A Honeymoon in Provence

by Janet Beardsley and Karl Kurtz

We enjoy travel to strange lands most when we have connections to people who can introduce us to the local community and give us a glimpse into native life. Unfortunately, we don’t have any such personal connections in Provence or the Cote d’Azur, where we traveled for two weeks in September 2007 on a 20-year delayed honeymoon. Of course, we took guidebooks with us, but the Guide Michelin and Lonely Planet, however much they provided useful information about where we were going, weren’t our friends and didn’t take us away from the beaten path.

But we did have a companion of words and imagination: Peter Mayle traveled with us inside three of his 11 books on Provence and France. We devoured all of them on our honeymoon. His vignettes of Provencal life are marvelous. In addition to being entertaining they provide insights into the eccentricities of Provencal life, language and lands. One of us would read one of his stories apropos of something we had recently experienced and immediately have to read it aloud or retell it to the other. He was so present with us that it almost felt like a ménage-a- trois honeymoon!

Inspired by Peter Mayle, we decided to write our own vignettes of our two weeks in Provence and the Cote d’Azur. With apologies to Mayle, we have called this memoir “A Honeymoon in Provence” because 20 years ago when we were married we couldn’t afford both the wedding in Redstone, Colorado and the honeymoon. We both agree that this honeymoon—in Aix-en-Provence, the Luberon Mountains and the Cote d’Azur—was all the sweeter for waiting two decades to take it.

Our first stories are about dogs. The French love their dogs and take them everywhere with them. Dogs regularly joined us for meals. Sometimes they were with their owners at the adjoining table and sometimes they were the “house” dog. That didn’t surprise us when we ate outdoors, but one night in the hilltop village of Menerbes the same dog that had come begging at our outdoor table across the street the night before showed up at our indoor table. At our hotel in Ste. Maxime (near San Tropez on the map), a beagle named Tom belonging to the hotelier smelled the food that we were eating on our terasse and came to join us for dinner.

Exploring the ancient, abandoned village of Oppede la Vielle in the Luberon (the area north of Aix on the map), we followed a couple with a spaniel that was off leash. His owners kept the spaniel under control by prodding him roughly with their walking sticks. We felt sorry for the dog, which would have been happier on a leash.

Then there was the bichon frisé, led by an elegant grand dame, prancing gaily down the street in Antibes with a visor to keep the bright Cote d’Azur sun out of his eyes. And in San Tropez a young couple sauntered along the quai admiring the huge yachts and pushing a stroller containing not their baby but their poodle (or maybe it was their “baby”).

Enjoying a café au lait on the quai in St. Tropez (photo) we watched an amusing tableau. A taxicab pulled up opposite us in front of the enormous yacht, Naughty by Nature out of Douglas, England. The cab driver got out carrying an Yves St. Laurent bag and attempted to get the attention of an older man and a scantily clad young woman who were sitting on the deck of the boat and oblivious to the hoi polloi on land. After several minutes of “hallo”-ing by the cab driver, the couple finally noticed, jumped up, grabbed the bag from the driver, signaled for him to wait and disappeared inside. They were gone for 15 minutes or so while the taxicab driver waited. Presumably mademoiselle was trying on the gown to make sure that it fit. Finally, the man reappeared and waved away the taxi driver, signaling that everything was OK. The cab driver, though, insisted that the man come down the gangplank, sign for the frock and pay him. Oh, those troublesome servants and tradesmen!

We spent a lot of time in our rented Renault Laguna making wrong turns and getting lost, even after we had a few days’ experience with unfamiliar road signs and maps. Karl never did figure out how to get the Renault smoothly into reverse, resorting instead to a two-handed yank of the gear shift lever that produced an awful clank but (usually) did the trick of getting us into reverse. We’ll see if Hertz charges us for stripping the gearshift! Karl loved driving on the high speed autoroutes on which well-disciplined drivers stay to the right when they are not passing (if you don’t pull over, the German in the Mercedes will blast up on your tail and wave his lights at you). Janet, however, clung tightly to the panic bar at every change of lanes.

