Day 69: Cavaillon to Menerbes and back

November 14, 2022

Chicken Love

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We were pretty hard on Cavaillon yesterday, but now our position has softened quite a bit. It boils down to chicken.

At dawn, right outside our window, the Monday market began setting up in the ugly large parking lot. By the time we finished breakfast and got out our bikes, it was filled with trucks, with their stalls in front. At first it appeared as if all these stalls would be for clothes and dry goods, which would have reinforced a negative Cavaillon assessment. But not that deep in, a wood fired pizza truck was parked. OK, we bought some of that!

Also, look Joni, the price of grandkid type slippers has fallen!

And also, there are unique designs, like these Jewish slippers.

As we walked deeper into the market, finding that it filled many streets and not just our parking lot, we found more and more food vendors. Plus the streets, active with stalls and people, looked far more attractive than they did on the barren Sunday. What really turned the tide of opinion, though, was the man shown below, and his rotisserie truck. His stuff was so good! We went for the roast pork, the aubergines, potatoes, and tomatoes. And these things were Provencal style. The man put on a paste of garlic, olive oil, and herbs, including a lot of parsley. I tried to ask how he achieved the pork being so moist and tender, but Dodie spotted the answer: It was roasted underneath the chickens, and was continually being dripped on by chicken fat. What's more, rather than being a lean pork loin, I think it was rolled shoulder, which is fatter and therefore more tender. A few hours later we would really appreciate all this, while seated high on the hill that hosts Menerbes.

It was not just this one chicken stand that turned the tide. In fact there were three of them! How can you stay mad at a town that has that?

Cavaillon also had some general commercial streets which we had not seen earlier, and which looked ok, even possibly interesting.

We passed by the railway station, where we will be doing some research soon, on how to get to Marseille by rail. For now, we only noticed their nice selection of chrysanthemums.

The final really nice thing about Cavaillon (for now) was the ease of getting out of it. A cycle route begins at the train station, and eventually links to an amazing network of routes, running throughout the region. Right now, we are concerned with the Tour du Luberon, which runs from Cavaillon out east along the foot of the Luberon massif, picking up the famous hanging villages like Menerbes, Lacoste, and Bonnieux, and the Veloroute du Calavon, which is the same as Eurovelo 8, and runs up the flat valley of the Luberon (of the Calavon river), to Apt and beyond. One can also easily jump between these tracks, for example, from Menerbes to Les Beaumettes.

Just a bit of these three tracks looks like this:

Cavaillon is at that big crossing point over on the left. The Calavon route is to the north, the Luberon one south of it.

So the point is, if you can get to the Cavaillon train station, you can easily leave town, by train or bike. Gotta love the town for that!

We are on our way, except that our first move was actually to head out on the Luberon track, not the Calavon.

Initially our track sometimes looked like this, but the Autour du Luberon was more like regular but extremely quiet roads, and the Calvaron was better than what is shown, being protected, smooth, and flat.

That's the Luberon over there. We are heading east, on the north side of the massif. But the track is a loop that goes around the whole thing, so we could also head east on the south of the massif. There are at least fifteen village on that southerly leg, and they are all currently unknown to us. The only thing we know is that one of those villages is Lourmarin, the town that Peter (A Year in Provence) Mayle moved to after leaving Menerbes.

Our story for pedaling along, up to Oppede le Vieux, is one of marveling at the earth tones of the buildings, and the beautiful way man and nature have chosen and arranged the trees, rocks, and plants.

So which way do you think the track goes? If you assumed that Dodie is always right, you would be correct!

This church is taking earth tones to an extreme.

Is this a village or a house? We were fantasizing about which properties we should buy, but even in our dreams this would be too much.

To this point the Luberon route had certainly had some hills, but Oppede le Vieux was one order of steepness greater. It is quite high up on a hill, and we needed to go through it.

Dodie looks skeptical about this behemoth's chances of negotiating the roads near Oppede. The lady from the passenger side got out and scouted to see how it would go, as they tried to maneuver up and into the parking lot.

As with all the villages here, Oppede le Vieux was beautiful. Dodie stopped to chat with a woman sweeping her stoop, about how nice it must be to live in a place like this. The lady naturally agreed, pointing put that modern buildings are sterile, and that any quirks in these old buildings are neither here not there.

From Oppede le Vieux we could look down on a panorama.

Descending from Oppede le Vieux, the yellowing colour of the vines as viewed from above struck me as interesting. But my camera decided that yellowing was not good, and presented the vines as still green. That could be some stupid AI that lives inside there. The shot is still actually interesting. Shortly, I found some slightly yellower vines, and the camera could not deny it!

We arrived below Menerbes, and found it a dramatic sight, with the trees and terraces that mount its hill. Villas here , not even ones higher up, are tremendously attractive.

This is a Peter Mayle type villa, near Menerbes.

