La Vie en France – a week of wine, bikes and friends

We could have easily settled back into life in Girona for another year, picking up right where we left off with daily market visits, beautiful trail runs and nearly endless rides, and best of all the kind of friends who you reconnect with after 11 years and it feels as though no time has passed at all, but our trip was moving forward and we had a pretty ridiculously luxurious week to look forward to... While not luxurious in accommodation or overly ambitious itinerary, it was over the top luxurious in that Nana and Baba had offered to take the boys for seven days of ‘art camp’ and French immersion while we met some of our best friends in the little town of Gordes, an absolutely pristine village nestled into the side of the hill in the Luberon, to celebrate our joint birthdays in a child-free, wine-and-bike-filled style. Bruiser, our loaded up, hilariously beater passenger van, took us from Girona to Cassis, a pristine fishing village tucked along the Mediterranean coast, where we settled Nana, Baba and the boys into a tiny apartment just 2 minutes from the port/downtown/beach. We filled the fridge with groceries, unpacked all the art supplies, and wished them good luck, not quite believing that after 6 weeks of never being apart, we had seven blissful days with no teaching, no agenda, no planes, trains or ferries, no kids and our best friends to boot!

Our first stop was a hotel nestled along the Cote d’Azur just below the town of Eze for 2 days of complete solo nothingness while we waited for Ross and Carly to fly in. Upon arrival, in the midst of a torrential downpour, we promptly ordered hot tea with our dinner and fell asleep at 9 pm 🤣. The next day we found the tallest hill around and hike/ran straight up it for an hour, feeling oh-so-out-of-shape after the past month and a half hardly moving, but loving the newfound freedom of activity together. The rest of the day was spent sipping spritzes and rosé, laying in the sun and hardly moving except to jump in the ocean or flip the pages of our books. It was absolute heaven. The next day we packed our bags, bid farewell to the Mediterranean coast and headed north to Gordes, one of the most picturesque hillside towns in the Luberon, that would be our base for the next 5 days. We had spent time in the area forever ago when we were first dating, riding bikes, getting lost on little roads and discovering the brilliance of the wine lunch, so were excited to return and relive those memories, to ride, and to share the area with our friends. Like all good things, the rest of the week passed in a blur that felt like 5 minutes and forever at the same time. We rode for miles and miles, hours and hours on every tiny road we could find, stopping at little villages for coffee, wine tastings and best of all, mid-ride wine lunches, filling ourselves with rosé, Aperol, bread, cheese and frites before jumping back on our bikes and continuing blissfully along. Needless to say, speed wasn’t our thing;)

We watched the leaves change from green to yellow and red as fall set in and the temperatures dropped, and our little heat conditioned selves went into shock at the first taste of cooler weather. We stayed up way too late drinking champagne and whiskey and relished in the fact that it didn’t matter because we could sleep as late as we wanted. We got to wander the vineyards and explore the cellar at Font de Loup in Chateauneuf du Pape, stocking up on good wine for those aforementioned late nights. We ventured over to Chateau la Coste, an incredible amalgamation of wine, incredible food and inspiring art, mostly in the form of massive sculpture installations spread along a 4 km walk of Provencal vineyard land. We first enjoyed a 2.5 hour wine lunch at Francis Mallmann’s restaurant there, gawking at the beautiful open-fire pit-stove and multi-tiered grill that they employed to bring his Argentinian-style fire-influenced cooking to the vineyards of Provence. We then spent the next 3.5 hours wandering up, down and across all the paths, each one leading to another and another and another awe-inspiring sculpture or installation from Tadao Ando, Bod Dylan, Yoko Ono, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Serra and so many more. All in all, it was a pretty heavenly week, made even better by the twice daily facetime calls from the sweetest boys, who could not have been happier with their Nana and Baba time, hiking in the Calanques, deep diving into various art techniques (venturing to the markets to buy fish to practice still life drawing, sitting by ponds water coloring lilies, exploring self-portraits and perspective) and making sure that each day started with at least one croissant and ended with a cone of cassis sorbet. Knowing that the boys were not just fine but absolutely elated to be with their grandparents whom they could not love more and watching the love and relationship between the 4 of them continue to deepen and grow made us feel pretty good about jumping on our bikes and heading off to find another glass of mid-ride rosé.