundry Day

As predicted, Day 1 was dreary. My contingency plan for rain was to take my guests to Cavaillon, a place I had really spent little time, and to visit the laverie to do my laundry. I’m sure you’ll agree that watching someone do laundry is not the primary reason people come to Provence, but owing to some unfortunate miscalculations, I had run out of clean socks and was in a spot. After all, as an emissary of my country, I couldn’t exactly go to work with dirty socks the following week, Franco-American relations being already strained.

There is not really much to see in Cavaillon. The Colline St. Jacques, a massive limestone hill topped by a chapel, dominates the city which was once a Roman outpost called Cabellio. The only Roman remnants that remain are some arches conveniently reassembled by the tourism office. So it was here that I parked, and walked with my parents and my dirty laundry through the streets in search of a laverie. There are three laundromats in Cavaillon (try finding that little nugget in the guidebooks) and I had already scouted them out, deciding on the newest. Once I had claimed two washers and inserted the requisite €3.50 per machine, the Flinns retired to that most comfortable of surroundings – the nearest bar. My mother got her first café au lait of the trip, while my father and I tried some of the local bières à pression (draught beers).

In retrospect, the rain gave us an opportunity to chat for a long while without trying to keep up with a hectic pace of attempting to see as many places as possible. My parents were real troopers and even pitched-in with the laundry. While my father funded and oversaw the operation, my mother and I provided the labor. It was reassuring to find out from my mother that at 36 years old, I still don’t know how to fold my clothes properly.

We lunched at a restaurant near the Roman ruins called La Fin du Siècle (Turn of the Century), an ornately 1900’s-syle decorated establishment, where my tagliatelle carbonara was served topped with a raw egg on the half shell. Coming from a country where it’s becoming more difficult to order eggs sunny-side up or where dishes involving hollandaise sauce are accompanied by warnings on the menu, I was slightly stunned at the sight. Unfazed, my mother said “Mix it in and it will cook in the hot pasta.” I followed the directions and it was in fact a very delicious pasta dish. But with each bite, my mind was on one thing - salmonella.

We returned to Eygalières where I dropped off my laundry and showed the folks around my new room and then to town. After walking around Eygalières and enjoying some of the local wine, we discovered a problem that was to plague us for the rest of the long weekend. Not surprisingly in the parts of Europe surrounding the Mediterranean, people tend to eat larger lunches, take siestas, and then nosh on lighter fare for dinner much later in the evening after the baking sun has set. This custom is carried through to the winter even though the sun sets just after 5 pm. I hadn’t really noticed it because I’ve been getting most of my meals from the grocery store and have only eaten in restaurants during lunchtime on the weekends. What this boils down to is that once the lunch ends, nothing is open to serve food again until 8:30 pm at the earliest. Needless to say, we spent a great deal of time looking for something to eat around our more customary dining time.

Gordes

As the weather looked to improve, I decided to venture into new territory. To this point, I had spent most of my time in the Bouches-du-Rhône region east of the Durance. With my guests packed into the Twingo, we drove into the substantially more mountainous Vaucluse region to the west. I thought it best to subject my father to the more elevated areas early and get it out of the way. To my surprise and relief, he was a trooper throughout the day and only spoke up on one particular stretch of mountain road.

The Vaucluse is littered with villages perchés (perched villages) but none is as celebrated or as lovely as Gordes. It’s in all the guide books and postcard racks and is a required stop for all tour buses in the region. The reasoning behind building cities on these hillsides is obviously security. In fact, most of these hilltowns have châteaus at the summit and many had walls to deter intruders. Gordes, for example, had near vertical staircases as its only means of access.

One of the fortunate things about traveling in November is the lack of tourists. Certainly, Gordes would be seething with visitors in the summer, but we pretty much had the run of the place. The real problem with Gordes, in my humble opinion, is that it looks great from a distance, but there’s not much to it once you get there. My parents agreed, remarking that it didn’t have the charm of Mont St. Michel or even Les Baux, which we had visited earlier.

A missed opportunity. She'll never get him that close to the edge again.

Gordes at sunset.

The village des bories near Gordes.

Meet the Flintstones.

Les Bories

Dotting the landscape around the Luberon range are stone huts built in the pierres sèches (dry stones) style, that is they are constructed without mortar or binder. These bories are constructed with overlaying flat stones to ward off rain, and the thick, air-filled walls provide an almost constant inside temperature year-round. An average-sized borie can contain 200,000-300,000 stones.

While there are some five to six thousand bories in Provence, most are found scattered here and there throughout the landscape. The village des bories outside of Gordes is the largest concentration of bories in the region. These dry-stone huts are not unique to Provence nor are they necessarily old. A museum at the village des bories shows pictures of similar structures from all over the globe – Africa, Italy, California, and South America. The folks saw similar dwellings in Ireland that date back to the Neolithic period. Those in the village des bories were used up until 150 years ago. Others are still used by shepherds to overnight in as they move their flock among the pastures.

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Sénanque Sans Lavandre

Pick up any book on Provence and there will be a picture of the abbey at Sénanque. I’ve seen it on the cover of several. What makes this 12th century Cistercian monastery so appealing is that it sits as an island amid a field of lavender. It must be a stunning sight to behold in the summer. I’ll have to come back someday to see it.

L'Abbaye de Sénanque amid rows of shrubs.

Les Antiques - Roman mausoleum and triumphal arch.

Bas-relief of Roman soldiers cracking some French heads.

Looking toward North Glanum with St. Rémy in the background.

View of South Glanum and the Alpille boundary.

Preserved floral decorative patterns.

A Gloomy Day in Glanum

On the road leading out of St. Rémy in the direction of Les Baux, one can’t miss the assuming presence of two large Roman structures. Les Antiques as they are called stand just to the side of the road like some sort of ancient reststop dating from 30 AD. The taller of the two is a mausoleum with surprisingly well-preserved bas-reliefs of Roman warriors engaged in combat with Gallic counterparts. Contained in the cage-like upper portion of the tower are statues of Caesar and Augustus. The triumphal arch adjacent to the mausoleum has succumbed to slightly more erosion over the last 2,000 years, but one can still make out the reliefs of Gallic male and female prisoners. A nearby sign states that the scenes depicted on les Antiques are quite rare in that it is unusual to find images of Gallic warriors or prisoners anywhere.

Les Antiques stood alone for some time until a couple of French archeologists began digging into the alluvial deposits at the base of the Alpilles several hundred yards away. They eventually discovered an entire city that mirrors the ancient history of the Gallic people themselves. The settlement of Glanum, so named after the diety Glanis who the original inhabitants worshipped, is originally Celto-Ligurian but the earliest remaining structures were built by Gallo-Greeks, possibly originating from Marseille between the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. The access to a mountain pass to Marseille and a hot spring to provide potable water made this both a strategic and desirable site. From the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, the site fell under Roman rule and was expanded. Consequently, the ruins are an interesting mix of large stones preferred by the Greeks and smaller more exact-fitting stone used by the Romans.

The Romans also made use of the spring by channeling the water underneath the town to heat homes and supply the ubiquitous Roman baths. Inscriptions on some of the ruins can be found in both Greek and Latin as well as preserved decorative patterns. In fact, a wall of a dwelling has been excavated which still has remnants of the original painted plaster. A partial reconstruction of one of the Greek temples was recently completed including copies of the original capitals. The numerous artifacts recovered from the site are displayed at St. Rémy in the Hôtel de Sade, a one-time residence of the famed Marquis de Sade’s extended family.