I went riding on Labor Day with Dave, Snake, and Chris from Memphis, down to Marianna, through the St. Francis National Forest, into Helena, across the Mississippi River, up through Arkabutla, then through Walls, and back into Memphis. 3 states, 7 hours, 2 bridges over the Mississippi River, and 1 great ride.
Thanks to the Parkers for another wonderful lakehouse weekend! Cool July weather, good friends, and a beautiful sunset. What more could you want?
Today, we started out at the Picasso Museum. In some ways, this has been a very Picasso-infused trip. From the 1890s as a boy through his death in 1973, he did his best work along the stretch of sea we’ve been experiencing the past few weeks. The Picasso Museum in Antibes explored his later work, especially pottery, while the Barcelona museum focuses on his earliest drawings, sketches, and paintings. Both are excellent, and I’m still not the biggest Picasso fan, I can definitely understand the genius behind some of the best art in the 20th Century.
Next, we headed down to the beach. I’m always going to be in favor of a beach that you can visit via subway. The Barcelona beach is exceptionally nice, a great place to stroll and take in the sea air.
The Barcelona Metro is the perfect teleportation machine to get around this diverse and busy city. Next up, we visited an old bullring that the Barcelonenos modified to be a surreal 5-story mall.
What a fun and unexpected city!
We started our first day in Barcelona at the must-see site for most of the 17 million visitors that visit the city every year, and as all of the other museums are closed on Monday, about half of that number descended on the Gaudi-designed masterpiece Sagrada Familia with us.
The church really is amazing and worth the admission price and crowds, but I’m not sure how “sacred” the place can feel with the crush of people all around. It has the feeling of a circus combined with an international photoshoot. I can’t imagine what it would be like in the real high-season, July and August.
We also explored Barcelona’s old gothic city, the marina, and Parc de Montjuic, with some tasty tapas on way back to the apartment. A fun day…
Katherine and I just made it into the apartment in Barcelona, and this is the view from our window. This is a famous market but is under renovation this year.
Many thanks to Laura, Antonio, Guisey, Toy, Chicho, and Antonella for hosting us and putting up with all of our questions (in English, no less!) over the past week! It was sad to leave Sicily, but we know we will return someday.
Katherine, Laura, Antonio, Chicho, Toy, and I rented a boat today for a look around some of the other Aolian Islands. We visited Lipari and Volcano, as well as stay off of the coast of Salina, where Chicho and Toy caught our dinner. What a wonderful day!
For a change of pace, Katherine, Antonio, and I took the ferry over to Panarea, a nearby island to Salina. We walked around, got some sun, ate a granita, hung out a a beach, and viewed an archeological site. Panarea is a beautiful place, much smaller than Salina.
We are having a great time catching up with friends in Salina. A lot of relaxing going on here.
Laura organized a tour of a local winery, which was very interesting. They also produce capers, using this machine.
Otherwise, it has been a lot of sun, sand, cooking, eating, drinking, and just chilling. Just what we needed after France.
Made it to Salina! First, a crazy Ryanair flight from Marseille to Catania (Sicily), then a wonderful lunch and car ride to Milazzo (thank you, Guisy!), and then a ferry ride to Salina, where we were greeted by Laura, Antonio, and the gang. Perfect!
We drove the rest of the Riviera coastal road to St. Tropez, which included much of the beautiful scenery you might imagine. Traffic was not as bad as I imagined.
All in all, southern France is a wonderland of experiences, from the quiet and meaningful, to the crowded and surreal, from the ancient and overloaded, to the stunning yet sublime. Prepare to be amazed, if you make it here. It is easy to see why this is the most visited country on the most visited continent.
Our stop in Antibes included finding a beautiful beach, studying dozens of Picasso drawings and paintings close up at the Picasso Museum, walking the sea ramparts, wandering through a packed Provencal market, roaming more medieval streets, looking at the yachts of millionaires and billionaires, and getting as close as I’ll ever get to a St. Tropez tan.
