Tuesday 30th August – Ancient Graffiti

After a restful stopover we continued our journey towards Provence with a stop off at Pont Du Gard (another on our list of places to go and highly recommended by many people – thank you).  This is a 2000 year old aqueduct build by the Romans and still nearly fully intact.  Extraordinarily it also has both ancient graffiti and something more modern – well if you call nearly 200 years old modern…

It was another hot day and we dipped our feet in the river below (the aqueduct piped water to the nearby Nimes while the river ran below it).

After a relaxing spot of lunch in the car park (was nicer than it sounds) we headed towards Avignon (which we stopped at last year but I fully intend to go back on another trip there as it’s such a beautiful city) and ended up near Beaucaire at another France Passion.

This was another vineyard but this time with a shop so we headed in for some samples and ended up buying a couple of bottles of red grown on the site plus some olive oil.  All very nice wines – hic…

Wednesday 31st August – A Good Year film location chasing

From Beaucaire we headed to Gordes via Carpentras and Venasque which is another very pretty hilltop town.  It wasn’t really suitable for motorhomes but we squeezed into a parking spot and found a stunning little restaurant with terrace to have an outstanding lunch.

Gordes is also the location of a couple of scenes of one of our favourite films called ‘A Good Year’ which stars Russell Crowe, Marion Cotillard, Freddie Highmore and Albert Finney.  It’s not a cinematic masterpiece but it is a feel good film (which I’m very partial to) and it was apparently filmed within 20 mins of Ridley Scott’s house in Provence (who directed it).

Turns out Gordes is also popular with the rich (and possibly famous) as we saw quite a few luxury cars and Monaco number plates.

After a few days of big drives and Steven playing with the Control panel to set the proper battery capacity we needed a campsite and there happened to be one just above Gordes so we found a shaded spot, popped some washing in the machine and headed to the pool. The site was called Camping Des Sources (http://www.campingdessources.com – GPS: 43.926274, 5.202525)

We even heard and watched a huge thunderstorm going through the valley below but no rain for us.

Thursday 1st September – Mobile wine bottling anyone?

Carrying on the film homage we went to Bonneiux which is where most of the cast & crew stayed apparently and just out of town is the Chateau Carnague which was the main location in the film.  Unfortunately you can’t get near the house so we only got some distant photos but it was fun to be there.

From Bonneiux we went to our final film location homage in Cucuron via the D943 which is a pretty and twisty route and also a little narrow at times…

2 things stood out in Cucuron, the first was coming across a mobile wine bottling plant in the back of an articulated lorry which was pumping bulk wine in and producing fully labelled, corked and packaged wine – very impressive.

The second was the large goldfish pond flanked by London Plane trees which is featured as an outdoor film location (which it has never actually been) in A Good Year and where we had a very pleasant lunch.

From Cucuron we headed back up to Apt for some supplies and then on to Reillanne (GPS: 43.880232, 5.66403)
for a free overnight aire which had 1 free EHU (in use by someone else) but the services unit didn’t seem to have any running water.