Another Sailor Saga

prelude91 · Post by **prelude91** » Sun Sep 30, 2018 3:28 pm

Nice trip, brings back memories, as these were my old stomping grounds when I lived near Tours.

YouTube · Post by **Sailor** » Sun Sep 30, 2018 11:38 pm

prelude91 wrote:Nice trip, brings back memories, as these were my old stomping grounds when I lived near Tours.

We had to miss out on Tours, but only because our time was limited and we couldn't see everything. Next time, perhaps.

mynameisowen wrote:Beautiful!
What car did you go in?

We were in the Integra. More on that later.

Next stop, Le Puy en Velay, the city known for its volcanic plugs.

Much of the old town is steep and hard work for old legs like mine.

So many places we went to ran light shows on historic buildings. Le Puy was no exception.
This is a succession of images projected over the stone work:-

Heading south again, we picked a bendy road through the Cevennes.

Our target was the railway viaduct in Chamborigaud.

After a coffee stop at Uzes ...

... we finally reached the Roman aqueduct at Pont du Gard.
This is the classic photo everyone snaps:-

And this is the river it crosses:-

89 UKDM BA4 4WS (resto job!) · Post by **wurlycorner** » Mon Oct 01, 2018 3:35 pm

Da Vinci was a crazy guy

You take some great snaps and the projections they do on buildings these days are amazing - it's staggering to see how well they work.

Stevee99 · Post by **Stevee99** » Mon Oct 01, 2018 6:12 pm

Yes I love the pics. The cathedrals at Bourges and Chartres look splendid - its given me a bit of wanderlust! Think I'll have to rob a bank first though

prelude91 · Post by **prelude91** » Tue Oct 02, 2018 8:40 pm

The railway viaduct not far from Millau, built by Gustave Eiffel, is pretty impressive, too. Forgot its name for the moment.

YouTube · Post by **Sailor** » Tue Oct 02, 2018 11:33 pm

I heard about this too late. It's the Garabit Viaduct and we could have gone that way from the Auvergne. (Would have done had we known.) Oh, well, you can't do it all.

What we could do - and did - was to stay the night at Aigues Mortes, a small, walled town on the western edge of the Camargue.

It's been a maritime settlement since (possibly) before the Phoenicians.

The Camargue itself was a must-see for us. I gave Ricky a painting of the wild horses as a birthday present a few years ago. It was the work of a friend of ours, a noted equestrian painter. Sadly, he passed away this year.
The first horses we saw were on a ferry with us!

And then, almost as if magic, the 'real' ones turned up.

Stevee99 · Post by **Stevee99** » Wed Oct 03, 2018 11:43 am

I recognize Le Puy en Velay from a book I have. You must have been on the Way of St.James pilgrim route on occasions?

YouTube · Post by **Sailor** » Thu Oct 04, 2018 12:53 am

Stevee99 wrote:I recognize Le Puy en Velay from a book I have. You must have been on the Way of St.James pilgrim route on occasions?

Yes. There are loads of different routes to the Camino de Santiago all over Europe. I think they all meet up on the Spanish side at the Biscay end of the Pyrenees. Many join up with each other way before then. We've seen the 'scallop' symbol in at least seven countries. One of the nodes is near us, in Winchester. Another, as important in France as Le Puy, is at Arles. We went there, too, but not because of the pilgrimage route.

I was fascinated by an old old wall that still had some Roman bits in it. The aircon unit was a bit incongruous!

And of course, when in Arles, you have to do a bit of the Van Gogh tourist thing. This is the lifting bridge he sketched and painted more than once:

From Arles, we drove via Avignon (the place too busy and full of roadworks to persuade us to stop) to Aix en Provence.

You can't take pictures of France without at least one traditional bicycle:-

We made our standard visit to the cathedral ...

... but spent longer in one of the art galleries. There was an exhibition comparing and contrasting Picasso with his mate Picabia.

But Cezanne was our main focus. This is his atelier:

Most of the trees in his garden were tiny back then. They're not now.

89 UKDM BA4 4WS (resto job!) · Post by **wurlycorner** » Thu Oct 04, 2018 10:20 am

I think the air con unit has been hidden quite sympathetically tbh! (unusual for a Mediterranean country, since they don't normally give much of a toss about historic walls etc)

YouTube · Post by **Sailor** » Sun Oct 07, 2018 10:26 pm

The next artist on our list after Cezanne was Matisse, so we set off for Vence.
We decided on a detour via the 700m deep Verdon Gorge.

It wasn't the only road en route with dizzy drops:

Vence itself is an attractive, walled city, at least at its heart.

It claims to have France's smallest cathedral. We were taken by the mosaic by Chagall (easier to like than to photograph!).

But we were here to visit the chapel designed by Matisse. It's the white 'shed' in the middle of the picture:

The chapel is simple and pure and full of strong, clear light. Photography inside is banned, so all we could get was a snap through a door: