We wake up to be greeted by a very gray and chilly morning – a quick check of various weather websites forecast a happy mix of sun, wind and rain for today.
As always, there is nothing to complain about as long as the TWIKE is fully charged and there is the sea and chilled rosé wine waiting for us at the other end!
This entry will be more about the photos than the text – it was a super relaxing drive across southern France with not much to report other than: do it yourself!
Early morning traffic is dense – combine this with the masterfully unsynchronised red lights that change to red for no reason at all and people unable to understand that it is a bad idea to drive into a roundabout when the exits are blocked and you get perpetual traffic jams everywhere.
It just boggles the mind to imagine the sheer amount of productivity and time of every French citizen wasted by the dumb technology deployed. Coming from Switzerland where virtually every traffic light tries to optimize traffic flow to the max, this feels like active sabotage! Also, don’t get me started on the stupid, stupid speed humps everywhere (grrr!)
At least we get to drive without rain and climb our first mountain range. The views are dramatic and we enjoy the fast moving and low clouds.
Finally, at the top of the first ‘Col’ for today, the views and temperature are both cool.
As with every TWIKE adventure, we only take small roads off the beaten path – this strategy takes us from one small French village to the next. Our buttery croissants in one of them were sublime.
The weather turns very nice after another few dozen kilometres and we’re in ‘TWIKE 100% travel enjoyment’ mode.
Our main discovery of today is Sisteron and its very strange and super impressive rock formation called ‘Rocher de la Baume‘.
The village itself is called ‘La porte de la Provence’ locally – giving way to the Provence region.
Heading further south we can see many more instances of these rocks.
Sometimes we come across villages that look like movie sets – devoid of people and totally quiet.
What we like about driving in France is when the signs make sense in other languages – examples of which are ‘Die‘, ‘Plan‘ – today we came across ‘Corpse’, ‘Mens’, ‘Gap’ … and:
Our drive is just relaxing – quite difficult to really convey how much so – let me try with the following time-lapse video.
After a few hours in the sun and feeling very hot, we were quite happy to see some clouds ahead –
It rained for about an hour and then things went back to ‘normal’
With the sun back out for the last 50km to the sea, we enjoyed looking forward to our stay in a small bungalow just 50 m from the sea beneath some pine trees.
And without much fanfare we just arrived. The people handling the property were super friendly and let us drive all the way up to the bungalow – which made the task of charging the TWIKE so much easier.
With this, here are today’s stats. Thanks to the rain and the hills, our consumption today was pretty high for TW560’s standards.
Located under some pine trees, we are really looking forward to staying a few days with full digital detox – reading some books – in my case French classics in French. And essentially marinating in Rosé wine whilst eating well.
We’ll be back with some new entries soon – see ya!
