Another day, another market

Today I’ll start off with a few words about my French wheels. They’re pretty sweet! My car is a black Renault Megane Estate (aka station wagon) with a 1.6 litre turbo diesel engine and really cool wheels. The car also has GPS and is the Renault Bose model that means an amazing sound system. In Canada, this would in itself be enough for me to buy the car.

Each evening as we settle down on the terrace for cocktails a man walks down from the upper road with a cat on a leash. The cat named Ishmail walks the top of whole length of the wall. Somehow, I don’t see a Canadian cat doing this.



Tuesday means market day – probably the largest market we’ve seen – at Vaison-la-Romaine. The rest of the world is also aware of this. Talk about tight quarters! It is, however, a great place to people watch and our group quickly turned into consumers – clothing, tablecloths, cutlery and great tomato products from my tomato lady. I wonder if she knows I’ve been stalking her for years. For my protection, I must point out that this is totally non-threatening stalking.

From Vasion-la-Romaine, we thought we might lunch in St. Roman de Malagarde at Chez Claudette. Forget that! It was 1:00 and we were way too late to get a seat. So we drove across the hills and down to Coteaux & Fourchette, the new Michelin recommended restaurant on the outskirts of Cairanne.
We had an outstanding prix fixe, the girls settling for 2 courses while I went for all 3. Jackie & I started with sardines on a bed of stewed vegetables, while Dawn had a chilled-zucchini soup. Then, Dawn & I shared our main courses that were veal medallions and a slow-cooked pork with beans – yep pretty much the French version of pork and beans. Although both were good, we felt the pork and beans were the most amazing. For dessert, Jackie & I had an apple tart with figs. With the meal, we supped a Domaine Alary Estevenas white. With a majority of clairette it was quite different, to our palates anyway and we found it very enjoyable.

Next, thanks to Margaret’s notes on shopping, we popped down to Carpentras, about 25 kilometres south of Cairanne. Shoe shopping has been Margaret’s favourite here, but once again there were no shoes purchased. Incroyable!

So, back to Orange we went to stock up for dinner at Carrefour. I also fueled up and got a car wash that may be a regular occurrence with a black car. I didn’t have enough coin for the wash and found my North American credit card rejected. The nice man in charge of the wash area offered me change for a 20 Euro note and voila! a new car. Generally our chip credit cards work everywhere here, but there are clearly some hold outs where they spit on the International card. C’est la France!
We spent the remainder of the evening on the terrace with a rotisseried chicken, beans and salad and watched the sun go down with the streaked red sky that followed.