This is my last post until my next trip - wherever and whenever that may be. My final day in France was truly lovely. We visited three villages in Luberon none of which I had seen before. The first, Taillades, I can't even find on my atlas it was that small and sleepy - but picturesque! The other two of them are major tourist sites and I'm going to attach a picture of each one. I have to say that everything we saw was picture worthy. We could have taken thousands of pictures because it was all so charming, so historical and so different from what we have at home. No matter what though, our pictures don't do justice to what we saw. It really was absolutely beautiful. The first picture is of Gordes, a city built of stones and perched on the top of a mountain. Even the bird houses were built of stone! It was pretty spectacular to be driving a winding, mountain road to turn the corner and be faced with this. People have lived in that location since the neolithic age. The second village is that of Roussillon. It really made a distinct impression on me because it was unlike anything else we'd seen. The village is built in the heart of the world's biggest vein of ochre and the whole village was a variation of the colours of orange and rust and red. It must be unbelievable when the sun is setting. We didn't have the time to do a hike there but apparently there is a huge, almost valley, of ochre. Next trip I guess! From there, we drove up to the most famous wine making area of the region, Chateauneuf-du-Pape. We'd been trying to get to a vineyard starting in Italy and things just never fell into place for us. We stopped at one vineyard in Chateauneuf and sampled 3 red wines. Driving on into the village, we wandered into a wine cave, the Cave du Verger des Papes, that used to be a Roman quarry. My final picture posted was taken in this cave. Here, a handsome, charming Frenchman took us in hand and spent an hour with us showing us how to "taste" rather than "drink" wine. We sampled 8 wines with myself, the designated driver, reluctantly having to spit most of it out! Since we hadn't eaten in a single restaurant since arriving in France, we drove from there to Arles for dinner in a Provencal restaurant adjacent to the ruins of a Roman colisseum. I had rabbit but wolf and bull were also on the menu! Chicken#&*! Rhonda had a salad..... Then it was back to our cottage (which was fabulous by the way) to pack our bags and partake in my final nightcap (bottle of wine we bought at the cave) and recap.
We were up early on the 11th and my excellent navigator, Julie, got us to the Marseille airport in great time where we dropped off the rental car. The girls then caught a shuttle bus to the train station to connect with their train to Paris and I flew home via Frankfurt. I had an hour between planes in Frankfurt and I swear it took me that whole time to walk through the airport which went on forever and to spend my remaining 43 euros on a bottle of duty-free Scotch.
Thanks to my travel mates. You were fabulous. Hope you have an extraordinary time in Paris and I look forward to reading the blog for updates.
Laura
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