September 12 Roussillon, Provence

Valerie and I headed out to the Luberon – a hilly area of Provence. We looked at the various villages/hill towns and selected Roussillon. Nearby was a famous cave (vineyard) where we planned to buy some reds to have for our guys when they arrived the next day. It was a nice day and it is a charming place with lovely red cliffs. Roussillon sits on the world’s largest ocre deposit and used to be the European ocre capital.

Parking was fairly easy although the driving in the hills is demanding. The town was crowded but not horribly so. Lunch took a long time. We are finding that there are generally not many servers in restaurants and they are running all the time. And still it takes a long time to get menus, order, pay. Our server brought us the bill but then got involved with someone who worked in a shop across the narrow walk. She seemed to be offering moral support while we waited to pay. Eventually, I took the bill to someone inside the restaurant and we were able to move on. Valerie was looking for a print/painting to bring home and I am always interested in linens. We did both. By then it was getting late in the day and we struck 2 items off our itinerary (and ocre conservatory and a Roman aqueduct). We found some water and I called the US Senate credit union.

The day before I had discovered that someone had made 5 ATM withdrawals – each for $500 – from our credit union account. All ATMs in the DC area. The only other withdrawal was a week earlier in Paris. So, the credit union has locked our account. This is going to cost us money because our Truist bank charges 3% + $5 for foreign ATM. The Senate credit union only charges 1%. Anyway, I reached the bank before even more withdrawals.

On our way back to Aix-en-Provence we stopped at Chateau La Canorgue to taste and buy some wine. It’s a small and unpretentious place – with award certificates on the walls. The man who was serving us wine showed us a photo of himself with the director Ridley Scott – when they had lunch a couple of weeks ago. He had also dined with Alice Waters when visiting California. Nice wine!