Provence

Provence

We spent one and a half days travelling by train to get to Provence. Along the way we stopped off one night in Nice (France). The hotel we stayed in was very nice and posh! We got given a little stuffed toy each...

The next day we picked up our rental car in Marseille and drove all the way to St Remy de Provence. We went to our little house in the middle of nowhere.

The little house had a downstairs bathroom, kitchen and lounge, and there were 2 upstairs bedrooms. In the late afternoon we went for a dip in the swimming pool we had in the garden. We shared this large garden and pool with two other holiday houses.

We rescued a frog from the pool one day. We didn't eat him though - his legs were too small!! Chantal

We went to Les Baux...

This is a mediaeval village and castle built into a stone hill.

While we were there we saw the biggest catapult in Europe in action!! It was amazing how it worked, with ropes and chains and things that pulled, until the catapult finally got set off. In the old days it used to fire 'greek fire' which a fire that can't be put out by water, only earth and sand. Today they used a giant water filled balloon.

We then walked around the old village and visited the amazing castle. When we climbed the steep steps to the top, we found that it was very windy. We had a great view of Provence.

The next day we went to the Cathedral d'Images.

This was an old quarry built into a hill.

Pictures were projected onto the walls, ceilings and floor, with music in the background.

The current exposition here is on Van Gogh...

(I found this quite boring and it isn't one of the highlights of my trip-Sabine)

I found it really amazing because everything was so huge-the quarry was really big. It felt weird when you walked over moving images on the ground. I would just love to put on a dance production here!!

We did a day trip to Toulon.

Mum and Dad tried to take the back roads, but it took a LONG time, so we jumped on the motorway to get there on time - it still took us four hours !!

We didn't see Tana Umaga, but we did see mum's friend Daniele. Daniele and her partner Jean-Claude showed us around the old part of town, and then shouted us lunch at a creperie. Mmmmmm!!

After lunch we walked around the port looking at all the boats, shabby or posh. We then had icecreams, shaped like Pinnochio.

We said our goodbyes, and headed off towards the motorways. Dad got really excited when he found that you could drive 130km per hour on the motorway which we soon did, Mum clutching her seat and wide-eyed. Then there was thunder and lightening, so we had to reduce down to 110km. Oooooohhh....:(

The next day we went to the bonbon museum (LOLLY Museum!!) :)

It was really cool - it was the Haribo Museum. You see Haribo lollies everywhere around Europe. At the museum we learned the process of how lollies were made, and got given a lot of free lollies along the way. They had lots of interactive games and I particularly liked one where you could send photo emails of yourself, decorated with lollies.

After the Haribo museum we then went to the Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman acqueduct.

It is a huge old bridge spanning the river. Before we saw the bridge itself we popped in to look at the ludo kids museum. This was very good and easy to understand, and I knew some of the stuff already because we studied ancient Rome earlier in the year.

Then we walked across the bridge, and paddled in the water. It was cold, and the rocks were very slimy. The bridge itself is a UNESCO world heritage site... we have seen a few of these in our travels now!