Friday - Les Baux & St. Remy
Woke up 7:09 AM. I guess we are adjusting to the time zone since that is about normal like back at home.
It took us until about 9AM to get out the door. Breakfast and packing up a back pack for our day trip just ate away the time.
Another bright sunny day. The mornings are cool. Sara asked for a blanket for the ride in the Bob-Stroller. (But later in the day it was very warm!).
We have our GPS loaded with the France maps now, so navigating to Les Baux was easy. About an hour drive. The fun part was trying to figure out where to park, since Les Baux is on a cliff. Once you enter the parking lot you just go around and around - and up, up, up! Dan found a spot and there was nothing but a 2 foot tall rock preventing our car (and us) from plummeting down below.
We loaded Sara and Julia into the Bob-Stroller and started the walk straight up the hill. It is a hill-top town in the Alpilles mountains. In medival times there was a castle here, and that is what everyone comes to see now-a-days (including us). The castle is now in "ruin" - they call it a "dead city" since it was once a thriving place and now no one lives there. It is amazing to walk around and imagine what it was once like.
The castle that we saw "was carved into and out of rock perched 650 feet above the valley." That is a good description. Imagine a huge flat swath of land and then a HUGE rock jetting up into the air. The rock is where the castle and medieval town are perched.
At first when you enter the castle area you don't see much. It just looks like a bunch of white boulders in a field. But soon we found ourselves at the very edge of it - and when we looked out into the valley we realized we were standing on a huge jagged rock - VERY high up into the air. It was a bit windy - we were all happy as we explored.
We heard them demonstrating a huge catapult. It was powerful enough to brake down castle walls in medeval times. Today they loaded a soccer ball onto it - and flung it into the distance with sheer brute force! Neat to see something like that in action - and not just in a movie.
The whole visit was self guided, which was nice because you could just wander around how ever you wanted.
We climbed up some steps carved out of rock to get to a view point. That may sound un-eventful. But not these steps. They were anything but flat - and they went nearly straight up. Sara held on to the iron hand rail ("why do I have to be careful Mom?") and Dan carried Julia. The view from the top made us speechless. Vineyards, trees, fields of crops, and jagged mountains in the distance. Beautiful. We had the whole top to ourselves.
Getting back down those steps was interesting. I held onto Sara's hand, not wanting to let her do them on her own since if she fell she would have gone straight down and gotten seriously hurt. So I hoped that my shoes would be okay on the limestone and held on to her tightly. We made it.
We stopped for a picnic. Pasta, fruit, vegetables from my backpack. It was sureal to do something so normal as have a picnic right by a castle from medieval times. We could see old rooms carved out of rock. We could see old cisterns. The scale was so huge - this place must have been big and magnificent.
Our visit came to a natural end once we toured the whole place and so we wandered back down the hill (very steep hill) through the winding streets. They were lined with shops, ice cream places, and lunch places. (The town only survives for the tourists, it isn't a real town these days.) We got a crepe, a ham sandwich on a baguette, and then - a hot dog. Sara wanted the hot dog (which surprised us!) and it was in a long bagette - with two hot dogs side by side! The four of us sat on a rock bench (everything is rock here) and ate. It felt nice.
Then it was time for cookies. Sara picked out 3 cookies, bought them with money she got from Dan, and then said, "see vu play!" (thank you!) - not sure how to spell it in French - but she sure said it! Then she carried the paper back with the cookies in it proudly out of the store. Naturally, the next thing she did was look for a place to sit and eat them. She found the perfect place - a rock step leading up to the town hall. She sat and took out the first cookie. She snapped it in half, handed part to Julia, part to Papa, and part to me - before having her own first bite. In a few minutes those cookies were gone - and savored.
We made it back to the car and took the scenic route to St. Remy de Provence. It was a 15 minute drive. The views were entirely unspoiled. Just nature. The road was largely lined with neat rows of plane trees, slanting just so slightly to the left. Then I saw my first field of sun flowers. They were bowing their brown heads towards Earth, past their prime, but it didn't take much imagination to imagine how beautiful they must have been. In the distance the ragged mountains seemed to be wrapping it all up into a hug.
St. Remy is many known as a place Van Gogh did a lot of paintings. After he cut off his ear he also went to a mental hospital here. It is still a mental hospital. We found St. Remy to be okay, but the main neat thing about it was seeing exactly where Van Gogh did his art. They had signs up - like say - #16, and then you could look on the map and see that #16 was where he painted "starry night" and in which museum that is today. We looked at many of these Van Gogh places and he must have had an eye for beauty since many were not super awe-inspiring to our eyes.
We decided to get dinner out. Our first time. The guide book said to look for a sign on the road, but gave no address. Amazingly, on a small two lane road that was the width of a single lane road Dan saw a tiny green and yellow sign for the restaurant. We went down a small lane with wide eyes. There was nothing around. Just plants on the side of the road.
Finally, we saw another sign for the restaurant once we were in the middle of no where France. We turned in. There wasn't a sole in sight. I got out of the car and asked if they were open. She said, "yeah sure!" and we parked, let the girls out of the car, and walked over to it.
The ground is all stones. No pavement. No grass. Just little stones. They are covered with natural white dirt/power. We crunched on the stones over to the outdoor seating, which was a bunch of rock slab tables with chairs around them. We picked a table in the shade. (The shade of an olive tree.) Then I looked up. There in the corner was a kid play area, complete with bicycles, push toys, tricycles, shovels, wheelbarrows. In all, there must have been 20 ride-on toys in there, and a swing and small slide.
We didn't see Sara and Julia all dinner. They were playing in the kid play area the whole time! They got so dirty - not "dirt" but white powder from the rocks. (Not a powder that was added, a natural powder that rubbed off of the rocks.) Dan and I enjoyed peace, ate lasagne and pizza. Then we ordered another lasagne and Julia ate the whole thing herself. They played nicely together, Sara eagerly pushing Julia on the toys and making Julia giggle. Julia also did a lot of independent playing, as did Sara. You could tell they needed the time - just to play and be kids.
We topped that dinner off with ice cream, and actually Sara was so interested in the toys (especially a bike and a scooter - and also just playing with the rocks themselves as if they were sand to make sandcastles) that she didn't eat a lot of the ice cream. It was probably the most Dan and I have relaxed at a family dinner in a long time! Smack dab in the middle of no where France.
On the way back to Uzes from the outdoor restaurant our GPS went beep beep beep. We thought it was a speed warning but it was the battery quitting. Soon we were driving along a winding narrow road, with nothing but scrub bushes on either side of us - with no GPS -- that isn't a big deal -- but it was funny at the time to have the GPS screen just go black! I pulled out our map and Dan remembered the route - so we drove 1 hour back home - with out any problems.
Back here we dunked both Sara and Julia in clean water/soap to get all the rock particles off them - and then to bed. It was a great day.
Favorite Quote of the day:
--"I just don't want this day to end." -- Sara, as we were leaving the castle at Les Baux.
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