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This is our fifth trip to Europe together and we have generally used trains to get around - until this time. Peter has always dreamed of tootling around Tuscany or Provence in a car but it has seemed like more of a nightmare for me. My left brain predominates and the challenge of reversing everything I know from fifty years of driving on the left side of the road feels insurmountable. My can-do husband, however, is the right-brained artist who can reverse trailers using mirrors and once drove on the other side in Los Angeles in a borrowed car! Could I sit in the wrong sided passenger seat and enjoy the ride?
Well, we are doing it and I haven’t screamed once, at least not aloud. As our plan developed, it was clear that to live in rural France, we would need a car to get around, and with my diminishing heart strength these days it would save me a lot of walking. So I agreed. A week into the adventure, we are still cautious but getting around pretty well. Every time we pull out in the car to drive, we both say, Keep right! We have conquered voice turn
by turn on Google maps but have now done a couple of drives without it, which feels like an enormous achievement. We have so far avoided the motorways, but the winding back roads have challenges as well as charm. They wouldn’t even rate as C roads back in Oz. Around Lourmarin, most of the roads between villages have no line in the middle and are barely wide enough for two car widths. There is no shoulder, and often a solid concrete walled edge, and almost nowhere to pull off and stop. When we get to a small town, there is still nowhere much to park, with the only town square carpark generally full. Most people own tiny cars, and we can see why - they wedge them into tight spaces, facing whichever way they can, and almost touching the cars fore and aft. All of this just means a fun challenge for Peter, who has so far manoeuvred into some very small spaces. We have excess waiver in our travel insurance, but would prefer not to draw on it for a parking scrape!!
So yesterday we decided to go for a drive in the afternoon, storm washed sunshine. 10km
and 13 minutes to Ansouis sounded not too demanding! It is also one of the top ten ‘beaux villages’in France, like Lourmarin, but we rejected it as a place to stay because of the steep slopes. Good call, it turns out! We have brief moments of delight as we drive, when we have a straight stretch between roundabouts, and I take in the scenery and even Peter can grab a quick glance. Then we have to focus again as there seem to be a lot of racing drivers in rural France and one will zoom out of nowhere and either roar towards us hogging the centre of the narrow road, or tailgate us at way over the speed limit (which our brilliant little French-made Yaris displays on the dashboard all the time).
It is unceasingly beautiful on these roads! Lush green everywhere, all sorts of unfamiliar trees and shrubs and flowering plants hang over the road. Sprinklings of red and orange poppies on verges, ends of vine rows and in the fields, and clumps of bright purple irises just doing their thing in unexpected random clumps. Stone farm houses and some old ruins of outhouses covered in ivy, and
a few animals. Not so many animals but we are attracted by the donkeys here with their lovely markings (and yesterday bought a little blue and gold crafted one as a memento). To our Australian eyes, there is a remarkable absence of anything commercial - no billboards or advertising, no Maccas, nothing to offend the eye or spoil the flow.
Then Ansouis appeared on the hilltop - one of the so-called ‘village perche’ because they are perched on the peaks. A few sharp turns and we were suddenly ascending steeply with stone walls a few inches from either side of the car. I love how the front doors of the houses open directly onto the narrow roads - if someone emerged suddenly it would be our car that would be doored! The hues of ochre and wheat are mellow in the afternoon sun and I have a momentary yearning to be able to draw and paint! I will have to stick to words and photos and a rapidly saturated album of memories. I closed my eyes as Peter negotiated a couple of hairpin bends and stalled once and then we were descending and out the other side. Three minutes seems a rather short tour, so we turned back to go up the hill again, took another turn while the road became impossibly narrower (I tried not to think about reversing down that narrow space around the bends!!) and suddenly we had found the town square with, hallelujah, some parking spaces.
We explored a little gallery where the potter inside was intrigued that we came from Australia, as the gallery was owned by an Australian woman who lives in Ansouis. Juliet Schlunk's paintings and ceramics were great, featuring local produce. I loved the painting of ripe figs on the tree. The potter was making clay artichokes and said deprecatingly that the one in his hand was ‘terrible’. It looked ok to me! A few photos from the terrace and a wander and we were ready to face the drive home. There was no need to buy a glacé as we have some delicious lemon sorbet back in the cottage that we spotted at the Super U.
It seems easier when we drive home, and the various entrances to Lourmarin are becoming familiar. Swinging around to the right of a roundabout continues to feel weird but can be accomplished! We know now where the camping ground is in our road, the garage and hotel at the roundabout and various other landmarks that help us to drive a tiny bit more confidently each day. Almost every trip one of us says, ‘Are we really doing this?’ Yes, we are. By the time we get to Scotland, Peter will be such a French driver that I will have to take over the wheel while he is deprogrammed!
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