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Once you stop looking, you find what you are seeking
God must have liked my two part book report on finding the silver lining while trapped in a crappy tourist experience, because Rory finally saw her (expletive) lavender. Lots of it.
Sure I last gave you a blog entry that ended on a somewhat positive note, but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t wake up yesterday morning with a certain amount of disdain for my surroundings. Indeed, I arose à la française by deciding to go on strike from taking further action to coordinate seeing any scrap of bucolic tranquility.
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I forgot to show you our hideous car. The first time I took a trip with Rory back in 1996, she made me drive the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to LA in a Geo Metro that had no power steering. Time to exact some revenge.
So that morning while walking to our car, I was asked if I desired to see something in particular on our last day in Provence. Still nursing a bruised ego, I tersely responded: “I don’t care what we do today, I am over this place.”
Those, I think, were the magic words that turned things around.
Lu jot yomb. That’s a Wolof expression essentially meaning “everything in its own good time” (Do you like how I am trying to ease myself back into a Senegalese mindset?). As soon as I announced that I no longer cared, our luck started to change. We trashed our pathetically cobbled day trip (based on our guide book of course) and set off with new goal in mind: find just one field of lavender. If we could do that, we’d count our trip to the south of France a success.
François, the half of our bed and breakfast couple who is decidedly not from Long Island, traced us a path that took us in the opposite direction of our Avignon route (where all the tourists and street performers go). Guess what direction he instead pointed us in?
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Oh yes, we are stabbing north towards Grenoble (where I lived as a 16 year old, remember?)
Even with the good omen of the Alps in our midst, we still set out in our Renault Kangoo with modest expectations. We were not going to get excited about anything after seeing a bear in a Jeep Wrangler during the previous day. Even when we saw that our designated highway exit, number 18, housed the main warehouse for that over-perfumed store whose trademark is the lavender field (L’Occitane), we still had zero expectations.
I’m a girl, so of course we stopped. And just in case I had nothing to show for the day’s outing, I bought some overpriced lotion.
Exit 18, as it turns out, did not disappoint us. We saw expanses of lavender fields that really did look just like my cookbook cover. Actually, it looked even better to me. See, the elevation had increased and we were in the Haute Provence region, just starting to approach the Alps. When our laboring car finally reached the plateau of purple fields, the mountains beyond framed the vistas in a way that brought me right back to my year in Grenoble. Madeleines.
Younger lavender. But look past and appreciate the mountains for me.
More purple, uploaded just because we suffered so greatly to reach it.
Rory, Marc, her lavender, and her favorite car of all time, the Renault Kangoo. Dubbed by me as worse than the PT Cruiser of rental cars, it makes the Scion XB look sexy.
My favorite lavender shot, probably because the field was lined with barbed wire. Comment on dit, “Stop taking photos in my F’n lavender field!” in French?
Cliché realized, we counted our trip to Provence a success and stopped at the closest town (Riez) for some lunch. Again, we expecting nothing going into this venture. We had been turned away so many times for lunch and supper while in France (“Vous avez un reservation?”) that we were prepared for rejection and would be content to eat just about anything. François, our intrepid trip planner, had mentioned the name of a restaurant in Riez- so we made our way there to at least ask if they would feed us.
Riez is pretty busy for a Saturday afternoon- the open-air market is in full-swing and Le Rempart restaurant is located in the center of this activity. It didn’t look promising, but I still asked the server if she has room for three.
“Avez-vous un reservation?”
You know what I tell her, and she looks disappointed but still fishes a scrap of paper out of her apron. As she is studying her cryptic scrawl I am already looking at all the tasty treats on sale in the marketplace below. I’m ready to turn around and head for Plan B.
“Venez.” she says, and amazingly brings us to a table under the patio awning. We’re going to eat! Score two wins for Team Stupid in one day!
This posting is already getting pretty long, but let me just tell you that we ate like kings that afternoon. No, not the kind of kings that were packing the Avignon streets and ducking into convenience store for Coca-Colas- we ate like real French royalty. For the first time during our trip, our tactic of walking into an eating establishment unaware actually yielded us two hours of unparalleled eating.
Rory’s non-alcoholic beverage. It came complete with a cow keychain and lei, which she didn’t see fit to put on.
I’m not afraid to look like a jackass, so I donned the plastic flowers. Our fellow French diners all gave me the thumbs up, and complimented me on my wine-dress-lei color coordination.
I ordered the chevre chaud salad. Chevre (goat cheese, and shame on you for not knowing)
is like kryptonite for me.
is like kryptonite for me.
Marc still won the menu contest. He ordered a bruschetta with chevre that was drizzled with local honey. It was sublime.
We ate much more over the course of two hours. Scallops with truffles shavings peeled right in front of you, fig ice cream, salted caramel ice cream, all finished with a bill that arrived accompanied by a bottle of coffee-infused liqueur and three small glasses….I have to say that I almost considered moving to this small town.
We weren’t going to push our luck with our day. We took a more direct route back to Aix so that we could be back to our Bed and Breakfast in time for their Happy Hour. We stopped to take a few pictures at roadsides that seemed to give us a little more of what we initially sought out in the first place.
Yes, we even made room in our hearts to stop and appreciate the rows of yellow that must play second fiddle to all the purple. No barbed wire here.
We make it back to home base, and François asks us how our day went. We told him what he already knew (that he was right- we were wrong, he was smart- we were dumb) and he just responded with, “That’s good then, you saved the day!” No, we tell him, you saved the day. As it turns out, they are cutting all of the lavender within a week, so we got to Provence and saw what we wanted to see in the nick of time. Our guidebook never told us that.
Happy and fulfilled, we hit the pool.
No more curse words are coming out of the mouths of these Cape Cod girls when we talk about Provence.
I don’t know why it is always a big shocker for me to relearn that you only get what you are looking for when you finally loosen your grip on things. We resigned ourselves to doing whatever and we wound up doing exactly what we wanted to do all along.
Before you worry that I now fancy myself a budding philosopher on the finer points of travel, rest assured that I am fully aware that I will be relearning this very fact again probably as soon as next week.
What can I say? I am here to entertain, as well as be entertained.