Les Baux de Provence

This morning we got our primer in French medicine. We called yesterday and inquired about an appointment to deal with Carole's burst blood vessels in her eye. We were told to show up after 9:30 for the walk in clinic. The doctor finally showed at ten minutes before 10:00. There were three people before Carole. We had appeared at the clinic at 9:20 and left at 11:30. The doctor was extremely thorough, which is good, but it was brutally slow. The end result was drops for her eye and spray for her nose, both of which we immediately acquired in Ste. Cecile les Vignes at the Pharmacie, for a fraction of what those drugs would have cost in Canada. While at the clinic in Cairanne, I had this NEW view of Cairanne.

After picking up the drugs we lunched at Chez Pigeon and then headed off for a visit to Les Baux de Provence. When you go on the autoroute it's a pretty quick trip, but the Route Nationale with the tree lined roads was a tad slow.

Our first order of operations was to do the chateau tour.

Despite the fact that it was Oct. 1, this place was still crawling with tourists - and for good reason.

We did the chateau tour once again and I have to say, we love this every time we come here.

Today we were trying - in an afternoon - to visit both the chateau and quarry sites. That actually worked out just fine.

As Claude and I walked the site, we quickly discovered that we wanted to get atop the chateau - "Warning do not go here , but if you do we have no responsibility."

It was a little windy up top, thus the pics.

Next we visited the bauxite mines shown above. Some of the displays looked like this, but the rest was a fabulous Son et Lumiere on the walls of the mine with the art work of Klimt.

This show was, after Chartres, the most impressive multi-media presentation we had ever seen. We expected static photos, but this was a dynamic changing video.

Even taking a pic of myself in the reflection was fun. We returned to Cairanne by 6:00 and were on the terrace and had a fabulus dinner of duck breast with a fig chutney found in the fridge with arugala salad and home fries. We forgot dessert and cashed it in after Dawn won one game of Bite Me.