Our visit to Apt is a good
example of how we often just do stuff on the fly on these trips – sometimes it works
out, sometimes it doesn’t. This time, it did, and after a short hop from our ‘night
of two aires’ and musical mayhem, we drew up into the municipal campsite not
far from the centre of Apt. Even as we drove through the town along the
riverbank to the site, we could see signs of the festival in the town and the
air was heavy with the scent of lavender.
The site was not overly busy
(and very low key) and we were able to pick our pitch with the now familiar
request of where to find the best ‘ombrage’ or shade, at reception. Unfortunately,
Mr B had somehow got the points of the compass and the movement of the sun a
bit confused, and just after we had finished setting up, it became clear we
needed to swap pitches if we weren’t going to roast in the rising temperatures
and virtually still air! He put it down to an interrupted night and being a bit
tired…
Luckily, after our second
pitch passed muster, we still had time to have a quick explore of the town and its
very idiosyncratic festival. It turned out to be a really interesting
combination of an agricultural show, focussed on displaying just about
everything you can do with lavender, and a quirky mix of vintage cars and
tractors.
By the time we had been
around the stalls, we had seen the wide variety of uses the locals could put
lavender to in foods, including bread, salami, brioche, syrup, lemonade, wine,
pizza, and ice-cream!
And of particular interest
to Mrs B, were the stalls (and stills!) that were selling essential oils and
distillates, along with a myriad of cosmetic products from soaps to face
creams.
With our heads almost
reeling with the scent of so much lavender (and Mrs B’s own bunch she had been
given – for free – no cajoling itinerants here!) from one of the huge loads on
the trailers, we decided we had enough time to walk back to the campsite and
clean up, and then walk back into the town for some tucker…not before enjoying
a musical interlude by a traditional Provençal ensemble of course!
Dinner was a in a lovely
bistro restaurant Les P’tits Lilou that had a ‘menu du jour’ that also luckily ran in the evening. We
quite like these fixed price affairs, where you can be reasonably sure that the
food has been cooked on the day, and so we ended up with a good value three
course meal with (you guessed it) tarte Provençal, a lamb main course (a souris
of lamb – aka shank!), with a lavender scented dauphinoise, and apricot crumble
with lavender ice-cream – complete with a half litre carafe of house wine of
course!
By the time we waddled back
to the site, the temperature had refused to even consider dropping, and as we
sat out in what seemed like near sauna temperatures, we decided it was time to
break out the overhead fan that fits into the skylight above our heads. It’s no
more than a homemade frame that slots into the skylight with a powerful (and
quiet) PC fan with a speed controller – and as it turned out, a real godsend
that night as it managed to send a gentle breeze across our faces as we nodded
off!
The next morning saw no
let-up in the temperatures and so we set off on our way to Orange, hoping o
visit new friends we’d met on Corsica, wondering what the temperatures were
going to be like further inland!
S&J
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