Rodney has requested that it be noted that the removal of our toilet waste and the grey waste were the smelliest so far. It is so hot here with temperatures well above 30˚C for about ten days straight, that ‘it’ must be cooking in there……. no comment…… He was very glad to get back in the driver’s seat and hit the road. So we left the energetic apricot tree behind us with a pot of apricot sauce and a bag of very fresh apricots in the bottom of the cupboard. We drove through Cavaillon, past two standard road signs that showed a car exploding. Neither of us could think what it means, so we continued on. Mind you, the speed bumps are enormous and maybe that had something to do with it.
We spent the day driving across Vaucluse, for those of you in Sydney, no it’s nothing like it.
We visited two villages, one yellow and one red, oh and a quarry. On the way we stopped near the 12th century Abbaye de Senanque to get the classic shot of a Provence lavender field. The lavender is really only just beginning to show its colour, but it really is a lovely to see.
Gordes is yet another lovely hilltop village, another ‘Les Plus Beaux Villages de France’; we must have visited more than a dozen of them by now. The buildings here are made of a lovely yellowy gold limestone which seems to make the village glow above the Luberon. We popped in to a couple of art galleries and I bought some lavender bags, one of which is now in Eileen’s bathroom……
Next stop was in Roussillon, a pretty village which the brochure describes as “a magical spot, like an artist’s palette of colour in many shades of the ochre oxides shimmering on the houses”. Very true and accurate.
The whole place seems to be a mix of various shades of red and orange; the buildings, the soil, the rocks and now our shoes too. We went in to the area called ’Le Sentier Des Ochres De Roussillon’, which is an old ochre quarry, and marvelled at the colours everywhere.
The heat finally drove us back to the village to watch a wedding and lick a much-needed ice cream, before returning to Eileen to drive further east.
We drove through Apt, Cereste, Manosque and finally pulled up at Camping Verseau in Greoux les Bains next to the Verdon River. We jumped in the swimming pool straight away (no celebrities at this camp site) and then I cooked up a pasta meal, while Rodney shaved a big chunk of parmesan, before a much needed early-ish night.
No apricots on the roof tonight, but I did wake up at 3am when I realised I was getting wet. We had left the sky light wide open, not imagining it might rain, but it was and we had to quickly jump up to close it and bring the chairs inside. We woke this morning to a cloudy cooler sky, which is a nice change for now.