Jubilee in the sun

It’s the Jubilee weekend and we have our bunting up!  The GB caravan on the next pitch has a few small union jacks out, otherwise not much to show from the English contingent.   Here it is Mother’s Day on 3^rd June, so shops are full of gift ideas for mums.  Weather is perfect – hot and sunny by day, but with a breeze so it cools  down at night.  Hope you get some sun in the UK for the street parties and other celebrations.

We are now just east of Aix en Provence in a delightful camp site with views of Mont St Victoire – if you are at all familiar with Cezanne’s paintings you will probably have seen one of this mountain, apparently he painted it over 50 times.  Today we have been into Aix on the local bus – a 30 minute journey through ‘Cezanne’ countryside, which amazingly only cost 1Euro each way for each of us.  Aix is famous for its street markets and they were certainly in full swing today.  Huge food markets, with vegetables, cheeses, fruits, honey, oils, herbs etc and also flowers, textiles, pottery, paintings, all sorts.  Very busy and fun, so we stocked up with a few things including lovely cherries and some green asparagus – up till now we have only seen white (blanched).  There are some spectacular walks here too, around the base of the mountain and through the forests, so we plan to tackle a long (3-4hr) walk tomorrow, which we hope will take us to the summit of St Victoire.

After we left Avignon we backtracked west a bit to visit the Pont du Gard – the extensive remains of a Roman aqueduct.  This is now part of a very picturesque park complex with museum and exhibitions and an extraordinarily complicated exit barrier with no instructions.  You have to pay with a credit card (no cash) so there were queues of cars being taken by surprise and trying to reverse away from the barriers - it was chaos.  There were two staff helping and they just about got everyone through but it wasn’t even busy, so they will have to rethink that one. The aqueduct was a spectacular sight and the museum was very interesting. 

We stopped the night at a France Passion site at Uzes, parked in a farmyard on the edge of an olive grove.  The farm produces wine and olive oil, so we now have a very superior bottle of lovely olive oil.  Uzes is a well-preserved old town with streets shaded by huge plane trees, a beautiful colonnaded square and a castle that has been in the same family for a thousand years.

One teensy problemette – the water pump for the internal water supply in the van (sinks) failed the morning after we arrived at this site.  This is the first time anything at all has gone wrong with the van in 4 years, so we are not complaining, just a bit surprised.  We rang the technical support guy where we bought the van and Ray bravely spent the morning taking things apart and putting them back together but it rather looks like a new pump is needed.  These are small submersible units that push fit onto the water supply pipe in the freshwater tank, they are about £12 and (allegedly) pretty readily available from camping and camping accessory stores.  It isn’t a disaster and if we stick to campsites we can manage fine, but we will try and get a new pump fitted in the next few days.

So in the spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, we are going to break open a bottle of something fizzy for the Jubilee – Cheers!