Another beautiful day in St. Remy…temperature starts in the high 40s, reaches the low 70s in mid afternoon and is back down to mid 60s before sunset. We haven’t even had many French clouds to admire! This morning we drove to L’Isle sur la Sorgue where antique dealers added to the typical Sunday market.
The Sunday market has been in existence since November 9, 1596! L’Isle sur la Sorgue is a beautiful village, surrounded by the Sorgue River with canals from the river throughout and 14 water wheels still turning. The water wheels were important for the strong textile and paper industries and have been turning since the 12th century.
We had lunch here at Le petit frere; walked around the old town one more time and moved on to our next destination, Fontaine, only 7 km from L’Isle sur la Sorgue. There is not much to see in Fontaine except for the spring from which the River Sorgue emanates and the rocky outcropping surrounding the village. We found so many cars in the small village that we decided to only drive through and see what we could see from the car. We missed the spring, but the cliffs and the castle ruins were spectacular.
We added Jocaus to the GPS and continued through forested countryside, some vineyards and some olive trees on the way down to the Luberon Valley where we saw cherry trees, more vineyards, a soccer game in progress and the renovated village of Gordes on the top of a mountain.
At Jocaus, a smaller village on a mountain, we admired the art–this one is called “The Fury of the Mistral”. The Luberon Valley is in the background.
Continuing through the Luberon Valley, we headed to another tiny village, Goult, where we happened upon a Pétanque tournament in progress. Pétanque is similar to bocce but only because balls are tossed on an open field. Pétanque is played by men, women, young and old, but mostly by old men. It is played on a field that has no defined size and is usually ungroomed by anywhere from 2 to 6 players, usually divided into two teams. The first player tosses a very small light ball called the bouchon and everyone else tries either to get their balls closest to the bouchon or push other balls away from the bouchon. I’m sure there are more subtleties involved, but that is the gist of the game.
There is a lot of spectating, cogitation the next throw, and though we didn’t see it at this game, pastis is the beverage of choice. The tiny village of Goult has a lovely square town center and is surrounded by forests and rocky terrain. We continued back to St. Remy from here along tiny roads, straight downhill with stone walls along both sides–hoping no other vehicles came our way!
It was another full day. We opened a bottle of wine, sliced some French cheeses, started cooking dinner, sat on our patio in the waning sunlight and talked about plans for tomorrow.
Nancy
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