The nicest photograph of a polytunnel that you'll see this side of tomorrow (probably)

I took this yesterday evening, out walking our friends dog.  If you'd like to see more, you can in this Picassa album.

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...

So why the big paws?

... as the barman said to the bear.

But it has been a long time since I blogged, I confess.

Last September, 2007 turned from busy to hectic and for a variety of personal reasons, there was never any time for blogging. But I'm back now, and back on line.














And more significantly, Lindsay's back from working in Brussels, so I hope that she might find time to add to our blog as well. Here are a few pictures of Lindsay that I took last year. The first 2 I took in Montpellier, last August. (If you look again, you might be able to tell that Lindsay was feeling ill as the lunch that we'd just eaten was in the process of giving her botulism!) The third was taken in Paris at the end of November. You don't have to look that carefully to tell that it was cold!

We're just back from a flying tour of England and Scotland over Christmas / New Year and are settling back into life at the Mas des Grand' Terres. Provence has been looking distinctly soggy for the last few days, with a rare period of rain. It can keep it up for a few weeks yet as it's great for the new beds that I've planted in the garden. Plus rain down here means snow up in the mountains and we're due to go skiing in 10 days time. So, let it snow!

I did keep snapping through the latter months of 2007 and so have a back-log of images to share. To get things rolling, here are 4 images from a walk that Lindsay and I took recently with our friends John and Ruth in the Alpilles hills just behind St-Remy-de-Provence. I trust that they demonstrate that Provence is beautiful throughout the year. And once the hot weather and bus-loads have disappeared, there are compensations to be had with beautiful (and sometimes exilerating) walks in the hills.