Day 5 (9 June) - Life´s A Fairytale

After breakfast, we decided to pack a picnic lunch and visit some of the noteworthy sights in Provence.

Our first stop was the breathtakingly beautiful Gordes. A stone village set on a mountain, Gordes was the kind of place which I thought existed only in medieval fairytales. I was wrong of course and a stroll through the village established the fact that tourists are well aware of the place and visiting it in droves.

Beautiful Gordes

Summer in Southern France is unforgiving and even for us Singaporeans who live on the Equator, it can get a little overwhelming. So we defected to the shades of the forest for our picnic and it made for a rather interesting sight. Imagine 6 Singaporeans and 1 Frenchman sitting on the ground plucking food from various plastic bags. Needless to say, the old biddies weren´t very impressed by this arrangement and were on the constant lookout for ants and other creepy-crawlies.

After lunch, it was a short walk to our next destination, the Senanque Abbey. Almost a thousand years old, the Abbey initially housed a community of Cistercian monks until they were expelled in 1903-1926.

A small group of monks returned in 1988, growing lavender and tending honey bees for a living. Today the Abbey serves it main purpose as a tourist attraction and we were brought on a guided tour through the various parts of the Abbey with a host of other visitors. Perhaps it was because we have been visiting too many religious buildings but I was quickly bored by the whole thing.

The historical Senanque Abbey

Thus it was with relief that the tour came to an end and we were on our way again. Along the country roads, we saw so many trees bearing luscious fruits of every imagination. Needless to say, the greedy Singaporean in us reared its ugly head and we had JF stop the car for me and Dawn to jump out and pluck some fresh cherries off the trees. I´m not big on cherries but those cherries were heavenly...

Our last stop of the day was Roussillon, a small village famed for ochre deposits. In fact, most of the houses there were all in ochre. When we passed a sign stating ´Famous Villages of France´, Uncle Raymond (Dawn´s dad) insisted that the place we were visiting was a recreation of famous villages in France. No matter how much we argued, he refused to believe that we were at the real village itself. Sigh...

It might have been the hectic pace of the day, the blistering heat or the picnic lunch, but I was feeling rather sick by the time we made our way back. I went straight to bed that day without dinner, exhaustion quickly taking over me.