Blogs from Bonnieux, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France, Europe

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Europe » France » Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur » Bonnieux March 29th 2011

Travelling through the amazing French countryside from Tours near Paris to Provence in the South ... driving on the right hand side of the road, roundabouts particularly challenging! Tomorrow we drop off the car and head to Switzerland ... woohoo!... read more
Our B&B at Moulismes in Vienne
Moulismes
We stayed in the middle room at the farm of the three ducks


Hi All, just a quick update on our travels following the tour. We spent yesterday in Carcossone checking out la cite and this morning on to Provence to see the tour wizz thru. We got stuck in a bit of traffic and then had a hard &é km ride over the luberon range to Bonnieux a great hill town that I visited with my family in 2002. Unfortuaely we missed the riders by 5 mins _ bugger. Just having a cooling drink in the local bar before a lap around town and then on to the Alps and Alp Huez as our base for the next week. Will fill in te gaps and add some more pics soon. Thanks for all your comments and feedback. R... read more


Bonnieux to Chamonix After taking a day off from driving, (Wednesday, May 16) on Thursday, we headed toward the Camargue and Ste. Marie de la Mer. The town itself was VERY tourist oriented—more or less a summer trailer park—but the surrounding area was interesting and pretty. We could have taken another tour of a bird sanctuary at probably about $50 for the both of us, but we opted instead just to look around on our own. Aside from a number of sea birds that we had already seen and learned about from our travels in the northern part of France, the birds I was most interested in seeing were the pink flamingos. And sure enough, we saw lots of them! That night, we decided to go to a real French restaurant for supper. We dressed ... read more
More flamingos
Two flamingos
Caravan at Ste Marie de la Mer


I woke up and was 2 minutes into my bath (I have no shower in my room) and suddenly there is a sort of urgent knock on my door. I call out that I'm in the bath but there is no response. There is more knocking as I get up and throw on a towel and a t-shirt saying "just a minute, just a minute," and before I get a chance to open the door I can hear somebody (who I then know must be Patrick) unlocking the door with his key. I open it up and Patrick is frantically wondering if I'm taking a bath. "Yes," I'm thinking, "look--I'm wearing just a towel." He explains that it is leaking downstairs and flooding the kitchen below me, and he looks at the bathtub and asks ... read more


The sun was shining brightly and the sky was a nice deep blue when I woke up, which was great news. We had breakfast in the front sun room and Patrick took us to a farmer's market where we shot for a little bit before moving on to a Lavender museum. At that point, Patrick had to go for a little while, so we took a taxi to the town of Isle sur la Sorgue, where all sorts of antiques were for sale along the main drag of town. We wandered through all the stands, shooting along the way, and had lunch at a place along the water. After lunch we met up with our taxi again we went towards the towns of Lacoste and Bonnieux in order to try to get good shots of ... read more


We had breakfast downstairs at Patrick's, and then headed off to a small winery called Domain Marie where we did a short interview with the winemaker. It was a very pretty vineyard and wine storage area, but the rain was still coming down, so we won't be showing it on TV in its full glory. We stopped briefly at a cork screw museum, but barely spent any time there before they closed. We moved onto where our lunch would be, a restaurant called Blue de Tois, where we filmed the chef, also named Patrick, as he grilled and rotisseried prawns, pork, lamb, duck, and a huge steak. Patrick used to be in car finance, and changed careers and accepted a huge pay decrease to open the restaurant, but it is very nice and they're very ... read more


My alarm went off at 2:20am, and that was the start of a long day. Our driver, Victor, picked us up in an old van at 3am, and we began the drive to Gatwick to catch our flight to Marseilles. I immediately noticed as we got on the freeway that the van was working awfully hard to get up to speed. About half way through the drive, the exhaust started smoking like a steam engine, and after a few minutes of trying to keep it going, Victor had to pull over on the side of the road. We were still 45 minutes from the airport, and it seemed like the van was going to catch fire any minute. He made a few calls, things were tense for a while, and eventually the manager of the ... read more
my beds




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