Vacation more often than not turns into a real battle.
To continue my story from the previous posting, we abandoned Avignon not long after my non-French speaking brother-in-law proudly announced that he had spotted an advertisement for “Les Monologues du Vagin” on the wall of an indoor food market. Great. Hours of our precious day were wasted and we had nothing to say about the cultural highlights that our tourist book recommended. Check out Le Palais des Papes? Forget it. Le Pont St-Bénezet, the famous bridge from the classic children’s song “Sur Le Pont d’Avignon“? Eff that (as my sister Myriah would say). Me, I didn’t spend my childhood in France, and I no longer cared to see this stupid bridge or ever hear that song again.
We only saw the pont (bridge) from the car as we drove out of town. A feeble attempt to check at least one cultural box.
Back in the car, my sister voiced her Boston-styled desire to see some fields of lavender (if you forget exactly what she said, go back to the previous entry). We consulted our book and found another seemingly beautiful area that was sure to offer us something memorable, so we next set a course for for Les Baux de Provence, population 450.
Again, Google says that this is what Les Baux is supposed to look like.
Don’t worry, you know where this is going.
We arrived in town, but guess what? I have no idea what this town looks like. The tiny mountainside village was so packed with tourists, buses and campers that we didn’t even park to check out the area’s crown jewel, the chateau. The word around Provence is that it’s renowned for the stunning views of the valley below, but I will never know if this really the case.
Before you roll your eyes at me, I should let you know that we did at least try to take a look around. We parked down the hill a little bit as we tried to take advantage of a less-trafficked attraction called “Le Cathédrale des Images”. Our Bed and Breakfast owners told us to go here and “not to miss” the Australia show.
“This spectacle is on me!” I told my fellow travelers as we headed into the the cathedral. Remember, we are still looking for traces of my cookbook cover. This cultural undertaking has got to be a step in the right direction; why else would anyone pay 6.50€ to go inside and check this out?
This is the inside. It would appear that Superman’s Fortress of Solitude is actually located in Provence.
Deeper into the quarried mountain, we get to the show. “What the…” is all we can say as we are greeted with a display straight out of the
boat scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And I don’t see any lavender on display.
We weren’t even into this tiny town before cars were lining the sides of the access road. They were still sitting there when we decided we’d seen enough.
I’m quite bewildered at the continuation of non-Provencal activities- so we decide to flee this town too and back to home base in Aix. We’re calling it a day. One long day spent doing the opposite of what we set out to do. At least back at our Bed and Breakfast we have a little bit of landscaped Provence….and
no Australia slideshows or bears driving around the front yard competing for our attention.
We get back into Aix, and I decide to throw out one last request before we call it quits. There’s a supermarket up ahead, and I still have an unfulfilled mission that I have been trying to accomplish ever since I got back to France.
I have told you a bit about why I love this country, and I think I have also told you about the transformative year I spent here when I was a miserable sixteen year old girl (really, aren’t we all miserable at that age?). I would say that more than any other time, those eleven months in Grenoble changed the course of my life. As a result, I have a number of strong associations with that year, and many of these associations take the form of food (and booze, shockingly enough- but that’s another story).
I have been looking for a particular unassuming candy bar that evokes very fond memories of a time I spent in Paris with my father. I was a few months into my year abroad, and he was an airline pilot; we met up in Paris overnight while he was there on a trip. So I have been ducking in and out of supermarkets trying to locate this candy bar ever since I first got back to France a few weeks ago. Each foray into a grocery store has come up fruitless, and I have largely written the candy bar off as a discontinued item. Fast-forward to this hell day in Provence, andI figured the hypermarché will be my last hope to find it.
We go inside the store. Unlike Avignon and Les Bains de Provence, the place is almost completely devoid of human activity. There are no tourists inside, only amazing foods stocking every aisle. It’s like being in the womb. Simply fantastic. This massive supermarket may be the open air market’s anti-Christ, but still I
loved the Wal*Mart-esque selection of French goods. This turned out to be my favorite stop of the day:
Wine wine everywhere. So cheap and all so tasty.
Saucisson? Oh yes, we have six hundred varieties.
They even sell champagne that caters to children (sparkling cider).
And best of all? I found my candy bar! Here’s me posing with the package outside of the supermarket.
Once back home, we head out for a celebratory drink. Pastis really does taste best when consumed in its proper surroundings.
Maybe it is possible to fuse your own treasured memories with the ones that others say you are supposed to appreciate.
I used to think that the swarms of tourists who descended upon Cape Cod and the Islands were nuts. Every summer these people packed up their families, braved the horrible bridge and ferry traffic to access beach towns that were sure to be overcrowded and overpriced. They did it because names like Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket all evoke images of beauty and charm that supposedly can’t be had in other corners of the world.
“Why would anyone think that this is a good idea for a vacation?” I’d ask myself as my own car would crawl through the ferry traffic on my way to work each summer evening.
But lo and behold, now I find myself doing the same damn thing in Provence: jockeying for photographic superiority with a million other tourists on the top of a craggy mountain. It’s not my idea of fun, and I knew that I would be in store for such an experience well before I ever set foot in this region.
Aha. After torturing myself with several tourist destinations that are not on Cape Cod, I finally get this little life lesson. Your ultimate vacation destination can be defined by no one except yourself. The ruby slippers are always there, it’s just sometimes they are kicked underneath the bed and out of sight.
(Also, between you and me, I secretly think that my time so far in Provence is penance paid for all the deliberately incorrect directions I gave to tourists when I was a precocious child.)
So now I think you can see why I mentioned Proust and Cape Cod winters when I started off yesterday’s post. I know that this shouldn’t have been some great realization here’s my profound observation: the places where I will appreciate beauty are not those projected to me in a travel guide. That’s probably why finding a five-pack of Sundy bars in a French supermarket, or watching the sunset at Chapaquoit Beach in January are probably unparalleled moments of happiness for me.
That’s a vacation.
Freezing my ass off? You bet. Is this my personal idea of paradise? Sans doute.
