In the Midi sun

The joy of travelling with this new toy of mine, the smallest of Mac Airbooks, is that, as planned, I can stow it in my handbag. Look, no hands!  The pain is that I don’t really know how to use it, over and above the obvious.  All those tricks which make Mac so desirable are still beyond me. Neither, to compound the pain, have I paused long enough to learn the simple skill of taking photos off Alex’s new toy, the smallest of waterproof cameras which stows even more easily in the same handbag. So, rather than leaping into the blog, as also planned, I’ve been held back by good old technical ineptness.

Here I sit, in the gap between ostentatiously heavy brocade curtains and the bedroom windows of our lodgings in Lymington, dressed warmly for another sad summer’s day in the south of England.  Alex sleeps on in the muffled darkness on the other side while I wrangle sense out of a simple Microsoft Word document. Some time between the breakfast part of our B & B package and racing onto Southhampton to see the next boat, I’ll massage this into a New Post, complete with Photos. Hah! I wish.     

                 

It’s been hectic, as they say back home. Truly.  We’re a little further ahead in the boat-finding game than we were a week ago, but we’ve put some big distances in, and we’re about to fly a quarter of the way back to Australia just because….we’ve undertaken to see another man about another boat. From Provence to the Solent via the Costa Brava and Barcelona, and now onto the Turkish Riviera (I’m sure someone somewhere has described Fethiye as such) – when I put it like that, it sounds exotic, doesn’t it? It’s that too, in a mad, let’s-eat and-drink-our-way-around-the-marina-circuit-and-see-everything-worth-seeing-before-we-sit-down-with-yet-another-bottle-of-wine-and-make-our-decision kind of way. 

The loveliest surprise was Arles, where we arrived in the drawn out midsummer evening last Friday.

 We’d stayed longer than expected at Port Napoleon to help Christophe haul out Enki so as to put her on a hard stand (I've put her picture at the top).  By that stage, we were loathe to leave her.  We'd got rather too close to her and his story. But we needed to get moving, and Arles was close and curiously, neither of us had been there before (we’ve spent a bit of time in Provence over the years).  All it took was 40 km of freeway travel in the rented VW Polo, and we were in another world, where the star attractions did not have masts and keels but gloriously intact Roman arches and stepped terraces, magnificent Medieval stonework, peeling shutters, doorways and courtyards which spoke of cloaks and daggers and dark dastardly deeds.

We kept the Rhone with us all the way. Arles, like Avignon further to the north, is a river city. Julius Caesar gave it to his soldiers, a bit like the Australian government giving farms to veterans after the First World War. The Romans built an amphitheatre, and it’s awe-inspiring, appearing suddenly around a corner, in the midst of the town,  without fanfare, as if its presence there were as normal as a Westfield shopping mall.  

And then, equally unexpected, are the golden arches and hot-coloured flower beds in the courtyard of what was once the hospital where Vincent van Gogh was incarcerated.  I’d forgotten that Van Gogh lived in Arles.

You'd think with such a drawcard that everything would be van Gogh this, van Gogh that, but the town flows around him rather than to him. Arles seems to take in all those Roman soldiers, stern abbots and monks, painters and mystics, and still have a youthful pulse. Attractive towns are always about commerce first, and  the Saturday morning market is a beauty. 

I do love those cheeses and cherries and olives, but my most heady experience in Arles was at the Musee Reattu, a gem of a museum, brilliantly put together, where sketches by Picasso, carpets by Christian Lacroix, 18^th century painting and 21^st century sculpture work into and against each other and the building, an ancient priory of forbidding walls, coats of arms, flagstones and gargoyles.  I was in heaven.

The next stories of the boats will have to wait.  Alex is down at the Berthon boatyard now, tearing himself away from a glamorous 50 foot Oyster called White Wings. There’s a 49 foot Najad with a dreadfully dowdy name down the road in Southhampton waiting for our attention….Time to get back to the marina.