Pic Spocket

I posted few days ago the pictures from my first 2 weeks in France. During my work weeks at Eurocopter, I stayed in the city of Aix en Provence, historic capital of the Provence region. It is a pretty nice city. It is also well known to be the birthplace of the French painter Paul Cézanne.

I did not get a whole lot of opportunities for pictures because at this time of the year, after the 1 hour drive back from the Marseille area where I worked, the sun was setting already.

More pictures from Aix en Provence.

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As mentioned before, during my first weekend I visited the city of Gordes. This medieval village is built on the flank of a mountain overlooking a large plain. This is quite special to see and it’s got a “cachet”. I passed a few hours there and had lunch outside on a terrace, without a jacket. It really felt like spring during my stay in France. It was sad to go back to winter weather in Canada a few weeks later…

More pictures from Gordes.

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Not too far from there was the city of Avignon, which I visited before in ’97. This is a nice place too and decided to go again. This is also medieval in style. The city is very well known for the “Palais des Papes” (below) where the Popes lived in the 14th century. Also well known is the “bridge” from the children song. However, this is not a bridge anymore: only 4 arches are left from the original 22 due to floods.

More from Avignon (City).

I stayed until after dawn, where I got some very nice pictures of the bridge after sunset.

More from Avignon (Bridge).

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On the following day (Sunday), I went hiking the the Calanques area between Marseille and Cassis. This area also called “Massif des Calanques” is a 20 km long by 4 km deep area long the coast where many of these geologic formations can be found. I started my hike from the forest of La Gardiole.

The hike was quite strenuous given my actual fitness shape (I’ve added a lot of weight in the last few months). This was pretty much walking up and down hills all day. What did not help, and that’s pretty funny, is the following: I had prepared a plan for the day on a hiking map. The trails were color coded and every time you would arrive at an intersection, there was a sign on a rock to tell you which way to go. Few times in the morning I seemed to cross paths at unexpected times. Later on, I cross a blue path, which is not possible for the area I think I am currently. Look at the map, figure I must have missed a turn and readjust my plan.

It is only after 2/3 of the day went by that I finally realize that I have been completely misinterpreting the signs on the rocks. A sign like this:

…which I thought was an arrow head pointing to the left path for the orange trail was in fact a sign to go to the right!!! The whole day I was always picking the wrong turn!!! Can I tell you how stupid I felt! So anyway: I ended up doing a huge detour. I was telling my self that the view would better be good to compensate for all that effort.

Few minutes later, I was standing in front of a magnificent view at the calanque of Eissadon. Once again, it’s hard to get a real feel of the place just from a picture. On that picture below, I am inches from a precipice of several hundred meters. You have to be careful with each steps!!

A little bit later, I also reached a point of view for the calanque of En Vau. Once again, I am a few inches from very impressive overhang here!

More pictures from the hike.

Many more pictures of this trip can be found in the Travel section of the Photo Album.

France Jan 2008

More to follow in the next post.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Travel, Album update, Our news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.