Wow, we experienced the “Mistral wind” first hand today! Middle of the night last night, all the window shutters were clanging and open windows banging around. Massive wind was blowing outside, so we shut everything and locked it down, then tried to go back to sleep. This morning the wind was still howling through the town, with BIG gusts at random. Cooled things down a lot, and made bike riding not a good idea for today. We walked down to the boulangerie, got some croissants for breakfast, and accidentally found three more ancient waterwheels working along a nearby street. We found the canal feeding these waterwheels by accident LAST night, on our way to dinner!
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| One of many canals running UNDER Isle, we saw last night |
Lynn helped me talk to our local grocer while we bought some stuff; he’s a mountain biker with his bike stuffed into a corner of the grocery. We talked awhile about local biking and my plan to ride Mt. Ventoux. What a riot, even though his English was as bad as my French, with a little help we talked bicycles (velos) for 10 minutes! He warned me against trying to ride up the Ventoux if the Mistral was blowing, by pretending to blow out candles on a cake! I think “Velo” is an international language, regardless of national origin.
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| 3 waterwheels on this street we found tonight |
During breakfast we decided to go explore the Camargue region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camargue about 120 km away, near the town of Arles. Lynn and I have both had this region of France in our minds for our entire marriage. We learned about it in a movie we saw while we were dating. The movie is “FRIENDS” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_(1971_film) a coming-of-age love story made in 1971, filmed almost entirely in the Camargue. It was not a big hit, even though Elton John did the soundtrack for it, but the beauty of the film’s setting stuck with us both all these 40+ years. The Camargue’s marshlands, wild white horses, flocks of flamingos, and desolate location have always been something we wanted to see in person. So, today we did.
The drive to Camargue was fun and challenging. We used our GPS-based navigation system, and opted for all back roads, no highways, to see as much scenery as possible. That worked great until the town of ARLES, where I took a wrong turn and the navigation instruction voice took us through the ancient part of the city to get back on course. Zounds! We crawled along streets just wide enough to clear the rearview mirrors on our car, made turns I couldn’t believe could be negotiated, and generally tried to keep from scraping paint off the car. On this route, probably designed just wide enough to hold a Roman war chariot, we accidentally passed right by the old Roman ruins and columns of some forgotten structures, and the still-in-use Roman arena where “no-kill” bull fights still are held. What a detour!!!
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| Arena in Arles - surprise route took us almost into it! |
The Camargue eventually appeared, and oddly enough seemed to be just like driving through the Belle Glade agricultural section of Palm Beach County, or Homestead’s Everglades agricultural area: flat, marshy, crops everywhere, wide open vistas, with tractors and farm buildings scattered around. They grow mostly rice in the Camargue, with other crops scattered around. It’s common to see big windbreaks between fields, to shield the fields from the massive winds that are always blowing in this area (Mistral). The breaks are made from trees or bushy tall shrubs planted on long rows to mark off fields. We noticed this pattern all over the Provence area after getting tuned into it today.
Our goals were to see the CABIN where “Friends” was mostly filmed, BULLS (they grow lots of famous bulls down there for the bull fights and to eat…bull meat is big!), WILD HORSES (beautiful Camargue horses are white or gray, and live on the marshes and fields), SALT MINES (Lynn wanted to see this, they have mountainous piles of white salt mined from big beds covered with pink water), and FLAMINGOES. The bulls and horses we saw while driving down to the town of Saintes-Maries-De-La-Mer. The bulls were grazing in their farm fields; the horses were grazing along grassy ditches and fields. OR WORSE, the horses were saddled and left standing in shaded stalls waiting for someone to rent them for a ride in dozens of horse “Promenade” businesses all along the route. What a bummer.
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer could have easily been a French-speaking Key West, only tackier and without good music. It’s big drawing card was the ancient church, with unique architecture and a compelling back-story on how it was founded (2 Mary’s and an Egyptian woman named Black Sally). We wanted to climb the rampart of the church to see the Camargue from high up, but gave up because we were constantly being hustled by Gypsy (Roma) women who hang around the church courtyard. It turns out this church is an icon of the Roma people, who converge on it every year in May to celebrate the founding of the church and Black Sally’s involvement. The guy at the Tourist Information office was a drag, and had never heard of the movie “Friends” so couldn’t help us find the cabin where much of it was filmed. We had a brief picnic, took some pictures of some statutes, the awesome harbor and beach, then hit the road again.
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| Sts. Maries de la Mer swimming section of the massive beach and harbor |
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| Cowboy uses bull wrangling stick to herd bulls |
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| Famous Sts. Maries de la Mer church, without Roma hustlers for a moment! |
Got lost again, and found some adventures on the very crummy backroads before finding our favorite town of the trip: le-Sambuc. Tiny place, but their cafe was open and we could get a Coke and use the toilette! Back on the road, we finally found the salt mine and a lookout point high above so we could take a picture. It had a mountain of salt, and hundreds of acres of pink water-covered salt beds. The wind about blew us off the high lookout! Well, we found 3 of the 5 things we had wanted to see in the Camargue, and were frankly tired of the place, so we headed home. A second stop at le-Sambuc was made, then nothing but hammer down until we got back to Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.
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| John NOT being blown away by the wind off the pink salt beds of the Camargue |
So, our Camargue memories now are of a tacky, hard-working, agricultural and drunken tourist area, with grim formerly-wild horses harnessed to make a buck. Sometimes it’s probably best NOT to visit places you’ve idealized in your mind over the years!
Wind seems to be dying down, so tomorrow may be bike day!
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