The insects grow big in this part of Provence! For those of you with better eyesight, you will see that this is a sculpture, seen on one of our many sunny days, when we went up to the village of Tourtour. Yes, yet another medieval hilltop village, but they're all different in their own way, and always interesting to wander the streets.
Our days out have started to form a pattern: get up around 7.30am when Tutu the cat starts meowing to be fed "QUICKLY, LIKE RIGHT NOW, I'M IN DANGER OF STARVATION" outside the bedroom door! That is followed by releasing the chickens from their coop and feeding them, changing their water etc. By now, Tutu has eaten the first of his many feeds of the day and has decided to come out for his morning walk down by the river. This is a relatively slow process, as he has to stop and drink from the river several times, which involves him doing a virtual handstand down the vertical bank to get to the water! He then needs to launch up a tree, just to show he's still got what it takes, even though he is 17 this year.
Once the livestock are fed and happy, we can get out the door, with the first task being to find the perfect pain au raisin for Lew, and croissant for me. Be assured, not all croissants are created equal, there are croissants and there are croissants! The same has to be said for pain au raisin - a sweet rolled up piece of croissant dough with raisins and a custardy filling. I know, its a hard task for us to do the research, but we feel we have to do it.....
Purchase complete, we then find a cafe at our designated hilltop village of the day, and sit outside with a hot chocolate and a coffee to watch the village go by.
Cafes here seem quite happy for you to eat food purchased from elsewhere, as long as you are buying a drink from them. In fact we watched a couple last Sunday at a cafe in Salernes get through a virtual three course takeaway meal that they had assembled from the market stalls, together with their beer and glass of wine at 10am!
Wandering around the streets of these villages is very relaxing at this time of year - there's no-one around, so we can explore and take photos without people getting in the way! It will be strange when tourist season starts and we find the croissants have sold out and we can't get a seat outside the cafe after 9.30am! Tourtour is quite high up - don't ask me how high - so there was still some snow around in places. There's an old chateau in the centre of town which has been taken over by the mairie (town hall) on one side, and the post office on the other side. Its a funny looking building with four towers, one at each corner. While I couldn't get a good photo of the chateau, the towers were represented elsewhere, on someone's front door:
Still on the subject of doors - the variety in France is incredible - Lew particularly liked this example, with a high-spec top of the range cat door at bottom right....
The other fascinating aspect of French houses is the use of bars over the windows! Presumably for security, so windows can be left open year round, there is an endless supply of designs to choose from, with some people going for functional and distinctly prison-like, others going for designer chic...
A few more pretty pics of Tourtour...
From Tourtour we went back down to Villecroze (which is currently top of the league table for pain au raisin - shame its about 30 minutes drive away!) which has a park on the edge of the village with cave dwellings. Its been hard to find any information about the caves, as they are closed until Easter, and surprisingly there isn't much on the internet either, but it seems that they were created fairly "recently" ie post-15th Century!
The park was very pleasant, with lots of terraces and rocks to climb over and around - a kid's paradise. Amazingly there weren't any signs preventing this activity; the French do love to say "no" if they possibly can!
And on that subject, a word about notices: the French love to inform the public about all sorts of things, and its obviously required for them to post a vast array of council information prominently for all interested parties to read in detail. All part of the mountain of bureaucracy they have an endless thirst for. Every village consumes several forests each year in their quest for ensuring they produce enough paperwork to show they are being effective.
Even in the small hamlets like Les Fadons, where we live, there is a noticeboard with the agenda for the next council meeting pinned up for all 6 houses to read!
Far more interesting was the noticeboard outside the primary school in Villecroze - the week's school dinner menu was there for all to read and debate whether the 5+ per day was being achieved or not!
On the work front, we finally picked the day for burning all the garden rubbish we've been accumulating, after chopping down toi toi and bamboo, pruning grapevines, wisteria and roses, and collecting up mountains of leaves to they don't all blow into the pool. There is a fire pit for the purpose, but for some reason its been dug in an area surrounded by trees. We were a bit nervous to light anything unless there wasn't a breath of wind. Friday dawned, frosty and calm, so we set to with the matches and firelighters and soon had a good fire under control.
Note the surrounding trees overhanging the fire...but at least you can also see the river!
Getting into the swing of things, with a mixture of very dry and partly damp stuff, we thought everything was under control, even when the wind picked up
Suddenly Sue (neighbour) appeared on the scene, to ask if we had a fire permit, and did we know that when the smoke is blowing at anything less than a 45 degree angle you have to extinguish your fire immediately? Mmmn...no, and no! I'd say ours was blowing almost horizontally, and we hadn't heard anything from James and Lavinia about needing a permit. So, we decided to claim ignorance, and pretend to speak no French if the fire police arrived - which apparently they do, on a regular basis. We were lucky, and managed to get through all the rubbish without threat of deportation. And without adding any of the surrounding trees to the fire, just a few scorched leaves maybe.
Meanwhile, inside......Tutu has found the warmest seat in the house!
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