Day 61: St. Remy de Provence to Menerbes

April 19, 2025

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I checked out reviews of the Marie Blanchere bakery last night, and was surprised to find that few people shared my five star rating for it. Still, we rode back out to it, creating a 4 km detour in our day, just to pick up breakfast plus a sandwich and a pizza slice for later. Well I must say, their croissant was completely normal - nothing to write home about and certainly nothing to ride 4 km for.

A marketing ploy for this bakery is to offer package deals, like buy 3 things get one free, and croissants figure heavily in these deals. Maybe they cut the quality on these to support the marketing scheme? For whatever reason, my croissant was not flaky enough. Yet is was suitably greasy. Could they be skimping on real butter and putting in margarine, or something despicable?

On the other hand, the sandwich had fresh good ingredients, the pizza seemed suitably "Provencale", and a pain aux raisins we threw in was just great. I'd say they they are worth another try.

One thing that was a little weird - they had a coffee machine out in the public area. This had an advertised espresso/Americano price of one euro, so I gave it a try. The first glitch was that it accepted only Carte Bleu ("CB"). "Carte Bleu" is the term universally used in France for credit/debit card. Not that any of the cards are likely to be "blue", but maybe one was, at some time.

The problem about CB is that only your accountant, maybe a month later, can verify if you were actually charged what you thought it was going to be. But I decided to gamble, and presumably for 1 euro it dispensed a "cafe allonge", which one might expect to be a stretched out (large) coffee. Well maybe it was allonge for France, but to me it was still 3-4 ounces in the bottom of the cup. I had the idea then of topping it up with boiling water. This has worked in many a restaurant, because the base coffee is rather strong for me anyway. But for this service, the machine demanded €2.40! I know Europeans get weird about water, but really!!

My "credit" is not good enough to get 4 ounces of water!

With all the good bakery product on board, we set off for Menerbes. I hadn't thought about it, but indeed this is the way EV 8 goes, on its way to Italy.

We ran into one last remnant of the Camargue, in the form of several Camargue horses, most notably a new foal. The Camargue horses start off brown and do not turn white for about five years!

For the whole ride today, we have had either official bike paths or very quiet roads. The only drawback has been very high winds, which turned up as crosswinds or headwinds for us. At some points we had to get off the bikes, to avoid being buffeted into traffic.

Not far from St Remy we got some really good looks at the Alpilles. This reminds me of looking over to the Tetons in Wyoming.

We also enjoyed looking to all the apple orchards, which in other seasons have been dripping with mostly Pink Ladies. The covers on some of the orchards are already down, which we assume means that flowering is finished.

The Durance river runs near Cavaillon, and we had to cross on a rather large bridge. We were really getting buffeted by the wind, up on this bridge. Dodie just rode across, but wimpy me got off and pushed, turning around at the end, to photograph the darn thing, to help remember the crossing!

At the end of the bridge was something else scary, posters in support of Marine LePen. The caption says "Let's save democracy". It seems to be a strategy of the Right Wing to claim exactly the opposite of what they plan to do.

Cavaillon is just not a gorgeous place, though we've found that in time one can see some charm in it. Here is what it looked like as we got into town:

There is a small park on the western edge, that holds what was our hotel last time:

In this park there is a free standing Roman arch, a great photo candidate. According to Copilot: "The Roman Arch of Cavaillon dates back to the early 1st century and is a remarkable vestige of the ancient Roman city of Cabellio. Originally, it was located in the heart of the city, on Place de l'Évêché (now Place Philippe de Cabassole) and was likely part of a larger complex, possibly serving as the entrance to the Roman forum.

In 1879-1880, the arch was moved to its current location at Place du Clos to ensure better preservation and visibility. It features four piers and two semicircular arches, characteristic of Roman architecture in Narbonne Gaul, and is adorned with bas-reliefs depicting plant motifs, small animals, and figures of Victory. Interestingly, one of its pillars bears a Christian epitaph, highlighting its long history of coexistence with Christian buildings in the region.

It has been listed as a Historic Monument since 1840, making it the oldest monument in Cavaillon".

But this time there was a guy, a touring cyclist actually, standing inside the arch, playing with his cell phone. My brother had commented, about the girl standing motionless in my shot, chewing on a baguette, at the Arena in Arles - that the correct strategy is to move such people along. Dodie agreed, but I am sooo patient and polite. This time Dodie went over and (presumably politely) asked the cyclist to beat it.

A good side benefit of this was that we struck up a conversation with the cyclist - Andy from Washington. He was on his way to Ireland. We learned that he had been a forester until recently but had been laid off by Trump. He saw it as a scheme to grab protected public lands for development.

We were in Cavaillon for a few days, in 2018, and the cathedral must have been closed, because i only remember noting how ordinary houses had grown up all around it. This time things were much the same, with the cathedral exterior and its grounds being very dull, and crowded with other buildings.

In fact, there was a parking lot in front of the main entrance, and that lot was under construction and blocked off with portable barriers. We shifted one of these in order to get in, and I noted that the letter of authorization for blocking the way, pinned to the barrier, was out of date. Dodie commented that the work was not completed, so they needed to still block the lot.