We were frustrated by our inability to communicate effectively in French. With Janet’s 10 years of schooling in French, her junior year abroad experience in Aix-en-Provence and Karl’s 1.5 years of college French (all admittedly over 30 years ago), we felt as if we should have been able to understand and speak more fluently. For example, one night in Aix Karl ordered a tuna “steak”. When the waiter asked him if he wanted it rare (or at least that’s what we thought he said), Karl said “oui”. The waiter raised an eyebrow and shrugged a shoulder but went off to fill the order. When the dish arrived it turned out to be tuna tartare. We rapidly deduced that the waiter had been asking Karl if he wanted it raw or cooked. Karl was surprised when the plate arrived but found the ground tuna with onions and capers to be delicious. He now knows that cru means raw.

Another time Karl biked down the country lane from our bed and breakfast, La Magnanerie, outside of Menerbes in the Luberon Mountains to a vineyard to buy a bottle of wine. The vineyard was about to close its tasting room for the day, and a back room worker who spoke no English was the only one left to tend the counter. He didn’t offer Karl a degustation (tasting), but he was more than willing to describe each of the wines in detail and at great speed en francais. Other than occasionally picking up the name of a fruit that one can taste in the wine, Karl had no idea what he was saying and resorted to reading the price list from right to left and pointing to the least expensive wine. The chosen bottle turned out to be a delicious blend of Grenache and shiraz that went well with our supper of a baguette and Provencal sausage, cheese, olives, tomatoes and peaches that we had bought at the market in Apt.

In the course of our two weeks, our French got a little bit better. Janet proudly reported engaging in conversation with an old woman in a flower shop in Aix, successfully stringing together two sentences in a row and understanding everything that the fleuriste said in response. But “a little bit better” is a relative term: we probably went from about a 10 percent communication level at the beginning to 25 percent by the time we left.

The French have gone gaga over rugby. The 2007 international rugby tournament took place in France during our visit, drawing fans from all over the world. On one occasion in the épicerie (small grocery store) in the beautiful village of Bonnieux, we lined up to pay for our groceries behind New Zealanders who were touring the Luberon on off-days for their side in the rugby tournament. On another day in the same store it was a group of Australians. In each instance the very outgoing cashier, a huge rugby fan, tried to engage the down-under types in conversation about the matches, but she spoke no English and they no French. We played a small part in international understanding by doing our meager best to translate for them.

We had a number of misadventures with museums and historical sites. We saw the beautiful Abbaye de Senanque (photo) from the outside but arrived half an hour after closing time and couldn’t see the inside. In Antibes on the Cote d’Azur, the Picasso museum that we had targeted was closed for renovation. Wanting to see the inside of the chateau in the middle of the mountain-top village of Gordes, we paid an exorbitant museum admission fee without paying attention to what the exhibit was. It turned out that the inside of the chateau was not much to look at and the exhibit was of dreadful, layered, silk-screened collages by an avant-garde Belgian artist. Why was this exhibit in Gordes?

The most pleasant museum surprise was the Musee du Tire Bouchon—the corkscrew museum. Just outside of Menerbes, a vintner (Chateau de la Citadelle) has collected and skillfully displayed over 1,000 corkscrews from around the world, dating back to the 17th century when corks were first used to stopper wine bottles. It was a fascinating display. Of course, we had to taste the vineyard’s wines and buy a bottle or two as well.

We found everything in France to be expensive. Perhaps the best example was doing our laundry. We took an afternoon to wash our dirty clothes at a laverie. After spending several confused minutes studying the instructions on how to use the washers and dryers and getting pantomimed help from a passerby, we put a 20 euro ($30) note in a master control center that operated all of the machines, expecting to get change back. We were dismayed not to get anything back and concluded that we had pulled another dumb tourist move. After 15 minutes or so of fretting about this, we did eventually get change when we moved our clothes to the next cycle. But it turned out not to make any difference: it took the entire 20 euros to finish the three loads of laundry—yes, that translates to $10/load!

We observed that, like the most bored residents of retirement communities (but for different reasons), much of the life of the traveler in foreign lands revolves around “where are we going to eat next?” The combination of the body’s periodic need for food and the stranger’s need to figure out the options means that this is usually the most important organizing question of the day.

