La, la, la, la, lavender

Actually, this is just a little experiment to see if I can embed a slide show in the blog. If you'd like to have a better look at these pictures that I took near Sault (about 45 minutes from us) back in July, click the link to our Picasa photo album that pops up in the bottom left corner at the end of the show or when you roll your mouse over it.

Winter Sunshine

It's raining again, today. It's been wetter than usual, lately. Not so wet that I haven't been able to go out for a bike ride on most days, but wetter than we're used to down here. The locals are all starting to make noises about how terrible the weather is, but all that we can say is that obviously they've never lived in Glasgow!

The weekend, however, was a very different matter. The sun split the sky. On Saturday we had a rare opportunity to go into Arles for its fabulous market - where it's the height of the Corsican clementine season. (I say a rare opportunity as Saturdays in the Spring/Summer/Autumn are usually given over to the departure and arrival of our gîte guests and the cleaning of the gîtes in the intervening hours.)

On Sunday we went walking in the Montagnette with John and Ruth. (If you read my last post, it looks like walking with John and Ruth is a regular event. But my last shots, from the lake at St-Remy, were actually taken in November. John and Ruth seem to be emerging as our 'outdoor friends' though, as we are also about to go skiing with them next week.)

The Montagnette is a range of low hills about 5km to the west between us and the River Rhone. At the centre of these hills lies the Abbey of St Michel de Frigolet. The hills are laced with walking tracks and on a clear winter's day like yesterday (it's never this clear in the summer heat haze) you can see as far as the Alps in the North and East, the Cevennes and Pic St Loup above Montpellier in the West and you can just make out the shimmer of the Mediterranean on the horizon in the South.


This (above) is the Abbey of St Michel de Frigolet, looking South-East, with the Alpilles hills that run behind St-Remy-de-Provence in the background.


And this is the Abbey looking Nort-East, with a snow-capped Mont Ventoux standing proudly behind.

Aliens Spotted Over Ventoux!

Having posted my shot of a storm cloud over Mont Ventoux recently, I was reminded of this shot that I took last summer.

Apparently this classic flying saucer cloud effect is caused by nimbus cloud getting caught in a whirlwind at high level. Strangely I'd read about this in the newspapers only a couple of days before and how such photographs have traditionally tricked people into believing in imminent alien invasion (more convincing in black and white). And then just a few days later I went and saw one!

Stormy Weather

5.44am: CRACK! And white light fills the house. I'm sure that lightning bolt hit the field behind us. Surely even Lindsay wouldn't have slept through that one? (Although she has slept through big ones in the past. Once, at an early hour of the morning, a clap of thunder broke that sounded like someone had just dropped a grand piano from a great height onto the roof just above our bed. Didn't stir!)

After this morning's strike, I got up and disconnected the computer - just in case - and went back to bed. Thunder and lightning crashed around for another hour although never as close again, and it rained hard for several hours. Good for the garden, generally, although I haven't been out just yet to see what the damage to my recently transplanted tomato plants may have been.

There've been storms throughout France this week and it looks set to continue next week. Last night up in Saone et Loire where my parents used to have a house (350km north of here) there was 1m50 of flood water in Marcigny and a mud slide in Iguerande!

We seem to avoid the majority of the storms that hit this area by dint of our geographical position - the surrounding hills tend to break the worst weather before it reaches us. Look at this fantastic sorm cloud I photographed building on the plane behind Mont Ventoux on Tuesday...