Uzes, Allauch, Cassis, and surroundings

22 juillet—Allauch
On our way to Allauch/Marseille we had the perfect excuse for a slight detour to Uzès just in time for lunch. Our favourite oyster bar was no longer there but the replacement bistro served pretty good moules frites and delicious chilled zucchini soup with spiced crème fraiche followed by café gourmand (a bit of a trend in some places—an espresso with mini dessert selection).
Our days in Allauch have gone far too quickly. Liz went to Oxford the first weekend (8-12 July) for the annual Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery, also catching up with our Wallingford friends, Peter and Isabelle, Barbara and Bernard and Joan (Roger was in hospital having just had a knee replacement). It was quite strange to have temperatures of 36C on the Friday and not much relief over the weekend.
Back in Allauch, Arthur was taking care of Fiona, Liz’s niece who had arrived on the Wednesday (7th) at 5.30pm and had to catch the TGV early on Friday (the day after Liz went to UK). However, she managed to pack in a lot, in-cluding a boat trip along the Calanques, the mandatory Open Bus tour, dinner watching the sun go down over the Med at a typical fishing port along the coast south east of Marseille (just before the Calanques start) and dinner up the hill in Allauch village.
Over the last 2 weeks we have been to Cassis (35 minutes south) several times; to swim, catch the weekly markets, eat terrific seafood and explore the nearby coast.
The Route des Crêtes is a road that encircles the 400m high cliffs between Cassis and the next port, La Ciotat, an amazing trip which we made last Friday. We have also been checking out all the closest (and not so close) beaches for swimming and are just in the process of setting up a spreadsheet for comparison based on a number of criteria—sand or pebbles, depth, temperature and clarity of water, how crowded, ease of parking, closeness of suitable eatery, and most im-portant—fresh water showers. It is such a relief to rinse of the extremely salty sea water. Arthur was on a quest on Tuesday to find what he was sure was an isolated and deserted beach, at the end of a road through a remote area of the Camargue. After lunch in sleepy Salins de Giraud
(Salins refers to the salt pans where they extract the fine Camargue salt) we headed down a narrow road between high levees lined with reed beds towards what was (on the map), a long stretch of beach. Imagine our surprise when it soon became obvious that as far as the eye could see was line upon line of parked RV vans, tents and caravans, and the long beach was dotted with umbrellas and towels, albeit a bit more spaced out than in Cassis, but hardly deserted!
Beaches aren’t the only things we have been visiting. We have also meandered through windy mountain roads to remote hill villages, where we have had some exciting moments getting out of the narrow streets.
Liz’s birthday last Saturday was very special with a memorable lunch at Auberge La Feniere between Lourmarin and Cadenet on the south side of the Luberon, where the chef/owner is Reine Sammut. She was in Sydney in January for a masterclass, which Liz attended with Irene Calder and Yvonne Barber (the day Mitchell, our grandson decided to make his appearance into the world).
We have also enjoyed our long awaited Mediterranean fish soup—no, not bouillabaisse, but bour-ride, which is similar but uses different fish and doesn’t use saffron. And the restaurant was in Martigues not Marseille, which Laurent assured us was much less of a tourist trap than Marseille. We have since learnt that there is great rivalry between Martigues and Marseille as to the authenticity of both dishes. Martigues is a picturesque fishing port on the Etang de Berre, almost directly under the autoroute to Arles and we had bypassed it two or three times in the past. We ate there the night before Bastille Day, and the festivities were already underway with dancing outside in the restaurants and bars around the squares.
We just had to go into Marseille itself for Bastille Day fireworks, much to Laurent’s later horror. But we didn’t have any problems, even finding parking near the Vieux Port in a parking station which said ‘Complet’ (full). We never believe that, and sure enough the lowest level had a number of empty spaces! The fireworks aren’t a patch on Sydney’s of course, but with the French joie de vivre, dinner in a ‘cacher’ (kosher) restaurant before hand (that was a pure accident and not intentional) and listening to a chanteuse with a lovely voice singing ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ under the stars at an outside café afterwards- what more could you ask?
Our days in Allauch are almost over. It will be hard to drag ourselves away from the prolific veggie patch with its raspberries (almost finished), zucchini, glut of tomatoes, figs and herbs, grapes and capsicum coming on, the cool interiors of this comfortable house, the pool and the maturing lavender bushes. It is hard to imagine, looking out at the surrounding trees that the centre of France’s 2nd largest city is just 20 minutes away.
On Monday we leave to spend a few days in Saint Just-Saint Rambert with Regine and Alain Michel, the couple we met when they stayed in Shoal Bay last August.
To be continued ...

Pyrenees, Aude and Ariege then Montpellier again

22 juillet—Allauch
I now know why we have been getting some heavy hints on the lack of newsletter. It is almost a month since the last one, just as we were about to leave Pau.
Sunday saw us saying a regretful au revoir to Marie and Mickael as they repossessed their almost new apartment and presented us with a special local dessert so that we could take it with us to lunch with our friends from Broke in the Hunter Valley, Cheryl and Alan Stevns. Amazingly, I knew nothing about how special it was until Cheryl enlightened me. I think I will leave her description for you to read. Check it out on her blog. http://www.thefoodvine.com/. The article is called ‘Le Russe’.
Lascazères, where they live for a few months each year is only 40 minutes from Pau and was on our way to our next stop. We even had time for a long, leisurely and delicious lunch before continuing our journey. The evenings are long, so we had plenty of daylight left to eat our dinner on the terrace of L’Impasse du Temple, a lovely B&B run by an Aussie couple, in Léran, a small town south of Carcassonne, in the Aude region and near the Pyrenees.
We spent one whole day, and two nights in the Aude region, checking out Cathar castles, including Chateau Montsegur, and bastide towns.
Our quest for revisiting places we had been to in 1973 continued the next day en route to Montpellier, when we stopped off in Villefranche de Conflent. This is one of the star shaped fortified towns designed by Vauban, Louis IV’s military engineer. When we accidentally went through it in 1973 it was a remote mountain village and almost deserted. Today it is a bustling tourist destination, sympathetically restored but not too theme-park. We were in time for lunch which we had in a shady garden terrace restaurant. This was fine, until a threatening thunderstorm sent us all inside. Fortunately we were almost finished, just having our dessert and coffee.
That evening we were back in Montpellier as guests (this time) of Danielle and Francois Allier who went out of their way to make our 4 day stay very comfortable. By now the heat had returned so we spent a lot of time finding places to swim both at the beach (Le Grau du Roi) and in crystal clear mountain rivers..
Saturday we meandered through challenging mountain roads in the Cévennes area to join Laurent, Sabine, Pierre and Vincent Agostinetti at their holiday house in the Ardèche in preparation for the long planned trip down the Gorge de l’Ardeche by canoe on Sunday.
We can now say we have canoed the 30km along the length of the Ardeche from Vallon Pont d’Arc to Sauze at the other end of the Gorge and survived, in spite of 2 exciting capsizes. We should have made it unscathed if it hadn’t been a Sunday with the river like Pitt Street (ie hundreds of canoes) and it was hard to avoid already capsized boats in the more challenging rapids. No major damage, just lost sunglasses, Arthur’s hat and some pride! It gave some welcome relief from the 37C temperatures of the last few days to be saturated every so often. We even had a tail wind when the current slowed at the end.
to be continued ...