Jan 6, 2009 – Beaune, France

On one of the last nights of our trip, in transit north to Frankfurt from the south of France we spent stopped for a night in Beaune.

The area around Beaune, the Cote de Beaune, is known for its Burgundy wines, with Beaune serving as the hub of the local wine business.  Many famous French wineries had buildings in town and the town had a very established, organized feel.

I looked through the my archive of pictures and couldn’t find any of Beaune so you’ll have to make do with my memory.  When we arrived in the early evening it was snowing and a light accumulation of dry snow on the ground.  We had a very nice room at the Hotel de la Paix and had a nice dinner at a nearby restaurant and had a relaxing evening.

When we left the next day the snow had stopped and the roads were in good condition for our trip to Heppenheim, Germany, a trip of just under 500 kilometres (according to the Google map linked here).

Jan 3–5, 2009 – Aix-en-Provence, France

After leaving Italy, we headed to Aix-en-Provence (they pronounce the Aix like ‘Ax’) for a rendezvous with our friends the MacDonald’s – Rick, Wendy, Rowan, Caelan, and Rick’s brother Al – who were also travelling in France.

We made a couple of day trips to the surrounding area.  This is a group photo taken in a place called Here is a group photo at a place called Les Baux-de-Provence (Google Maps link here).

 

We highly recommend this area and it was the second time we had visited it.  Fortunately we hadn’t  visited the old city and its fortifications on our previous visit so we joined the MacDonald’s in a visit to the site. 

They had visited once before, in summertime, when the temperature had been almost 40C which was quite different than the weather on this day – clear, windy, and quite cool.

This is view from the fortifications (which was a high point of land in this area) of the surrounding valley.  As you can see, there is an agricultural area where they were growing olives and lots of grapes.

 

This is a view from the fort of the city below.

The fort had been redeveloped into a museum, part of which is shown in this picture.

The museum contained a number of well-preserved medieval weapons.

Just to show that the wind that whipped us during our visit was not a fluke – check out the pocked walls of the fort.  I think they were a specific type of rock – limestone, sandstone, something like that – that is a little porous but this degree of erosion spoke of the exposed placement of the fort and a consistent prevailing wind.

Within two kilometres of the museum was a winery located inside an old limestone quarry.  They weren’t actually open to the public but on our previous visit to the area we’d also visited this winery and one of the employees remembered Charlotte so they provided a tasting and let us use their seating area for a picnic (and to get out of the wind).

On our way back to Aix-en-Provence, we passed through Avignon where we saw this unique tunnel entrance mosaic made out of different types of creeping (clinging) wall plants.

 

Another image from our day trip through the French towns around Aix-en-Provence.

A typical tree-lined French road we travelled on our way back to Aix-en-Provence and some very enjoyable group dinners with our friends.

Jan 1-2, 2009 – St-Raphael, France

We planned on meeting the MacDonald’s, friends from Central Saanich in Aix-en-Provence on January 3rd which gave us a couple of days to visit the French Riviera.  After leaving Quiliano, Italy, we headed along the Italian and then French Riviera to a place called St Raphaël, France (Google Map link here), where we had booked rooms for a couple of nights.

It was a nice day and this drive is very scenic.  One of the scenes that caught our eye was these terraced hillside on which, if you look closely, you can see large numbers of green houses.  All faced south towards the Mediterranean.

Also along this route are Monte Carlo and , along this route is Monaco and Monte Carlo.  I still have not figured out the relationship between these two names.  Some references suggest that Monaco is the district and Monte Carlo is an area within the Monaco district but I’m not sure.

Regardless, although quite dark, you can see the following sign provides directions to the famed Monte Carlo Casino.

Unfortunately, on the day we were passing through this area was chock-full of people and cars and we didn’t have an opportunity to get out and walk around.  Here is a picture of the Casino taken from the car as we moved slowly through traffic.  Allister is a James Bond fan and became quite interested when we told him this was the site of some famous scenes from old Bond movies.

More scenes from Monaco.  It was exciting to think about the Formula 1 auto race that runs here every year navigating these narrow streets.

This wasn’t a Bond car just a beautifully preserved Austin Healy 3000 whose loveliness we had to record.

The following picture is of our hotel in St Raphael.  Its owner (barely visible in the middle right part of the photo) was just about to close up for a few weeks (or months).  He was headed to Lyon for a few days and then planned to go skiing.

We stayed in a room on the second floor of the hotel and the balcony shown in the photo above (to which the ‘Auberge Provencale’ sign is attached) offered a view similar to the following photo.

Its probably redundant to say that the French Riviera was a nice area.  But it was. 

St Tropez was about 40 kms away from St Raphael and we couldn’t miss the opportunity to visit.

A view of the yacht basin.  There were boats of all shapes and sizes but lots of large ones.

These were some of the more impressive large yachts.  The boat in the foreground is the tender for the sailboat immediately behind it.

