Next we rest.

Saturday was a rest and recover day. We hung out at the house, we had coffee and made some plans. We went to the grocery to stock up on a few essentials… cheese and salami, tomatoes and eggs, wine… fizzy water… wine… bread, wine… ice cream, wine….

The grocery store is a different experience here. There are of course the individual fruit and vegetable shops, the meat shops, the bakery and the cheese shop… or you can go to the newer more convenient all in one grocery store. The one we find is kind of like a mini-Meijer store. They have mostly groceries but also your paper products, some pots and pans, slippers, miscellaneous necessities like tape and batteries and such. You can also get prepackaged oats and hay for your pony. There is more of a focus on fresh and seasonal here. Fruits and vegetables are fewer but fresher. Meat and fish has not been frozen and shipped half way across the continent… some of the meat is, shall we say… still identifiable by it’s face. Chickens, rabbits, that sort of thing. There are all kinds of cheeses and cuts of meat that I have never heard of and couldn’t pronounce if I had to. We get some beans and zucchini, and some lovely salmon fillets for the grill.

We have only brought carry on luggage so it is also time to get a little laundry done.

There is a lot of laying about on the outdoor sofa and snacking… lunch and champagne. This is how it’s supposed to be. Now I just need to figure out how to make this my day to day lifestyle.

Dinner… When we arrived at Le Petit Mas, and Christine was showing us around the place she pointed out the grill and mentioned that it was gas. We were like “great! No problem, can’t wait!” I lay out the salmon and give it a dash olive oil, a little salt and pepper and a sprinkle of herbs de Provence… I cut the zucchini into spears… a little olive oil, a little this a little that and we’re good to go. Time to start the grill. Now the grill was covered when Christine pointed it out. When I pulled the cover off I thought, hmmm, this should be interesting. It was not a grill like you might think of a grill. It did not have a grate. It was a large solid cast iron surface with sides and a back and a grease channel at the front with two large burners underneath it. More like a griddle. Well, how different could it be? Two major differences between this grill and real grilling. 1, it cooked the salmon considerably faster than expected. Second, you don’t get the “grilled” effect of the drippings falling on to the burners and “vaporizer bars” and adding that smokey hint to the flavor… but for a first time, I think it all turned out pretty good.

And then we had ice cream.

Day… 8 I think…

Leisurely breakfast and then off to Pont Du Gard. Sean the GPS now has our full trust. Problem is, sometimes he asks questions we can’t answer… like nearest cross street. (really? We gave you the address…) so sometimes we make stuff up. Anyway, Pont du Gard is in his memory as a ‘point of interest’ so… no problem. 328 roundabouts later we arrive at one of the tallest Roman aqueduct bridges ever built. 160 feet tall and 1180 feet long. It slopes only 1 inch (!!) from one end to the other. But that’s still down hill… enough to keep the water moving. Part of the 50 kilometer aqueduct that moved water from Uzes to what would become Nimes. The entire thing descends all of 56 feet in 30 miles. It was built somewhere around 55AD, moved 44 million gallons of water per DAY (!) and functioned for 500 years. I think those Roman engineers could teach a thing or two to the guys building roads in Michigan these days…

We ate lunch at a restaurant on the grounds of the park around Pont du Gard called Les Terrasses. I will confess, I can barely read Italian but I’m not bad at working it out… French menus may as well be written in Sanskrit. Nothin’ no idea… no clue… ugh. So guess where we run into our first surly French waiter? Ding! You guessed it. “No English” he blurts, then points to himself and says “You, no English” and walks away muttering something about so and so and her “much English”. He talks to the young lady who seated us and points at our table without looking at us.

She was very helpful and nice but her English was … well… kinda weird, like she learned it holding a drinking glass to her ear pressed against a wall listening to a TV in the next room.

Chicken and potatoes, zucchini and fois gras… Delicious.

I always lose a little weight when we visit just Italy. I’m thinking that might not be the case this trip.

We then headed up to Uzes which, another 32 roundabouts up the road, is a quaint little town with amazing architecture and a central square full of vendors and cafes that the Romans stole a whole bunch of water from. We wandered around, did a little shopping (nobody bought anything) and sat outside at a tiny cafe for a coffee… served to us by a young lady named Lulu who seemed to think everything was rather funny.

360 roundabouts later we return to the little house in the countryside to enjoy a light dinner, a visit from a donkey and his many sheep friends and a little white dog that I will call Ernestine, a game of Petanque (boules (French bocce)) in which I am soundly beaten by Donna 13-3 and a sunset.

Sigh… wonder what would happen if I missed my plane back…