Advertisement
Lourmarin from our road
My favourite view as we come out the gate. How can this be our last day in Lourmarin? Two weeks sounded like a leisurely stay when we planned it, but it has flown and we feel as if we have hardly started to appreciate this plus beau village. But I am sitting at a cafe in the square and have been browsing our second weekly market, so it must be two weeks. This entry will be a catch up on things I haven't managed to write about yet, so get ready for randomness!
The weather has been most unseasonal, according to the locals. At least half our days have had some rain and it has been stormy and even cold. We have slept with the heater on low as the stone walls of our cottage are not exactly cosy. We haven’t tried out the pool on the property because it hasn’t been hot enough! It has meant we have steered our way through each day according to the weather forecast, but been grateful to have enough time to delay excursions when we needed to. This last morning is, of course, the perfect weather we expected! Peter is browsing galleries and art shops, slightly anxious that he might have missed
some. We have no need to buy food before we travel on tomorrow, so I am wandering the market and just enjoying the buskers, and quietly satisfied that I ordered my juice in the Salon de The in the square all in French.
Chateau Lourmarin dominates the scenery in our village and we paid two visits, both in the rain! The first was to the Chopin concert I have already described. Then on Sunday we tried to go to the Protestant Temple for the second Sunday in a row looking for a service but it still was locked up with no sign of life. Perhaps the Christians are meeting somewhere else but we couldn’t find them. We were parked in front of the chateau in the pouring rain, so after reading a psalm and having some prayer decided to go in and found a couple of lovely exhibitions at the base - some sculpture and some resin coated photographic work. We bought our tickets and started to explore the castle, already saturated! The castle itself has a long history, being built as a 12th century fortress, then updated with a new wing in the 16th century - the first
renaissance building in the Provence region. After the French Revolution it ran down badly until it was purchased in 1920 by the wealthy Laurent-Vibert, who commissioned an architect to restore it. When he died he left it as a trust to encourage the arts, particularly young artists. And that it does very well today.
What we could explore of the medieval part was gloomy and foreboding, including a prison tower we could see from the balcony. The renaissance wing is stunningly presented, and because of the bucketing rain, we had the whole castle pretty much to ourselves! The photos tell the story, but it was tastefully reconstructed, with some intriguing items like the bookcase apparently taken from the Pope's Palace in Avignon! I loved the kitchen, especially the enormous fireplace and amazing ceramic crockery crafted in nearby Apt. The stone spiral staircase beat me in the end, but Peter made it to the top and found an amazing music room. We hadn’t really finished when the lady came around jangling the keys - not enough business, we suspect, and she wanted to close up and go home in the middle of the day! I was able to pull out,
“Mon mari est en haut d'escalier” - my husband is upstairs, thus ensuring that he didn’t spend the night locked in a castle!
The poppies are a stunning feature in May in Provence (the lavender comes in July) and they give a delightfully whimsical feel to the scenery. They grow out of stone walls, in clusters at the side of the road, in the vineyards and beside the bridges. An occasional cheeky one just pops up in the footpath. But I wanted to see a wide field of them and we have had glimpses as we drove and not been able to stop. Then Peter came home from a wander and said he had found them - in the very next road to ours! We took a leisurely drive and were able to park, sort of, and just enjoy the panorama of the waving red flowers against the lime green crops and the hills behind. The reference in Matthew 6 to the lilies of the field came to mind and seemed apt, except it was poppies. The lovely French name is coquelicot.
Another point of interest in Lourmarin is that the writer, Albert Camus, lived and died here.
There is a street named after him, and we found his and his family's grave in the local cemetery, adorned with a number of pens stuck into the soil, presumably from fellow writers. As he was an exponent of existential despair, I am not sure if it was sad or fitting that his untimely death in a car accident finished his life too early. I do remember ploughing through his book L'Etranger at university.
I have tried to avoid blogging too much about the trivia of food on our travels, but eating in another country is always an adventure. One of our main discoveries is that we need to upgrade our level of doneness for meat meals. Peter likes medium rare, but even asking for medium last night produced something we would call very rare! I stick to my ‘bien cuit’, or well done and it comes a perfect medium with some pink in the middle. I was a little shocked to see ‘Araignee de veau’ on the menu, also last night, as I am sure that means spider! It does, but referred to the way the veal was arranged, and it was delicious. We still find it interesting
that wine can cost less than water, that it is hard to get green vegetables on the plate, (although salads are popular), that dinner is so late and takes so long (got home at 10pm last night), and that the bread is a different texture every time.
Peter managed to make some contact with an artist, and took photos of French faces and people at the market, preparation for some sketches. We are very reluctant to move on, but also delighted with our choice to start our trip in this exquisite village. We'd love to pencil in a return visit, but for now we have to gather our belongings ready to hit the road in the morning - new adventures ahead in St-Remy en-Provence! Tonight we will have a farewell dinner with our hosts, Loïc and Evaline, and are looking forward to that.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.264s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0436s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb