July 30, 2012. Around Provence

Started out with breakfast at the B&B and then headed out by ourselves for Uzes (Richard and Elizabeth had stuff to do at home) — a totally charming town (which has also been found by tourists — mostly French and Brits), but — because it is a real town with people who work and live normal lives there (as opposed to Gordes, which from what I can tell has become a town driven by one industry – tourism) and because it is larger than Gordes, has maintained the charm and working aspect. Its markets are for real residents and you can easily drift into wonderful neighborhoods.

Uzes has a long history. It is the site of an aqueduct from the first century BC which supplied the city of Nimes with water. And the Pont du Gard remains the most famous stretch of that aqueduct (if you haven’t seen Pont du Gard — it’s worth a trip. By the way, Uzes was  home to a significant (?) Jewish population in the 5th Century and the local Bishop welcomed the Jews, until the King admonished him and then all Jews fled, except those who agreed to be baptized. After the death of the king (or maybe the bishop), Jews returned and even if baptized returned to Judaism.

Well, I need to confess that Uzes is also a great little shopping town with some wonderful, small boutiques.. which I remembered from earlier trips.

From Uzes — at the last minute — we decided to drive up to Roussillon, a town we had never visited before and which is known for its red dirt (similar to Sedona and Molokai) and all the buildings are made of the red clay, making for a rather homogeneous setting. It’s quite beautiful — but like Gordes, without any industry or business center, is really just a town to attract tourists… Stayed a while, strolled up the hill for a view and down to the edges… had great ice cream, and then drove back to Violes to pack, and then head to Richard and Elizabeth’s for some homemade squid pasta in black ink.

They are really into cooking, and their house is extremely relaxing — so it’s been nice to eat at home (sort of reverse of the norm for us. Dinner was also delayed a bit as I was on Skype and then had to get documents sent to me from the office…

We pledged to leave by 11, so that we would have a good night’s sleep as we had to start out with a wake-up alarm the next morning (today) at 4 a.m. Well it didn’t quite work out, and we got back to the B&B around 1 am; finished final packing around 1:45 am… and that damn iPhone alarm went off as planned at 4 a.m. The “Madame” was up when we arrived and very nervous about us paying our bill, since we were leaving so early the next morning. Not sure what the problem was as they had our credit card. Finally realized that she couldn’t find our reservation which had all the information. I said she was a bit flitzy! Anyway, after a while I decided to head to the room and let her figure it out, especially since our communication in French/English is really stressful for both of us.

So this morning at 5:30 as we lugged the bags down the two flights (not using the wheels because we would have woken everyone up — assuming anyone else was staying there, which we never found out.)… there she was. She found the reservation and just needed the credit card — although try as she would she couldn’t get her little credit card machine to connect through the Internet… she was literally outside trying to connect. Finally something went through. And off we went.