Cars, bicycles, more villages, and a stone overhang to end all overhangs

Strange noises were outside when we woke up this morning.  Workers are stringing Christmas lights in Lourmarin.

I posted this photo of Lourmarin a couple of days ago and listed it as another town…well, after you have seen a dozen of these little villages, they all start to look alike.  I have had to start taking notes as we drive along or by the time we get back to the apartment at night, I can’t remember which photos are from which place.

 Like most towns in France, Lourmarin has a monument to the soldiers lost in WWI.

As we started out today, I thought of a few little trivia things about our car.  Of course, Leon and I neither one have cars with fancy accoutrements on them, so this is a lot of fun for us.  The radio comes on when we start the car.  EVERY TIME!  We turn it off, and next time, it comes back on.  The fob automatically locks the car when we get about 10 feet away from the car.  The power is on to Helen all the time, so we have to be sure to unplug her when we get out of the car for fear she will run the battery down.  The mirrors fold in when the doors lock.  There are sensors that beep when we get close to a wall or curb.  That is particularly interesting when we are driving through a narrow street with only a foot to spare on the sides and the beeper is going off all the time.  I mentioned that the car starts with a button that has the words STOP and START on the same button. If Leon fails to change the gears at the appropriate time, the car beeps to remind him to shift into another gear.  It costs about 100 Euros to fill the tank.  We thought Caroline would like our license tag:  CW 117 AR. Dad has also decided that Megane drivers are much more courteous on the road than BMW and Mercedes drivers.

We drove through the little mountain village of Bonnieux again today.  We met several bicyclers there.  Dad thinks that lots of people like to ride the Tour de France routes during the off season.  We have seen several groups of well outfitted cyclers as we drive around.  

This is the Vaucluse region of France.  France is divided into Departments.  We have been in Normandy and Brittany and others as we have traveled in France.  Each department has its own individual specialties and traditions. 

 There seemed to be even more snow on the distant mountains today, and we saw more snow in shaded places.  There was ice on water puddles in parking lots. The Tour de France has climbed this mountain range before.  There is a weather station on the very top that measures some of the strongest winds in all of France.  I remember seeing the bikers just about being blown over as they crested the mountain.

Lacoste is a lovely but tiny village parked on a mountain.  At the tallest point is a chateau that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade.  There are interesting pieces of sculpture on the grounds.  

Much of the castle is just ruins, 

but it was purchased a few years ago by Pierre Cardin, who has restored parts of it for a country home.  

We were able to walk all around it.  There is a big trench like a moat around the front side of it, and the rest of it just hangs on the side of the mountain.  

There is a path that leads down to the village below, and we walked down to the houses on the first level below the chateau. 

 The view of the valley below is breathtaking.

As we drove down in the valley to go to our next village, we drove through cultivated land with vineyards and nice houses.  Most of the houses are owned by wealthy people who use them as vacation homes.  One vineyard we passed had the grapes still on the vines, and we wondered if they were being saved to make a special wine we have read about made from grapes that have frozen on the vine.

The temperature outside got up to 10 degrees Celsius today.  That is the warmest it has been.

The next village we toured was Menerbes.  It is built right on top of a hill, so the main street from one end to the other is flat.  There is an old church and cemetery at one end.  The church 

was not open, but we could walk around.

 

  The only gargoyle left was in pitiful shape!

We have seen many iron crosses like this in front of churches and even at intersections of roads.

 We took photos of the graves through the iron gate in the walled cemetery. 

This town has received governmental money to restore some of the town center.  There was a place for sale right on the town square, and I hinted a lot to Leon about it, but he ignored me.

There were more fabulous views of the valley below.

The next village was Oppede le Vieux.  There are actually two towns named Oppede (in Latin Oppidum means village), one in the valley and one on the mountain.  The one with le Vieux added to its name means the old one.  It was founded in the 12^th century and built on the side of the mountain.  In the winter, the shadow of the Luberon Mountains kept the village in perpetual darkness, and it was hard to keep the homes heated and dry.  In the 19^th century, the villagers had enough and started building new homes in the valley below.  They took the roofs off their old houses so that they would not have to pay taxes on them, so the town became a ghost town.  In the 20^th century, a commune of artists was founded and moved to the village.  One of the writers who lived there for a while was Consuelo Saint-Exupery wife of the famous Antoine Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince.  The commune did not last long, and the town looks like a ghost town now.

As Helen took us on tiny narrow country roads and city streets that made our sensors beep, Leon decided that he had a description of what he called a “Glorious Highway.”  That was one with a stripe in the middle so that he has his own lane and knows that it is his lane.  This is NOT a glorious highway.

The next town we visited was called Saignon.  We kept calling it Saigon.  It is another village perched on top of a mountain.  When we first saw it from afar, we thought it had huge round castle towers, but when we got closer, we saw that they were just huge outcroppings of rock.

 At the top is a church with its accompanying cemetery.  The church was not open, but the gates to the cemetery were open, so we walked through.  The part of the cemetery we saw was not ancient, but each plot was for a whole family.  We saw several that had one marker with a family name on top and then names of people for over 100 years on it.  

There was snow on the sides of the roads again and in the shady places.  We drove on an even higher road and could see the towns and valleys down below us.  The top of this mountain was flat, like a plateau, and was planted with lavender fields.  This is limestone country and very rocky soil.  There were stone fences dividing the fields that looked like they were made with the stones picked up from the fields.  There are also these small, stone cone-shaped rooms in fields all around the Vaucluse region.  Leon looked them up, and their origins are hundreds of years old.  They provided shelter for workers in the fields and also provided storage for farm tools.

The last town on our list for today was Buoux (pronounced Bewks).  Buoux is tiny, just a small cluster of houses, a restaurant, and a hostel.  Farmers here built terraces on the mountain sides to try to make more arable land, but most of the terraces are no longer used and are overgrown.  Its real claim to fame is that it is close to the Fort de Buoux, one of the most defensible and inaccessible town sites in all of Provence.  It sits in a deep limestone canyon with almost vertical sides all around.  This Fort survived the Wars of Religion only to fall victim to Cardinal Richlieu, who deciding that it was a bastion of Protestantism, had the walls pulled down in the 17^th century.  

 It is just a tourist site today, but is up a long, steep road that we decided not to walk.  We did walk partway on the dirt road to what the tour book called a rock “overhang.”  Oh, my gosh!  What an overhang!   

  Prehistoric people lived in the caves.  This photo was on the information board.

There is a cave under it that is tall enough for Leon to walk in. Look closely and you can see Leon standing in the opening. 

We took photos of the cliffs in the area.  It reminded me of Yosemite with all the huge rock face cliffs.  

It was getting dark, so we headed back to the apartment.  Our apartment owners had left two bottles of wine for us this morning, so we opened one of them, brought out the brie and a baguette and had a little snack before dinner.  Restaurants don’t open until 7:30 here.

We decided to go to the little café under us, and got there at 7:30 and had the place to ourselves.  By 8:00, several other people had come in.  Leon had beef and I had lamb.  It was good, and the best part was that I did not have to wash dishes.  We do not have a dishwasher here.

The owners of the restaurant have a bulldog that came and sat by our table and watched us eat.  I did not know the proper protocol about feeding him, so just left him alone.  He would walk away for a while, then come back and sniff our feet and sit down by  our table and give us pitiful looks.

We came back to the apartment, ate our tarte almande and had a glass of wine.

Yesterday, the weather forecast for tomorrow was snow, so we decided we would just hang around Lourmarin and explore more of it, however now the forecast is for rain tomorrow and snow for Wednesday when we will be leaving for Paris.  I hope that the forecast changes again.