Gordes, France.

Gordes, France. Certainly one of the most beautiful villages in France - perched on the mountainside in Provence. Provence is my kind of region - sun, sun, sun. Every day you wake up and find a perfect blue sky and sun that slaps everything below - very seriously. It has been 93 degrees since we arrived and we bake under the power of it - unrelenting. I've always had a thing for sun like that. In Gordes, we also found the most divine ice cream - lavender and violet. Not just fruity tasting, but certainly churned with the plants. Delightful. We twisted and turned through the medieval village, its tight alleys admiring its shutters and doors galore.















Traveling with the babe has been amazing. She has soaked up all the novelty around her and has delighted in her French kin and the setting. A lot of 'wow!'s and dancing and rejoicing from the little Colette. That said, the sun, rambling, and being a baby is still exhausting! Good thing we can sleep just about anywhere:

Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque.

One of our first outings was to l'Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque near Gordes, France. We timed this trip perfectly to hit the lavender blooms and this is a place one must visit if taken by those rows of lavender in Provence. It is a Cistercian abbey dating to 1150. The austerity of the gray stone against the violet rows of lavender is staggering. It is still a functioning abbey - the monks who live here grow the lavender for their livelihood and tend honey bees.












Ma belle Louise admiring the cloisters of the abbey. (What a beauty she has become! So grown up).



We took a full tour and our tour guide was one serious lady. Since it is still a place of prayer and silence, they demand a reverent audience. Colette was the only one who wasn't on board. She loved the way her little screeches resonated in the vast Romanesque spaces. Marguerite tried to convince her to calm. She wasn't about to listen.

Provence.

Comment dire...? Provence. One word for an immeasurable region of France. This year we decided to gather all of Xavier's family in the south of France, rather than at the family home Baugé. My brother-in-law - Fabien's parents sublimely restored a family farm near Avignon, adding a swimming pool and a sumptuous garden (which was already full of fruit and olive trees and lavender) for their summer home and this is the spot of our sojourn in Provence. The one true deficiency of the Côte d'Azur is the inundation of people during the summer months. Avignon - or more precisely, Eyragues, is the opposite. Yes, this region also gets flooded by tourists and when we went to the market in Saint Rémy de Provence this morning, it was clear that we were not surrounded by locals. However, the vast fields of Provence remain and space is still a superfluidity here. We have been venturing out to villages and abbeys and markets, but the house is worth an unescorted post.









Colette is having the time of her life spending her days strutting naked in the shade of the beautiful sycamores that line the front of the house and romping on the first step of the swimming pool. We are all under a spell of fascination watching her negotiate between French and English. She repeats like a monkey and when her Marie ("Na-ie!") repeats 'jaune' - she says it right back with her. Sleep is French - doudou (her blankey) and dodo (sleep). Food is in between ("nilk" is milk - with a scrunched up nose) and the rest is a lot of pointing and single-sylable attempts at words. Body parts are English - although she knows them all by reference in French too. We have been riding in the car more than we do in New York and when we tell her we are going for a ride she puts on a pair of pouty lips and shakes her booty back and forth (Papa plays DJ and Colette is a fan).

















Poolside picnics - concluding with a Tropezienne...what could be better? (A very serious question).




Fabien and Colette discuss: on est bien ici.