Down by the Sea

It's only 45 minutes from our house to the Mediterranean at its closest and Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is generally where we head for.  In the height of summer it can get pretty busy, but in the winter, you share the beach with only a handful of other people (and horses).


We went down a few weeks ago with John and Ruth.  The sun was low in the sky, creating some fantastic shadows.


A few guys were out fishing (strenuous stuff)...


... and they weren't the only ones with fishing on their minds.

Les-Saintes-Maries is the principal coastal town of the Camargue - the marshy area in the Rhone's delta famous for its flamingoes and white horses.  It's a great beach for drift wood.

The beach features a wooden bar/café in the summer months, built on wooden piles.  In the winter they take the café down, leaving just the piles...


The piles and their shadows created fantastic graphic patterns...



... as did the sun through the fences placed along the beach to stop the sand blowing away in the winter winds.


And then along came a group of riders, on those famous white horses.



As the afternoon drew to a close, a fantastic light show was laid on for us.



This is Ruth and Lindsay walking back towards Les-Saintes-Maries.


That's the tower of Les-Saintes-Maries' medieval fortified church on the horizon.

Makes you deaf, you know!

One of the additional advantages of living near Avignon, is that we're pretty much based at a pan-European crossroads. Turin and Barcelona are both just over 3 hours drive away (in opposite directions!), Marseille is a major embarkation point for North Africa, Paris is 2 hours north by train, we're well linked for flights to most parts of the UK (and by train with Eurostar/TGV) and we're under 3 hours drive from the southern Alps!

So we're just back from a week's skiing in La Plagne at the centre of the Alps. And a great week it was too. La Plagne is where Lindsay and I first started to realise our escapist dreams when we chucked our jobs at the end of 1999 to go and work that winter running a ski chalet. Therefore this last week was a bit of a trip down Memory Lane (or Piste?), catching up with old friends, skiing favourite runs (and trying new, fast chair lifts) and visiting old haunts.



Just such an old haunt is La Bergerie - a mountain restaurant just above La Plagne and thus always a favourite stopping off spot for a Vin Chaud on our way home after a day's skiing. The photo above was taken from La Bergerie's terrace at the end of our last day skiing. The mountain in the background just catching the light of the setting sun is Mont Blanc, Europe's highest mountain - about 4,500m (from memory).

Skiing home after this, the pistes were suddenly deserted and silent - an eerie, beautiful feeling.

However, the end of the holiday was somewhat marred for me as I managed to catch a horrible cold that has dragged on for over a week now. And my top tip for catching a cold in a ski resort is... if you catch a cold up a mountain, avoid going down to the valley! Having got thoroughly bunged up on Friday, we left on Saturday and drove down from the ski resort, descending La Plagne's 21 hairpin bends and 2000m to the valley floor, during which descent I turned thoroughly deaf!

And about two days after we got home, as if not to be outdone by 'foreign parts', Provence threw us a fantastic sunset of it's own...

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.