The French Countryside

The next couple of days we spent driving around looking at little villages like Bonnieux, Mernebes and Lourmarin - some on the flat and others perched on hill tops. Each had its unique features such as a little market, cafes, museum, winery or chateau. I must admit that living in some of the houses on the hill didn't look too different from those in the cities - terraced housing, doors opening on to the street, no garden or outside living and very little sun. The ones on the flat appealed more to me as although there was less of a view there was plenty of greenery with the 'historic' appeal still quite evident. I did enjoy the colourful berries and the magnificent trees that lined many of the roads and so did Haz. At one point Haz stopped by a car yard and I thought he was going to take photos of cars (so I decided to sit patiently and wait) instead he hopped across the road and took photos of the orange berries (what is happening to my car crazed man???). The other unique feature of country life is how the snails enjoy their summer. One of the photos below gives the impression of little white daisies under the trees until you get up close the notice that it is snails snails everywhere!!

Our picnics and meals have been varied and enjoyable. All of the larger cities had an Irish pub (and yes Haz and I ate an Italian pasta at an Irish pub in France - how multi cultural is that??), and some of the towns even sport an Aussie pub but there were few takeaway places evident eg (those American type restaurants like KFC and McD's). We said goodbye to Jim and Margot on Thursday evening (and Caramello and Trev said their goodbyes) at a bistro in Jocques - well it isn't really goodbye as we see them again on Wednesday night when they pass through Bristol.

Driving and parking in France has been an experience. Sometimes it is unclear if streets are one way or not and we did get told (in french with quite a bit of hand signalling and face pulling) that we were going the wrong way up a little lane in Puyricard one day. Parking is a bit of a nightmare - car parking buildings are built for midget cars (our little saxo would feel at home here - oh I forgot for a moment it is a Citreon), and if you find a park then it is quite difficult to park so that the driver can escape from the car, as those with bigger cars tend to park at an angle and take up more than one park. Parking in smaller towns doesn't seem to be policed at all, and 'no parking' lines are ignored. We did see this unique style of parking (note the back wheel is actually off the ground) - they must have been in a hurry to get to the nearby market. We were also very surprised when we discovered that our hostess could drive her little car around without a drivers license because it was small (there is a photo of it in our blog when we talked about Puyricard).

We said goodbye to Sandra on Saturday morning and on the way to the airport stumbled across another little gem - Vitrolle - a suburb of Marseilles. We walked up some rather crumbly and steep steps to the top where we found an ancient and little prison building and chapel. We came back to reality quickly when we discovered England was mourning their loss to South Africa, the sad aircrash in Thailand and the 'potential' collapse of Northern Rock with many standing in queues for hours attempting to get their savings out of the bank. Amazing to think that the bank would lend home buyers up to 125% of the value of the house, and up to 6 times their annual salary. Seeing a table of banks it appears that the HSBC is the only large bank in the UK which has a savings to mortgage ratio of more than 1 - a little bit scary I think. There was great relief last night when the government guaranteed that the savings.