Provence

This Saturday we took a day trip to the region of Provence. Unfortunately the weather was pretty crappy - it was rainy and cloudy most of the day, but Provence was still very beautiful. I can only imagine what it looks like in the Spring! We stopped at four main sights, starting with le Pont du Gard in Nimes. The Pont du Gard is a Roman aqueduct, built in 50 AD. The view was gorgeous...

Next we were dropped off in an adorable little French town, situated in a closed valley, to see la Fontaine de Vaucluse (the fountain of Vaucluse). For some reason I was expecting to see a fountain...but turns out, la Fontaine is the source of the Sorgue river. It's famous, and quite mysterious, for the fact that the water seems to appear out of nowhere, as if it comes out of the side of a mountain. The real source is an immense underground network of waters which come from rain and snow melt.

The third stop was Les Baux de Provence, which was my favorite part of the trip. Les Baux is a plateau with signs of human life dating back to 6,000BC. One thing I found really interesting were the ruins of medieval castles on top of cliffs. You don't really notice them at first glance because they're so dilapidated and the same color as the rocks, so you always have to make sure you look twice in case you miss one! I find it fascinating that people could actually build castles all the way up there....That is quite a feet today, let alone a thousand years ago. It must have been a lot of work! And the history that goes along with them is always cool to learn about...it almost makes me sad to see them in ruins.

Finally, we saw le Moulin de Fontvielle in the town of Arles. A writer named Alphonse Daudet lived inside of it for years so he could write his novel... From le moulin you can see a row of huge, white modern days windmills in the distance. The contrast is pretty amazing, its like you're seeing the past and present come together.

On the way home we say hundreds of tractor trailers lined up for miles along the side of the road. At first I thought perhaps there was some sort of truck driver strike going on...(because everyone knows the French love their greves!) But, turns out, they were stopped because of this storm. They were forced to pull over and wait it out because of the violent, hurricane-sized winds coming from the Atlantic Ocean. Further along, around the France/Spain border, trucks were being blown off the side of the road. Seventeen people were killed in related accidents. Of course as we were being told this we were in a tractor trailer sized bus...so the first thought that went through every one's mind was, "omg why aren't we pulling over?". Montpellier is too far east from the storm to feel the full affects so we were fine. Although, as I was walking home I almost got blown over! I've never felt wind that strong before, I can't even imagine what it was like further south-west from here!