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.
