Thursday morning we decided to explore Goult, the town where we are staying. We finally found the tourist information and got a map of the "sites" in town. We started somewhat in the middle of the walking tour, as for some unknown reason, the actual start of the tour began in a place where you would never start.
To start at the "start" required a bit of backtracking. So, into the middle we went. First up was the town washing station. This was not kept up by anyone and leaves, etc. were all around. There was no signage to actually let us know that this was the place. We figured it out by the shape of the stone basins. Not impressive, I thought.
Down the road a very short distance was the town spigot where the stream emptied into a large stone basin structure with a roof over it. The water was strewn with leaves and had not been cleaned out in some time. Quite a bit of algae there. Also not impressive.
Then we continued with the numbered walk up the hill into the old town behind the town wall, which is just around the corner from our apartment. Now the town became more interesting. It has a manor house, small by comparison of other towns, but this is a small town. We wound our way around the curling streets, always going up. We saw a nice quiet spot, a public garden, where two people were enjoying a takeout lunch. Nice spot for lunch.
We continued up again and found the windmill (moulin) which was used until roughly a hundred years ago and looks to be still in good condition. Quite obviously, it is at the highest part of the town.
A 10 minute walk beyond the windmill were the terraces where the people of the town had cultivated their crops on stone-supported terraces. There were quite of few of them. They had been reconstructed by volunteers about 15 years ago, and had been planted with typical "crops", primarily olive trees, sage, lavender, rosemary and, mysteriously, irises. I couldn't figure out the medicinal or food value of irises. Maybe they were simply for the flowers. The terraces were not maintained as well as they could have been and seemed a bit over grown. There were several bories -- small utility buildings made of dry stone. They were in great shape and could easily be used today for the same purposes for which they were originally constructed.
Here's a typical borie:
It is hard to determine how many people actually live in this town, but it is clearly a real town where people really live. I got the opposite feeling about some hill towns in the Dordogne where I couldn't imagine anyone living there unless they happen to own a tourist business somewhere in town and want to live close to it. In those towns, there were lodgings, certainly, but they appeared to be used for gites these days. In Goult, there certainly are quite a number of gites, but there also seems to be quite a number of non-tourists here --ladies (and gentlemen) of a certain age who appear in the morning with their market baskets. These women probably do not own a pair of pants; they wear dresses or skirts every day. They are definitely not tourists.
We really like Goult, and just love the gite here. As I described earlier, it is a medieval townhouse just outside of the town wall. The steps of the house are worn down in the middle from a few hundred years' worth of climbing.
We came back to our apartment and had a takeout lunch from the local patisserie. I really should be photographing some of our meals, but I never think of it. When I'm hungry, nothing else matters.
After lunch, we went to one of the few towns that is not located perched on a hill, although we did have to go up and over the very steep hilly town of Bonnieux to get to it. Lourmarin is flat and peaceful. There is none of the perceived danger associated with a town desperately clinging to a rock high above the farms. It was a lazy fall afternoon. A few locals were out sitting in the middle of a shopping plaza, enjoying the afternoon sun, where they probably could not find an empty seat during the "season".
As with a lot of towns, this town seems to earn it's economic foundation on tourists. Even on a Thursday afternoon in early fall, the cafes were doing a reasonable business. The manor house just off the center of town attracts loads of tour busses and independent travellers. I can only imagine this lovely, gentle little town being positively over run by tourists in the summer.
In October, the crush has calmed down and the town appears to be taking a well-deserved break. When we arrived, the town even appeared to be napping. Since it is no longer tourist season, stores go back to their normal schedules of taking the lunch break for two hours. Some stores are open during the lunch break and then close from 2-4 pm.
We are constantly having timing issues. We spend a couple of hours driving to a place, only to arrive just when they are about to close for one type of break or another. It can be a bit frustrating to wait out the break. It also limits the number of places that we can travel to in a day.
I liked Lourmarin a lot. It would be a great place to stay for a week and use it as a base to travel around. I think one reason that I liked it is because it is flat. It seemed more "normal" to me, and less fairy tale. It had the same medieval construction, the same ancient church in the center, the same large manor house, the same crowded meandering narrow streets in the old town. But, it also had a sense of being a living town.
Friday, October 8, we took a road trip to see the sights of Nimes and Pont du Gard. We decided that logistically, it made sense to start with Pont du Gard, then drive to Nimes.; otherwise, we would have to backtrack. That itinerary made a lot of sense because when we got to Pont du Gard, we were fresh and had not yet worn out our legs.
Pont du Gard is just plain spectacular. There is no other way to describe it. The "pont" is the bridge crossing the Gardon River. It is 160 FT high at it's middle. It is truly a remarkable feat of Roman engineering. The entire aqueduct system which brings fresh drinking water from the hills to Nimes stretches over 30 miles.
I have no idea how long it took to build this bridge and the rest of the aqueduct, of which this is part, but it must have been quite a while. Of course, when the raw materials are free for the taking and the labor is literally "slave labor", the cost of building a marvel like this is not that great. Probably feeding the slaves was the highest cost.
Here are photos of this awe-inspiring fantastic work of mankind at his best:
Had we known that the parking fee of 15 Euros also included the museum, I would have gone in to understand just how the Romans managed to get all those huge stones in place. I will do some research when I get internet service again, because I am really interested in how this was done in 19 BC.
We arrived in Nimes around lunch time; so, we quickly found a take out and an available park bench. Then we were off to the arena. We chose to see this one because of all of the arenas built by Romans in their new cities in Europe, this is the best preserved. It is still in use today, after 2000 years. Concerts and bull fights are the primary attractions there today.
The self-guided audio tour took about two hours. I found it very interesting. The audio guide did a fine job of orienting the visitor to the stadium itself and to the life at the time of the Romans. I felt like I got a very good crash course on the Romans and the people that they "conquered".
The Romans conquered new lands by overtaking them with minimal force. Then, they immediately began a program of treating them very well. They built arenas for entertainment, built roads, bridges and housing, provided water and other necessities of life. They did not treat the conquered as "conquered" but as new citizens of Rome. Their idea was that if they treated these people well, within two to three generations, the people would consider themselves Romans also. In fact, the townspeople tried very hard to be Romans because they wanted to enjoy the lifestyle and "perks" of being a Roman citizen. Listen up, fledgling dictators, this is the way to go.
I am very glad that we went to the arena (not coliseum, as we might think; there's only one Coliseum, and that's in Rome, named for a sculpture of Colossus just outside the gate). However, having seen this one, I don't feel that I need to see any more. We saw the best, why spend time seeing others in various degrees of destruction.
Here are pictures of another Roman wonder. If only they had laid off the vino, maybe they could still be building things today.
I liked Nimes quite a bit. It was like a small version of Paris, with Paris type parks and lovely, graceful buildings which were all short. This is a cultured city. The people of Nimes were very well dressed and the city was clean and pretty.
Here are some pictures of Nimes, especially the Jardin de la Fontaine which was designed by the architect of the gardens at Versaille:
We arrived back in Goult well after dark -- about 8:30. We were both tired from the day's adventure. Vacationing is hard work.
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