Sunday 15th September

Do you remember those lazy Sunday mornings when we were at work and looked forward to a lie in and perhaps a spot of breakfast with the Sunday papers? Well it is not like that if your on tour with the Jones’ and Foskett’s. There were larks still rubbing their eyes, yawning and stretching, as we left Arc en Ciel. We would have been even earlier but we had to wait for the bread we had ordered to be delivered, in the end it was late so we went without it, our tyres kicking up the dust as we headed for Gordes (pop. 2130)

Gordes’ entry in the Lonely Planet guide book begins; “Arguably the scenic queen of the Luberon’s hilltop villages…”. Well it is not! We have done a few of the Luberon’s hilltop villages now and we  would say that Gordes is more of the Princess Beatrice of the Luberon’s hilltop villages. A place that over-promises and under-delivers and it has the most expensive coffee so far. Just off the square, which is dominated by a run-of -the-mill chateau, is a very expensive hotel and outside it was swarming with flunkies, dressed as beige hobbits, waiting to take the guests very expensive cars to offsite parking.

Talking of parking, our car park had one of the most confusing signs explaining the charges we have come across. Wendy and Lesley were joined by a group of french visitors all trying to interpret how much we need to pay and how to do it. Fortunately I spotted the ‘Pay by Phone’ logo and for once the app was clearer than the board in the car park.

Gordes one saving grace is that it has caves under the town; and one family, who bought up large parts of the town in the 1950s, excavated them and have turned them into a museum, showcasing how they were used in medieval times (olive oil pressing, tanning, storing, hiding – that sort of thing).

As a postscript to our visit to Gordes, we discovered that great swathes of the village were destroyed by the Nazis in retribution for a local resistance attack on a German column as the Allies were advancing from the Mediterranean. The subsequent restoration has probably created the slightly false feel I sensed about the place? It still doesn’t excuse the hobbits!