May Day in Montpellier

We arrived home around 5:30pm on Thursday, going through all sorts of traffic, which for the most part seemed to be going south, so against us. We'd never seen anything like it, but we were tired and just didn't give it a second's thought. Les thought the grocery store would be crowded so we went straight home on the promise that he would go down to the pizza place, which he did, so we had pizza for dinner. There's always lots of wine around here so no problems that way and I found two old apples in the fridge, so cut up with granola on top, made a nice crumble for dessert. Before we went to bed, we made out a shopping list for the next day.

Foiled again!

They take May Day very seriously here. Everything, including the Trams, was shut down. Fortunately, Doug had left milk in our fridge and our boulangerie was open so we had our usual croissants for breakfast, and then I went exploring to see if any of the tiny shops were open. Another bakery and a a vegetable place were open and so I bought enough for a chèvre chaud salad with olives and tomato for lunch and pasta carbonara for dinner. And we had some hummus in the freezer so with that thawed out, we had the indredients for sandwiches for our hike on Sunday.

The hike was organized by a woman who was part of yet another Anglo/French group. She was French, about 70 (we think) and fitter than any of the rest of us. The hike was described as "easy" and we were to meet in the parking lot at St-Guilhem-le-Désert. We started off around 10:30, with a bright blue sky and hot sun, and as we were huffing and puffing up the rock strewn path, there were comments like "I thought this was going to be easy". Our leader turned and said "It was the easiest of the three trails." And, of course, you don't get these views if it's easy. This is a view of the town and abbey from 'way up high'.

And as we started down the other side, our guide took us here. There is a hermit who rebuilt this place by hand, hauling 50kg bags up cement up from a road (about 1km). If you look closely, you can see the smoke from the chimney. He would have been either cooking, or warming the house after a cold night.

This is the little chapel to the side where he offers services every Sunday at 11:30am, which means you'd have to start climbing up around 7:30 or 8:00am, because we reached this after we had had our lunch. Five and a half hours and 13.4 kms later, we were back at the parking lot.

We met some very interesting people, some American, some British and everyone had the same comments to make about learning French. Unless you marry a French person and raise your children in the language, it's so easy to get along in English here, that for many, their language skills had not improved much over the 7-12 years that had lived in the south of France. So I began to feel a bit better that my French had only slightly improved. Practice, practice and practice.

I'll leave you with this shot. Pretty spectacular scenery, n'est-ce pas?