This made us feel right at home.  It wasn’t particularly warm this day – probably 3-5 C – but they still needed an impressive generator / refrigeration unit to keep this and another sheet of ice (not shown) cold enough to support the number of skaters.

Nov 6-8, 2009 – Chambery, France – Dinner with Chambery CISV delegation

Allister had a chance to renew acquaintances with members of the Chambery CISV delegation he’d met in summer 2008 at the CISV camp.  Both he and Charlotte had a chance to go to school with members of the Chambery delegation.

We were also invited to a dinner with the families of the Chambery CISV delegation hosted by the Gonays.  After some difficulty finding their home (definitely off the GPS device grid – thank goodness for the kindness of strangers), a lovely home near a lake just outside Chambery, we gathered for a great dinner featuring some local Chambery favourites and some great wine.

One of Laura-Lyn’s ongoing objectives in France was to find opportunities for Allister and Charlotte to use their French.  This evening was a great opportunity, conducted almost entirely in French, with only momentary pauses to catch us up on on some of the more important points.  Great fun!!

Here is a picture of the Chambery delegation (with Charlotte and Allister).  From left to right they are Juliette, [Allister], Thibaut, Thomas, Philomene, [Charlotte], and their leader, Tiphaine.

This is the group that gathered for dinner at the Gonays – seated to my immediate left, Mrs. Gonay (with Philomene on her lap) and Alain.  We had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality of the group.

Nov 6-8, 2009 – Chambery, France – Around Chambery

As we’ve mentioned before, both Allister and Charlotte attended camps Pennsylvania in the summer of 2008 sponsored by the Children’s International Summer Village (CISV) organization.  One of the delegations at Allister’s camp was from Chambery a city in France near Grenoble and and the French Alps.  We arranged to meet the delegation and their families and stopped there on our way to Italy.

I have pictures from the dinner we shared with the delegates, their leader and families in a separate post.  The images in this post are some of those we saw in our sightseeing in the Chambery area.

We went for a hike in a gorge that the Romans had used as road from a valley through the Chartreuse (yes, there really is a such a place) Mountains about 20 kms from Chambery.  This photo looks down the gorge to the valley beyond.

You can see the remains of Roman road development under Allister’s feet.

Once you passed through the gorge, this was the view that greeted you.  We left our car at the top and walked down and back.

We ate local dishes at the Chambery restaurants we visited.  This was raclette in which a chunk of cheese was heated to the melting point by an element that is part of this contraption and then scraped off and eaten with bread or sausage meet that was part of the dish.  The next night we ate fondue which was delicious.

Our next stop after Chambery was Venice, with an overnight stop in Parma, Italy.  This was a view from the highway after we left Chambery.

 

The rains that we’d seen in Avignon must have fallen as snow in these hills in the Alps.  Not far from where this photo was taken we went through an 11.3 km tunnel under Mount Blanc.   There was about a 30 Euro toll for this tunnel but no other way around.  We had never seen such emergency equipment in a tunnel – apparently to guard against fire – and places of refuge if a car stopped in the middle of the tunnel.

Nov 2-5, 2008 – Avignon, France – "A Good Year" tour

Those that know our family know there was a movie starring Russell Crowe and produced by Ridley Scott called “A Good Year” that we’ve watched a number of times (and inflicted on our guests a number of times also.  They movie is loosely based on Peter Mayle’s novel, A Year in Provence.  It turns out Ridley Scott and Peter Mayle are neighbors in Provence and collaborated in the making of this movie which does a great job of showing the Provence countryside and hill towns in all their glory.

I found a web site that described the Provence towns where scenes of the movie were set and we made a tour to visit these settings.

For the movie this square was transformed into an outdoor cafe run by the film’s female lead. These dogs would periodically look up in amusement at those passing by.  It’s located in the city of Gordes.

This is a beautiful view of the city of Gordes we took as we were leaving town.

This square was the setting of a scene in which Russell Crowe made a few laps of the monument in the middle of the square in his Smart car (how European!).

The photo below was taken just outside the city of Bonneux (I’ll check on the spelling) and is the sign of the winery that Russell Crowe inherits in the movie.  For the movie it was changed from Chateau de Canorgue to Chateau Le Siroque and was at the head of two driveways; one private which lead to the winery owner’s house and the other to the tasting room of the winery.

 

This is the view from the wine tasting building (we bought a couple of bottles of wine which were very nice) to the main house which was one of the movie settings that staged a number of scenes.

  

In the movie, Russell Crowe zoomed back and forth along this driveway on a Harley Davidson he inherited from his uncle.

 

The is the view of the front garden looking out to the Luberon Valley beyond and was a vista featured many times in the movie.

 

Finally, Russell Crowe rides on the Harley Davidson to a date with the female lead that takes place at this public pool in the village of Cucuron.  In the movie, this pool was transformed into an outdoor concert venue, the performance of which was interrupted by a downpour.