Greetings From Aix-en Provence -
Yes, we are getting near the end of this 11-month adventure. Most recently we’ve been returning to sites we’ve enjoyed, trying to give Mike and Jenny at small taste of Provence and the French Riveria.
Hitting the photos, we took Mike and Jenny to Pond du Gord, the amazing Roman aqueduct. When we were there previously on a pleasant February Sunday, there were five cars in the parking lot, Well, it’s July and there were quite a few more people taking a look at one of France’s treasures. Our group did a lot of posing. There’s a photo of Jenny, Marlene and Mike and another photo of Jenny, Marz, myself and Sophia. There were a few olive trees that had been transplanted from Spain back in 1988 and Mike posed under one of them.
One of our day trips was a morning stop in the nearby beach town of Cassis, which featured a boat trip to view the calanques, combined with an afternoon in Marseille. We managed a photo of Mike, Jenny and Marlene at Cassis.
Another day we went to Cannes, Antibes, through Nice, on to Villafranche, Cape Ferrat and back to Nice. In another photo, Mike and Jenny saw a car parked in Cannes they would have liked to drive away in. Cape Ferrat, where Paul Allen (Microsoft, Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers) has a home, is a peninsula that sits out into the Mediterranean about 15 minutes east of Nice. There’s a photo of Sophia skateboarding at the village of St. Jean on Cape Ferrat. There’s another photo of the plaza at St. Jean, in front of any number of significantly large yachts.
Yesterday, we travelled the normal 45 minutes to Lourmarin, at the south end of the Luberon. Jenny and Marlene did some shopping, while Mike and I managed to spend 3-1/2 hours sitting outside at a café (joined for a brief time by our companions when it was time to eat lunch).
And, Sophia was sleeping late this morning on the couch, with her favorite dog, Maurice.
We have no special plans for our final two weeks in France. We’ve had two cool (low 70s) and windy days, but the mid-to-upper 80s and 0% chance of rain days are due again and look like they’ll take us fairly close to the finish line. So, we see some pool days before we depart. We have a couple of villages within one hour that we haven’t found our way to yet, so they’ve on the “to do list”. We’re hoping to take Sophia and Keaka and check out a couple of beaches that come highly praised. So, we’re just kind of cleaning up odds and ends before departing for America.
The Wilsons
