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Luberon, Provence
Monday morning we caught the TGV
 to Avignon, picked up a little car, took a deep breath, and plunged into the French traffic with high hopes for navigating our way southeast to the Luberon in Provence. | ||
 Lourmarin, our perched village |
Our home for a week was an apartment on a back street in the pretty little perched village of Lourmarin -- not as perched (as you will see) as some, but typical of the villages of this region, which are mostly built on the rocky highlands above the rich farmland.
Along with a lot of history, the villages of the Luberon combine beautiful golden stone for building and a green and glorious climate that treated us gently despite the fact that it was November. |
After the bustle of Athens, Venice, and Lyon, Lourmarin felt a lot like Caspar: quiet, private, and comfortable. We wandered the streets, discovered "le super-marché " and had a wonderful time shopping and cooking for ourselves. Every morning one or the other of us would walk a half block down the street to the bakery for fresh bread. We found the wood seller and bought firewood, because the nights were sharp. After a couple of days, the baker's wife recognized us, as did a few other friendly locals; other locals, probably tired of tourists, pretended we weren't there ...which was okay with us. |
 passageway in Lourmarin |
 Lourmarin street
The countryside around Lourmarin was in its autumnal glory, and despite the claims of locals that they were experiencing a drought, the fields were amazingly green and luscious. | Lourmarin sits at the mouth of a canyon that provides the only practical passage through the range of mountains that give the region its name, the Luberon. Location gave the town importance reaching back for at least a millennium.
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 agricultural vista from near Cucuron
The area around the Luberon range is crisscrossed with a network of back roads leading from one wonderful little village to another. Here more than our other stops in France we came to appreciate how rural France is as compared with other European countries where a majority of the population has moved into the large cities. The land seems more alive for being held closely, in reasonably small plots, by the people, rather than the large expanses of agribusiness seen elsewhere.
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Walking out into the countryside around Lourmarin -- there is a well documented series of trails in the region -- took us into the farm land, where rich earth had been ploughed, and the patchwork of fields stretched to the ranges of hills in the distance. "Except for the lack of an ocean..." Rochelle suggested, and I agreed, this is countryside we could come to love.
Driving, except during rush hour, turned out to be a bucolic affair, with very few cars on the well-marked and -maintained roads.
road into Cucuron |
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The surrounding agricultural land is peppered with villages each once distinguished with special qualities. I love the way they "perch" on top of agriculturally useless (and defensible) rocky outcrops surrounded by fields and streams. Building on such sharp and rocky territory inspires wonderful walls and vistas.
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