Mt. Ste. Victoire

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This entry is kind of an off-shoot of the next entry, "Mes Copines". So on the second day that Katie and Amanda, my friends who came to visit me, were in Aix, we decided to climb a mountain. Well not really climb a mountain, but just look at it. Of course, sometimes plans go in directions you hadn't expected...

We went with Kate, a another student of IAU, who had been on the bus before and knew what she was doing. The plan was to go to Mount Ste. Victoire, which you can see from town. We met at the Rotonde and took the last four seats in the bus. This was the first of a series of miraculous events. (I think it's because it was a Sunday. Praise Jesus!) So anywho, we got off the minibus thing at a trailhead, after winding through some very beautiful Provence landscape.

The mountain was beautiful, and we had plenty of light, and wind. Lots and lots of wind. So we started our hike, scrambling up rocks and passed through an olive grove. We think it's a grove, because olives don't grow in orchards do they? We got to a flat concrete slab and had to sit and collect ourselves before continuing. This second leg was much nicer, flat and wide. We climbed up alongside the mountain itself, jutting up before us. We ended up at a place that we had seen from the parking lot, and Katie had noted was "a long way up".

Our third leg of the journey up was marked by wind, lots and lots of the fiercest gusts of wind I have ever experienced. As Katie once more noted, if it hadn't been for the wind pushing up forward, we wouldn't have made it. Of course, if the wind was at our back going up, it was going to be in our faces going down.

When we couldn't take it anymore, we turned around and started back down. This was the interesting part. If you have never felt the skin of your face and nose moving around without your permission, you should climb Mt. Ste. Victoire. I think my eyeballs were being smooched too, because it got kind of hard to see. Amanda thought she was about to lose a contact.

This was our second miracle, that we got down without anybody twisting an ankle, because there were a lot of loose rocks and little ditches where you could slip. I went down saying "whoop!" every few steps as I almost pulled something. It's not a place to take your grandmother.

Getting down to the bottom was nice, and I felt like I accomplished something. We checked the schedule and found that there was a bus in fifteen minutes, 1:30ish. Miracle 3- the bus after that wasn't until 3:45pm or something. This knowledge made me willingly throw myself almost into the bus's path as it came around the corner, though I think it was stopping anyway.

We had a lovely ride back and spent the rest of the day in a state of shock. Ah, the fresh outdoors!

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Photos

Mt. Ste. Victoire
The beast itself, currently my wallpaper

The "really far" point
And then we kept going....

Going Down
Oh crap.