Without going to any Michelin-starred restaurants—and trying to ration ourselves to one major meal a day, which was the hard part—we ate well, mostly meat and vegetables in Provence and fish in Cote d’Azur (see Janet’s plate of sardines). Other than the frequent appearance of ratatouille as a side dish, though, we didn’t eat all that much that one would think of as typically Provencal—dishes cooked in tomatoes, garlic and olive oil. Come to think of it, though, we seldom had a meal without tomatoes or olives—or garlic for that matter—in some form.

September is high season for fruits and vegetables in southern France. We loved going to the markets in every city or village that we visited. Our favorites were the flower and vegetable markets in Aix (photo). The most famous of them is the Saturday market in Apt, which meanders unendingly through the streets and squares of the old city and offers almost every conceivable good—from blue jeans to pottery to sausages.

One of our most memorable meals was one that we cooked ourselves on the wood-fired grill that our B and B in Menerbes makes available to their guests. The meal was a steak (an Englishman staying at our place and observing our meal said, “What else would an American cook?”), which we had bought at the boucherie while doing our laundry, and a salad of greens, tomatoes, anchovies, olives and chevre that we had purchased at the farmer’s market. This was accompanied by one of those bottles of red from the Chateau de la Citadelle. We ate by ourselves under the stars. All that was missing was the candlelight.

So many hilltop villages, so stunning and picturesque! Built on the hilltops as a protection from marauding Saracens or other invaders, their limestone walls, colorful shutters, red tile roofs and church steeples are amazing to look at as you approach them. Inside, the villages are a maze of cobble-stoned streets giving out on beautiful panoramas of the surrounding landscapes from the village walls.

Each of the villages that we visited has its own character: our “home” village of Menerbes in the Luberon, to which we bicycled from our B and B and which was made famous by Peter Mayle in A Year in Provence; nearby Bonnieux with many good restaurants and Olivier, our bike rental guy; gorgeous Gordes (photo) swarming with tourists; Lacoste, a one-time home of Marquis de Sade and now of Pierre Cardin (who bought and restored the Marquis’ chateau); Oppede La Vieux, abandoned in the early 20th century by villagers who moved down to the plains for an easier life but now the home of artisans who are trying to make a go of it in the ruins of the ancien village; Le Bar-sur-Loup, the part-time home of our new friends (through Susan Mead) Valerie and Mario, and Gourdon, both with stunning views of the dramatic Gorges du Loup; the steep cobbled streets of St-Paul de Vence, filled with wonderful art galleries and the one-time home of Marc Chagall and James Baldwin.

One of Janet’s requirements for a vacation hotel is a swimming pool where she can swim laps and take the sun. We experienced three beautiful pools. In Aix-en-Provence the well-named Aquabella Hotel adjoins the grounds of a spa built on the site of thermal springs enjoyed by the Romans. An ancient Roman wall surrounds three sides of the long thermal pool (photo). La Magnanerie, our bed and breakfast in the Luberon (the name means silkworm factory—the original function of the building), has a beautiful saltwater pool looking out over vineyards, olive trees and mountains. Our Provencal-style (ochre walls, red-tiled roofs and blue shutters) hotel in Ste. Maxime has an ever-so blue lap pool to match the shutters and the azure sky (in which we saw clouds on only one morning for a few hours during our entire stay).

Of the three areas that we visited, Janet’s favorite was clearly Aix-en-Provence (photo outside Cezanne’s studio), both for its energetic city life and the memories that it held for her from her year there. Karl loved the villages of the Luberon. We flew in and out of Nice and spent only an afternoon and an evening there, which we regretted when we took a whirlwind city tour by bus that showed us much of the beauty and the rich cultural resources of that city. It gave us something to look forward to on our next visit to southern France.

At the end of the honeymoon we concluded that we won’t wait 20 more years for another trip like this. The freedom of life away from our teenagers, much as we love them and missed them, was wonderful. They were neither the focus of our attention nor the primary subject of our conversations. Our honeymoon reminded us of all the other interests we have in common and the curiosities that we want to explore. It diminished any fear of empty nest syndrome (with Emily 16 and Andrew 13, it’s only a few years off for us) that may have been developing. We liked being “on the road again” rather than being “on the family plan” and look forward to future adventures. This photo inspires us to say, "A bientot en Nice!"