Diary of a French odyssey: PART 2
River swimming, lost sunglasses and a festival of goats
I’m into a good rhythm keeping a diary of my days now. It feels therapeutic and important to document how we have been spending our time on this trip. I want to have it as a memory I can look back on.
I loved reading your comments on Part 1 of this series and look forward to further conversations.
We’ve travelled further afield over these past 5 days, largely due to it being the weekend and us having more free time away from work. There are still plenty of tomatoes but with some river swimming, a cheese festival and a power cut thrown in.
Thursday 18th July
J is working all day so I plan to spend most of the day working and writing.
Went to the bakery mid-morning for baguettes and a pain au raisin to share with coffee. Worked on my interiors article for most of the morning and sent a draft to the editor before lunch. I’ve just found out that they’re leading with my piece and the cover illustration design will be based on it. No pressure.
Ate lunch outside together: last night’s cold ratatouille, cheese and baguette. Later I went swimming. The pool was very busy with children and it was quite difficult to swim lengths. Very refreshing despite being told off for putting my towel on a sun lounger which it turns out I was supposed to pay for. In my defence, there were no signs anywhere. Some good language practice, at least.
Around 4pm we wandered down to our local épicerie which we’d been following on Instagram before we arrived. It was yet to open so far this week (partly due to the Tour de France) so we were excited to go there. As food nerds, this is the sort of thing we get excited about. It’s a beautiful shop! Full of hyper-local fruit, vegetables, olives, cheese, wine, beer etc.
Returned with a basket of goodies and worked a little more on my article after receiving some helpful feedback from the editor.
It’s very hot today - around 35C. Not much wind.
Dinner was eaten late due to the heat. Barbecued kebabs from the local butcher with roasted tomatoes and parmentier potatoes.
Friday 19th July
Around 7am, I woke up feeling much warmer than on previous mornings and it turned out that we’d had a power cut. J thinks the power went out around 4am. Checked the power supplier website and discovered there was a very localised problem on our street due to a small electrical fire. It was estimated to come back on at some point in the morning.
You may be concerned about my morning tea given that the kettle was out of action, but fear not dear readers, we have a gas hob!
Fortunately J was only working in the afternoon today due to a scheduled meeting. We had planned to go out in the morning and hoped that by the time we were back, the power (think air con, wi-fi etc.) would have returned.
The air conditioning of the car was welcome during the 20-minute journey to the beautiful town of Grignan. We visited the impressive château which had magnificent views over the alps with Mont Ventoux visible in the distance.