Needless to say, we had a great time in Antibes and would recommend it over Nice as a base to see the Riviera hotspots. Nice and Monaco are only minutes away by train, after all.
On the way to our hotel in Antebes, we stopped for a few hours in Nice. I was pleasantly surprised; after hearing so much about the terrible French Riviera traffic, getting from Monaco to Nice was easier than expected. We would have never made it without Giselle, our name for our rented Skoda GPS.
We walked through the old town and the Saturday afternoon market. The rocky beach was a highlight, as was a beautiful, long, grassy park that runs through the center of the city. Nice is a little grittier than Monaco, but with families out enjoying some brief afternoon sunshine, it is also a little more down-to-earth, too.
You know you are in a place full of stinking rich people when your photo of the Lamborghini and Ferrari is almost photo-bombed by a Bugatti passing in front.
Monaco is surreal, clean, packed with people and cars, vertical, over-signed, pretty, and, unfortunately for us today, wet, because it rained almost all of the time we were outside. (No hailstones, however, thankfully.)
We could easily spend another week here. Free of big cities for day or so, you start to relax in a deeper way, thanks to the winding roads of the Vaucluse region and the postcard-perfect scenes waiting for you at the next corner.
When we felt the need to people-watch, we ducked in the towns of Apt and L’Isle-Sur-la-Sorgue for an ice cream or pastis.
One of the advantages of staying far out of town in Provence is that you can just run into relatively obscure things that you read about in books about the region. Not 100 feet from our doorstep on a short hike, we came across this borie, hidden in the trees. Bories are limestone slab buildings made without mortar, including a stone roof, and have been made in the region for 4,000 years or so. Today, they are sometimes used to store tools or for shelter during a storm.
Speaking of storms, we experienced four separate hailstorms in a one hour period. All of the cars in the area scrambled to get under whatever kind of protection they could find. The odd thing for me is that they lasted so long. I’m used to a few minutes of hail, but one of them went on for more than 20 minutes. The ground was an inch deep in hail around us, for a while, before it melted.
In the heart of the Luberon, we scampered up the tiny roads to the hilltop, red ochre village of Roussillon.
Thankfully, we arrived after the tourists had vanished back to their buses, so our dinner had a more natural, French feel to it. Walking back to the car through medieval streets, we emerged to a stunning sight of the cliffs fully exposed to the sunset.
Well, the roast chicken didn’t make it to the Cotes du Rhone region. I got hungry, and we devoured it during a rest stop along the road on the way to Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Delicious!
Unable to find the winery we wanted to visit there, we moved on to Vision La Romaine, at the top of a driving tour that would take us through the best of the Cotes du Rhone region and into the heart of the Luberon. Somewhere on the backroads between Malaucene and Le Barroux, we came across some of the most beautiful scenery of the trip thus far: vast fields of wildflowers in bloom, sweeping down hillsides and crossing vast valleys between vineyards to emerge on the other side and give way to craggy, pointed ridges.
It was one of the market days in Aix-en-Provence, so we headed south to pick up some picnic supplies. We never did find the flower market, but the produce and spice market provided a feast for the senses.
Armed with half of a roast chicken and what may be described as “roast chicken juice dripped sliced potatoes,” we headed north into the Cotes du Rhone region to locate some wine.
Having viewed the Pont du Gard and watched the movie in the museum, showing the path of the water from its source, we naturally wanted to see its destination, the ancient city of Nimes.
After rubbing the nose of the crocodile for luck, we took in the many sites, including the Roman Arena, the Maison Carree, Temple of Diana, and various fountains and medieval back-streets. Most tourists do not come to Nimes, so it felt like we had the place to ourselves.
As the “must see” tourist destination in southern France, the Pont du Gard lived up to the hype. Even though we arrived on a day featuring thousands of school children and some type of band performing environmental songs (over and over), the majesty of the site drown out most of the distractions.
This aqueduct, completed in 50 AD, was part of an system used to convey spring water more than 30 miles to the important Roman city of Nimes, making possible large water installations, like baths and fountains, in a place without a river.
