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Provence

We spent the second week of our trip in Provence, a region in the South-Eastern corner of France. We rented an apartment in a 15th century village called Lourmarin, near the city of Avignon. I fell in love with anchovies here.

Cassis

We took a day trip to the southern coast of France. Forest fires were a particularly big deal in southern France this year (it was a very dry summer), and apparently a number of the fires were the result of arson. Something about the land becoming available for development if the existing houses were burned off of it? I didn't completely understand the story but it sounded pretty evil, a few people had died in the fires. We drove by a fire on the way to Cassis and Marseille, this one was started by a car that caught fire on the highway.

The Mediterranean city of Cassis is sun-baked with high cliffs and pebbly beaches.

Marseille

Marseille is a large port city on the southern coast of France. It has a pretty large immigrant population and really high unemployment (~30% according to some of the travel books we were using), and the right-wing extremist politician Jean Marie le Pen is very popular there. It's also a great place to enjoy some anchoiade (an anchovy/olive tapenade) and experience an authentic bouillabase.

Mont Ventoux

We rented some bicycles and spent a day checking out one of the famous mountaintop roads that they race on in the Tour de France. They had a stage that finished top of Mont Ventoux in 2002, and it was pretty cool to see all of the race grafitti that was still on the pavement. It was a pretty darn steep hill, but it was fun to experience an Hors Category climb first hand.

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