The road up to the small central square of Menerbes is a long switchback, that is not really a challenge to go up. At the top, it seems the only thing I recorded of the square is this restaurant menu board. I was not so much interested in this in what was on offer, but in the possibility that this might be Peter Mayle's restaurant, the one he wrote of so evocatively. Poor hapless Steve. He did not remember that on visiting here in 2018 he made quite an effort to track down that restaurant, learning among other things that the restaurant was not even in this town, but in Lacoste!

Once you pass through the "square", you can look down the other side of the Menerbe hill, and see the expanse of the Calavon valley.

From that point it is possible to head a bit higher. In the photo below, Dodie is heading for the true summit.

Even though I seem unable to remember important things about past rides - for example I forgot that we ever stayed in Cavaillon before, or ever visited Apt - I am pleased (or not?) to report that my basic personality and judgement are completely unalterable. For example, about that shot above?, here is how I reacted in 2018:

2018! Well, at least Dodie has changed her shirt.

At the very top is this clock tower, a major landmark of Menerbes. It is recently refurbished - 16th century. But at that time the clock still had to be wound by moving a system of weights.

We descended a bit to the lavoir, which was built in 1908. It not only has a protective roof, but two great benches, one of which served for getting out our lunch stuff.

Here is what we had got at the market in Cavaillon. You can see the potato, tomato, onion, and pork, and the aubergine, perhaps yummiest of all. See the green mixture of garlic, parsley, and etc.?

Back up toward the centre of Menerbes, I shot one more wrong restaurant, before we headed down one of the very few streets, toward the bottom of the hill.

We stopped at the Saint Blaise chapel, where the main feature was the wooden ceiling.

A little more Menerbes loveliness, and we reached the base of the hill again.

Now we cut over to the Calavon route, by heading for Les Beaumettes. It was just more and more beauty, like the lavender villa shown below, or the house with the , yes, blue shutters.

The Calavon route is dead straight and smooth.

Dodie now spotted an olive oil mill, and we pulled in for a look. This was an operation where smallholders could bring their olives to get them pressed. The price seems to be 60 euro cents per kg. We learned that in a good year it takes 5 kg to make a litre of oil, but this year it is running to 7. So that is a pressing cost of about 5 euros per litre. However rule 4 seems to say that if you are getting less than 3 litres of oil, they will top up to 3 litres at a cost of 19 euros per litre. That seems rather harsh.

Ripe (black) olives have a higher ratio of oil to water, and ripe, drying out ones have the highest ratio of oil. Even so, the oil is always made from a mixture of ripe and unripe olives. This must be because the olives ripen at random times, and I guess it is not worth it to sort them. I could not get anyone to venture an opinion about whether oil from all black olives would taste any different. And anyway, I have always identified good oil with a greenish tinge. Does anyone know about this stuff?

Olives are coming put of that vertical pipe, but we don't know what the process is from here.

"Walters" got quite a few three litre jugs. Lots of salad in their future!

Two ladies were waiting for the press to open again after lunch, and had the back of their car filled with olives. They told us that they comb them out of the trees. It took them three days to collect these olives.

The possibility for a variant on our policy of stopping at all markets came up as we passed a shop featuring 100% local produce.

Dodie sent me in, and I came back reporting that it was sort of boring. So she had to go in. She came back with chestnut yogurt, tiramisu, grapes, carrots, and chocolate mousse. I was impressed by this performance and went back in, this time emerging with pear juice - they had juice of five named pear varieties - and home made potato chips. Here is other stuff they had:

We carried on down the Calavon, spotting a couple pruning grapes in an immense field. Dodie called out, "Good Work" and they replied amicably. "How long will it take you to do the field?" "One month". We wished them good luck!

Lots of work here. I heard the lady say to the man "I think we are doing rather well". OK.

Another crop needing some work was these apples. We wondered why they were still on the trees, helping out by gathering a couple, for research purposes!

Back at our room, we are benefitting from a rare time f having stuck at the same place for more than one night. We have been refining our ideas on how to spend our remaining time in Provence. We are helped in this by the remarkable set of maps that have been put out by an outfit called Velo Loisir Provence. These maps complement the signage that is out on the actual routes.

When we arrived at the hotel yesterday, I spotted some of these maps on a rack, and ran out to Dodie, still at the bikes, to excitedly show them. Slowly over the evening the meaning and content of these maps began to sink in and be assimilated, coming out as possible planned rides. After some hours I said "Y'know, I feel like I have seen these maps before", "Naaw", we agreed. So for the record, here are the maps tonight on our bed:

And sure enough, here is the shot from 2018:

Last night I was able to find the .gpx for the Calavon and also the Luberon somewhere online. Now 2018 Steve advises me that at provence-a-velo.fr I may find further gpx's, but there are some other sites as well. The maps are great, but gpx rules.

We had been thinking about shifting to Apt and riding from there, such as to Rousillon and the Ochre Cliffs, but now we think we will stick, and ride from here. Tomorrow could be a lot of rain, so we are thinking about relatively nearby Isle Sur La Sorgue. If 2018 Grampies have already beat us there, we will be ticked. We'll have to go read their blog to find out!

Today's ride: 47 km (29 miles)
Total: 3,207 km (1,992 miles)

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