France104 - St Antoine L'Abbey, it's coming up a ghost town .

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Throughout the night the rain came down , harder and harder hitting Suzy’s roof keeping us awake. Not much fun trying to sleep with the carcophany of noise on your roof and no way to stop it or get away from it. We woke , breakfasted . Our meagre rations like Vercingetorix are slowly running out. The last of the fresh milk and fresh orange used. The last of the puddings devoured . We need a supermarket but we don’t have anywhere to put the food. It feels like a disaster. You never know how much you miss a fridge until you don’t have one. The cool box is not cooling much now the ice has melted and we have no access to electricity . Still it could be worse I could be working . Every cloud and all that .

Our first stop was a petrol station. Easier said than done. Glenn had intended using a motorway one but I spied one across the road and decided better to get diesel now than risk the motorway one being shut. Getting across the road was not easy. The French like traffic lights and there are no ways to come back on yourself . We drove on and on trying to find a roundabout or a side road but the traffic was too busy. In the end after driving miles we found our way back and filled up. Not just a splash and a dash but a 90 euro fill . Good value though we saved 7 euros filling up out of town. 7 euros is almost half a night on a campsite or one meal for one of us.

Our destination today was the little town of St Antoine L’Abbaye. According to the blurb and the tourist stuff it a little gem of a place but then a lot of these Provencial towns are little gems in their own right. They are described as beau villages or villages fleuri. We passed through many pretty ones along our route south. Many with rivers flowing through them, old water mills and mill races, hanging baskets full of geraniums and window boxes full to overflowing with pretty flowers. The soil is productive a rich nutty brown in colour . Crops perhaps mustard grow in the fields. The trees are predominantly walnut . After all we are in mustard and walnut country. The grass is tinder dry and looks as if it would burst in to flame instantaneously. Cotoneasters with their red and orange berries fill the hedgerows. A feast for the birds in the depth of winter. The sky is cloudless. A vivid cobalt blue. We don’t see skies that colour back home. They tend towards insipidness. We climbed the Col de Madelaine to get to our destination. The ideal road for a stage of the tour de france with narrow winding roads which climbed ever higher until we could see the valley floor way beneath us. As we climbed Suzy crawled as we were following a slow moving agricultural vehicle who would not get out of our way and let us past. Still it gave us time to admire the ever changing landscape in front of us..



The car park Sally Sat Nag tries to lead us to does not exist. This happens quite often so we follow our noses and find another . It does not look appealing so we move on and find another one. Third time lucky it is huge and empty we find plenty of space for Suzy. Our walk takes us along the tiny river into the lower town where we find a restaurant that I had spotted on the way in. It will do I cheerfully said and we sat down. We waited as we do for a while and eventually monsieur turned up and offered us the menu. I ordered two white wines . Boy where they rough? We ordered Glenn a veal Milanese which is basically a piece of reconstituted meat in breadcrumbs with chips and a salad . I ordered a pasta dish. Pasta parcels full of blue cheese sitting in a runny cheese sauce and covered in nuts. Let’s just say it filled a gap. Had I walked in to the dingy bar I probably would have chosen somewhere different. Still it was food and the restuarants in the upper town were charging an arm and leg for food.



Fed and watered we climbed the slippery steps to the upper town . This was the gem we were looking for. Alongside us were mellow tall stone buildings which shaded us from the heat of the mid day sun. The temperatures were reaching over 30 degrees. My legs were burning nicely. At the top of the hill the square opened up with ramshackle wooden buildings to one side, a huge Mairie far bigger than a town of this size needs and chestnut and plane trees in the middle. The administrative function of the town had moved from the huge Mairie to a small corner. The empty main building was lifeless. Its windows full of flowers. An archway invited us through. Entering the inner sanctum we were greeted with a long road with shops and administrative buildings to one side. Artisans dwellings and the trapping of medieval life in St Antoine lined the other side. Up the dusty street was a line of plane trees. At the top of the street restaurants and the abbey church itself. The abbey is a rather squat looking affair and looks rather unfinished as if money ran out before the tower was built . Its stone to the base were blackened with age but in places it looked as if they had been replaced and were fairly new. It was a rather odd looking church from the outside. Inside like the town itself was empty. It felt like a ghost town. Where were all the bus loads of visitors? Where were all the pilgrims? The place was empty. If folks lived here where were they? We rattled round in the church with its white walls and lofty ceilings. There were some fantastic wall frescoes on one chapel wall. The others were covered with plaster and partly destroyed as the plaster was removed . I lit a candle for our relatives as I always do when I go in a church. I am not a believer but it feels right to light something is rememberance of my dad, my grandparents, my mum and all of Glenns relatives. Formerly known as La-Motte-Saint-Didier, it was renamed after becoming the home of purported relics of St Anthony the Great in the 11th century, and shortly afterwards of the original house of the Hospital Brothers founded here in 1095 as the result of miraculous cures from St Anthonys fire. My legs felt like fire as the sun burnt them.



Our last spot of purchasing was a magnet and we had spied a shop that sold souvenirs but sadly it was not open until 2. We had almost an hour to kill so walked to the boulangerie and purchased a sweet Viennese baguette, a tarte aux fruites , two small cakes one flavoured with chocolate and the other with melon and a tart avec noix. We sat under the trees waiting for the shop to open. We sat on the abbey steps and waiting but sadly it remained firmly closed and we ended up going home without the magnet.

It was time to leave and move on leaving our lovely little ghost town behind us.

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