Antibes to Greoux-les-Baines
Trip Start
Jun 24, 2008
1
19
41
Trip End
Aug 28, 2008
Greoux-les-Baines,
France
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
This morning we headed off first stop at and ATM in Antibes, we started to move the car before Peter came back, he quickly caught on, but.. tried to get into the car ahead of us an other Peugeot 407, quite insistent he was too, must have scared the living daylight out of the occupants. We headed in an easterly direction along the A8, a rather lovely motorway, with gentle curves and hills. The rolling hillside is not unlike some part of New Zealand, but the green colour is different, lighter and brighter. After about 65 km we head north on the D54. the country side is now changing, getting more mountainous and the roads narrower and more winding. After an other 20km we do a little side trip on the D51 to Chateaudouble.
What a delightful little town. We only stop for coffee, but there re a couple of nice looking restaurants in the town. It's a very quite and neat little town, with some wonderful views. I can see I'm going to have trouble with my photos today, so many things to photograph.
We continue north to Comps-sur Artuby, the countryside is quite barren
lovely greens
. It is a military area. We then headed east on the 71 taking the southern route along the Verdon gorge. Mainly small oak trees along the road, we keep climbing. Once we get in the gorge area, we make several stops to take photographs and just look. It's stunning, deep deep down we can see a turquoise river snaking through the gorge. We are at around 1000 meters, the sky is clear blue and the temperature about 29 degrees. Couldn't have a better day. We stop for lunch around 2 pm, sitting on a balcony looking into the gorge. It's breathtaking. Route D71 turns into D19 which then joins D957, we head north on D957 and get some stunning views of Lac de Sainte Croix. At one particular spot, we have the lake and across the lake the plateau with the lavender fields and the end of the gorge and the river, full of boats.
We wind our way down to the lake shore, A wonderful holiday spot where the river joins the lake. The water is full of people on different kinds of boats, kayaks, 2 person paddle boats etc, and lots of people swimming in jumping in off the cliffs.
We continue on to Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, It is wonderful to have Jan-Erik as a guide, we are getting to see place we would just have driven through. We walk through this delightful town, a river-stream runs through it with lots of little waterfalls. There is a special decorated white and blue potter for sale in town. The town is between to mountains, suspended between these 2 mountains is a large gold star
along windy roads
. The legend has it that a man from the town was captured during the crusades, and he wowed that if he was ever freed, he would hang a gold star between this 2 mountains. We stopped for a class of coke, and also drank some of the cool spring water direct from the spring. The water was far more refreshing than the coke.
From Moustiers we headed south east to Riez on D952 and then north on D953 till where it joins D8, which we took in a southerly direction to Valensole.
Riez to Valensole was about 25 km, and this was the area of the lavender fields. I have always wanted to see these and they were amazing. There were also fields of Rye, the yellow and purple-blue fields were just so beautiful. I'd love to go back there an other time.
In Valensole our 'lady' lead us all around the place, it was about 6pm and it was really getting time to find a place for the night, but we decided against Valensole headed south east to Greoux-les-Baines, only an other 13km on the D8. it looked lovely and it was getting late. We found a car park near the tourist information, and sent Gerda and Jan-Erik off to find some accommodation. They did really well, had found a hotel right in the centre, only minutes walking from where we were parked. 100.00 Euros for the 2 rooms. Nothing spectacular but perfectly adequate. We sat in the sun outside the hotel and had a drink and then found a nice place for dinner, I had a lovely Beef Carpaccio of starters, but the Salmon for my main was overdone. We were in bed around 10pm.
