I want to mention a marvellous camping site - not a 'site' in the usual sense but a spectacularly pretty farm with locations for tents or small camper-vans dotted around it, none in sight of another. Like wild camping but with WC's and hot showers after a moderate walk uphill. And a beautiful infinity pool with the mountains rising above it.
It belongs to a Dutch couple and most campers or gite-renters were Dutch, but not all. The farm, La Boucoule, is near Montbrun-les-Bains, on the Vaucluse/Drome border, on the northern slopes of Mont Ventoux. Their web-site, www.laboucoule.com, doesn't really do them justice - it was paradise! Great for young families - teens might get a bit grumpy.
Here are some more Provencal pictures, all from the Mont Ventoux area. I have never seen so many cyclists: how admirable they are! Several years ago we drove up Mont Ventoux and I recall very well the disapproving, even contemptuous , looks of the cyclists! It was in the days when I was trying to be a poet and I did write about it:
We take the twenty- mile notorious run
lazy by car, winding through
oaks and beeches,
gentle and comely in dappled
sunlight
passing the earnest panting
cyclists,
with all their sweating superiority.
Suddenly no trees - a
startling desert of
white boulders formed from
sea-salt
heralds the summit. Dark
crests of mountains
range to the Alps, blue -
silver, dipping and rippling
like waves seen at eyelevel
swimming a choppy sea.
The cyclists arrive, greeting
only those
who undertook their altitude
ordeal .
Petrarch climbed here with
his brother,
Mistral wrote verses and
Tommy Simpson died.
To be there was to share the
extraordinary,
but the relentless sunlit
stony glare
shows me my motorist’s
second-rateness,
not being one of those,
grey-haired
beneath their sharp bright
helmets,
who are defying time.
 |
Leaving La Boucoule by tractor.  |
No comments:
Post a Comment