There were some surprises, as we walked into the dull building. First off, the interior was really WOW - as shown below. And next, about the parking lot, the work had uncovered many archeological treasures, causing work to skid to a halt, as the professionals began to sift the rubble with fine tooth combs.

This is the first time I have seen the Shroud of Turin image with a prominent place in a French church.

Display cases with fragments found under the parking lot.

The guy in the left seems bored to be holding up the fig tree.

Stained glass blended with painted decoration.

The parking lot. It was not us that knocked down that barrier!

Hold it right there, we need to study this lot more closely!

In the street beside the cathedral we came across two young men, Lenny and Leo, who were puzzling over a flat in Leo's mountain bike. Lacking patching supplies, one had ridden to Decathlon for a tube, but he had come back with a Schrader version, which of course would not fit the Presta rim.

On seeing this, we stopped and pulled out our supplies of glue and patches. We found and patched the cut, but perversely the patch did not hold. The wheel got disassembled, and I put on what I believed to be a glueless patch, peeling it off a backing sheet and pressing it on. It looked good, but no. The wheel came off again, and Leo realized that the glueless patch had yet another piece of backing that needed peeling off. After that, we were in business!

The boys tried to pay us for the supplies, but we were able to convince them that better payment would be "forward", to when they would find someone needing help in future. We left them some supplies to use when that happened. We also found that they were only 18 and 19 years old - not far off our own grandchildren. We told them, consider that your grandparents came to help you out!

Grampies to the rescue. That red and black box from Decathlon is the wrong thing!

Birds have been rather scarce in France, since we left the southern Camargue. In fact, we have been reduced to searching hard for a crow, something that was missing from our list so far. Most crow-like black birds seen have been Jackdaws. But today we did spot a real Carrion Crow, hooray. Also, as seen in this photo, the Eurasian Starling, and also another new one for 2025, a Cirl Bunting. That brought our 2025 total to 199. Of course, one more to go for 200!

Coming out of Cavaillon (not totally easy to figure out) we found our way to the Veloroute du Calavon. The Calavon is a stream that runs in the valley between the Luberon mountains and the Vaucluse. Despite any reputation Provence my have for hilliness, the Veloroute run flat, straight up the valley. One can deviate if desired, up mountains on the valley sides, or up to the several "perched villages" that sit atop hills which dot the valley floor. But the Veloroute du Calavon is a bike superhighway that runs by it all.

We got off the "superhighway" to go find a place to eat lunch and also a bakery for dessert, in Robion, This may have been a slightly premature turn, but to reach Menerbes we had to leave the Calavon sooner or later.

The road was reasonable, as we pedaled on over to our Menerbes destination, while bucking "unreasonable" winds. At Menerbes we started to climb the switch backed road to the town at the top of the hill. The gradient was maybe reasonable, and 8.5% max, but the wind really made it tough. Dodie mostly pushed up it.

We have arrived below the "prison" tower.

At the base of a street that leads to the top of the town, we found our BnB, with its very pleasant host, Vincent. The BnB is a house from the 18th century, made of stone like all others in the town, and tremendously atmospheric. We have two or three rooms on an upper floor - very large and airy- and with many books on the shelves. Below is part of one shelf, containing coffee table size and quality books on about 100 famous painters or famous art history eras. Vincent said it was not he, but his father, who was the scholar on this.

Among the books on the shelves here was "A Year in Provence" and some of the sequels, written by Peter Mayle, starting in 1989. Initially expected to sell a few thousand copies, "A Year in Provence" has sold six million. That is not exactly the "Harry Potter" series (500 million copies) but it was enough to blow up the real estate market and tourism in this corner of the world. It certainly affected us, as we know and love all the characters and situations and could easily point to this as the reason we are here today.

Peter Mayle started out in his first villa near Menerbes (between Menerbes and Bonnieux) so we are kind of starting at Mayle ground zero, being here tonight.

We quickly picked up the camera and went out to reacquaint ourselves with what all the fuss is about. The fuss, we found, is about that the town is a knockout for beautiful, rustic, buildings and lanes, and the views to the valley are stunning. In addition, we spotted dozens of villas down below that we could buy in a flash, had we not read Mayle's chapter (April) on how convoluted buying something here can be.

Anyway, let's see what we saw:

This is one of my favourite angles. I have seen this shot too in some travel blogs.

I am really glad not to be driving, up here.

A view to the Vaucluse mountains from an arch near city hall, at the top of the town.

The views of the town from inside the town are all beautiful, but even more impactful are the views of the valley from up in the town. From this perspective one can see how beautiful and fertile it is down there, and one can see the position of the mountains on either side of valley as well. Another amazing thing is the large number of great villas than can be seen dotting the landscape. It seems one could become a Peter Mayle very easily, by grabbing one of them. We looked down and decided which we would like to have.

Looking down at the fertile land, dotted with villas.

We especially liked this bit of valley, filled with lavender.

We really are in Provence! And tomorrow, we go deeper!

Today's ride: 48 km (30 miles)
Total: 1,808 km (1,123 miles)

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