May is the month of many mays: it may shine, it may rain, and it may even snow, and it may be cold or warm (borrowed from an Instagram post). Still May is one of the most optimal months for vacation here, since the weather is usually quite good, not too hot yet, and it has several public holidays. By carefully planning the vacation time around those holidays, weekends, and possible ‘pont’ days (single working days between holidays and weekends that many employers give as time off), one can have quite a long vacation without using many earned vacation days. We weren’t that strategic this time, though. Originally we planned to spend the first two weeks of May on vacation — the first week had one public holiday midweek (1st of May) and the second two (Victory Day on Wednesday and Ascension on Thursday) and Friday as a ‘pont’ — and visit Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Since the first week’s weather forecast was rather grim, we postponed our vacation by one week, and instead of leaving on the weekend, we decided to leave on Monday, which shortened the vacation even more. Now, it was pointless to drive to the South-West corner of the country for just one week, so we searched for an alternative destination closer to home, and ended up returning to Avignon (Vaucluse) that we briefly visited a few years ago on our tour of ViaRhôna.
We wanted to avoid the noisy and crowded town center, and booked an Airbnb apartment in the peaceful residential neighborhood in the nearby village of Les Angles (Gard) on the other side of the river Rhône. Actually, we did not even visit Avignon center, other than driving around the walled city a couple of times — what a nightmarish experience!
The first day of driving was the only bad weather day on our vacation; it was cold and it rained quite heavily most of the day, the strong wind making it particularly miserable. We took a brief stop from driving in Serres (Hautes-Alpes) to climb to the top of the village. Even the prettiest villages look rather dreary in this kind of weather. The man in the picture below, Louis Videl (1598-1675), was the secretary and later the biographer of Lesdiguières, the leader of the Protestant army during the Wars of Religion (1562-98). The 500-page biograph was published in 1638, about ten years after the protagonist’s death.
Fontaine de Vaucluse and village of Le Thor
On our first day we drove to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse to find the place crowded by tourists on this off-season weekday. The village is built around the spring, the source of the river Sorgue. The spring is situated at the dead-end of a valley, at the foot of a 230-meter high limestone cliff of Vaucluse mountains. It is the largest spring in France, and the fifth largest worldwide, with an annual flow of 600-700 cubic meters. Several people, including Jacques Cousteau in 1946, have dived in the spring searching for its bottom. It still remains mystery where the water comes from.
It was just a short walk to the spring so we were done with the visit in about an hour. On our drive back to Les Angles we stopped at Le Thor for lunch sandwiches at a bakery. I don’t remember the name of the bakery, but it was definitely not a chain: the service was superb, so we reasoned that it must have been the owner herself who served us. Afterwards we had a quick stroll in the town.
(to be continued in Part II)