Gordes and Menerbe, Sunday

     Here are some more pictures of the little tower house where we are staying.

 The road up to Gordes where it meets our little lane.

 Gordes at sunset from our lane.

Betsy looking for the perfect picture on an after dinner stroll through town. 

Gordes, Saturday

 This is the view of Gordes from just down the lane where we are staying. It is an easy walk into town and wonderful bike riding if you don't mind the climb up the fierce hill on which the little town is perched. We will be here for a week using this as a base to explore St. Remy where Van Gogh committed himself to the care of an asylum and Aix where Cezanne spent the majority of his life.

 Here is the little tower we are camped out in, an old garden folly from the 1800's that has been turned into a guest house. The living room is an old orangery at the base and the mid-section is a bedroom with a little porch.

There is a bath up on the third floor where the arched window and skylight are located. It's a wonderful place with a view across the valley toward Menerbe which looks like a cruise ship at night when its lights come on.

The place comes with a little pool and its own garden lined with olive trees. 

Salads and Orangina on the little veranda.

Friday and Saturday, Arles

 This is the reconstruction of the famous Pont de Langlois, a motif Van Gogh painted and drew at least nine times during his stay in Arles. The original bridge was replaced and then destroyed by the Germans during he war, but Van Gogh has become so much a part of the local lore that the tourist board took apart an identical bridge and reconstructed it further up the canal in a setting that replicates the feeling of the original spot. The original location is now very close to the major highway that passes through Arles. It was fun to visit the site and see the houseboats that dot the banks of the canal nearby.

Here are a set of Van Gogh's paintings and some original photographs of the scene that Van Gogh painted.

The bright colors and strong sunlight that Van Gogh loved still fill the streets of Arles. This is a cafe right in the center of town across from the Place de la Republic.

This was the puppet show we had seen setting up earlier in the day, just across the street from the location of Vincent's "Yellow House" and near the location of the "Night Cafe."

 These children were taking part in a parade and festival of traditional dress that included a parade of the beautiful Camargue horses which start out life as brown but turn white as adults.

Thursday, Arles

This is the reconstructed Roman Colosseum that dominates the hillside of Arles.

This picture from the top of the colosseum shows the Rhone.

This view from the top of the Colosseum looks up the Rue Voltaire toward Van Gogh's "yellow house" which stood near the top right corner of the picture until it was destroyed during the second world war.

Here is a little puppet theater that was setting up for an evening performance.

This is the hospital courtyard where Van Gogh stayed after his manic attack where he severed part of his ear. He painted several pictures here both of the courtyard and a view of the ward. 

Wednesday, Biking South of Arcachon

We spent another day biking on the beautiful trails that run just behind the Atlantic beaches around Arcachon, about thirty miles east of Bordeaux. Just south of town we stopped and climbed a three hundred meter sand dune, filled that day with children on field trips. The dune stretches for about 6 kilometers south of town, part of a great ridge of sand pushed in by the Atlantic storms.

Here is a class climbing the dune with their teachers.

This photo only hints at the vastness of the great dune and the sandbars just seaward of it. 

We loved this little girl's head scarf/miter

We're biking down the Atlantic coast on a wonderful trail through the pine forests just behind the Atlantic beaches.

Here is the entrance to our hotel, the Regina, a rambling old aging beauty built in the local style. With 14 foot ceilings and giant windows, it was very comfortable with a lit swimming pool under our second story windows.

Betsy is standing on the middle of a beautiful iron footbridge that connects the residential neighborhood  with a beautiful belvedere looking out over the bay. 

Here is one of the views from the belvedere looking out over the bay.

Tuesday, Bassin d'Arcachon

The bay around Arcachon has hundreds of miles of bike trails, many separated from the road like this one and a number through the vast forests that surround the towns just to the east of Bordeaux. Betsy's happy because she has found a waterproof handlebar bag to carry her camera when we bike.

We've stopped for a lunch of panini at a little shop just off the bike path.

Most of the towns we passed were middle class beach towns, but this small chateau sat down at the bottom of the bay next to a bird sanctuary. 

This is the bike map of the Bassin d'Arcachon showing the bike paths in red. We biked around the Bassin the first day and then biked south the second. The enormous sand dune is in the lower left.

Monday Night, Arcachon

On Monday we drove down to Arcachon, a stopover on our way to Arles. This little coastal city is at the midpoint of an excellent set of bike paths that stretch down along the Atlantic coast, many set in the managed forests the French keep just behind the dunes. We are staying at an old 1880's hotel set in an old resort community built when the train line first reached the coastal town from nearby Bordeaux which is about forty miles inland.  The architecture is stunning, old highly decorated and turreted summer homes all set around a beautiful park and belvedere. Here are a few examples all within several blocks of the hotel.

Sunday Afternoon, Quimper

On Sunday afternoon, we drove to the beautiful city of Quimper about forty minutes from Pont Aven. The cathedral is beautiful with remains of the old city walls around the outside giving it a wonderful prospect from the river. 

Here is a detail of the flying buttresses.

                                                              Gauguin loved the local style of polychromed carving used in many of the churches.

Here is another example from the cathedral.

The local museum has a wonderful collection of Pont Aven school paintings

but they also have a wonderful new central hall built to hold a set of murals 

painted in a local hotel and moved here when the hotel was demolished. 

The murals depict life in Bretagne with scenes of fishing and farming done in the same palette Gauguin would develop with its bold use of maroon and yellow orange. 

The museum has some of the artifacts from the rooming house in le Poldu where Gauguin stayed including this barrel he carved. 

Betsy is standing in a beautiful garden terraced in the remains of some of the old city walls. 

Sunday Morning, le Pouldu

We drove down on Sunday morning to le Pouldu, the second village Gauguin stayed in, a coastal hamlet  that now has a number of vacation houses and condominiums but in the late 1880's was just a tiny village backed by farmland and fronting a bold rocky coast with a couple of sandy beaches. This building is a reconstruction of the rooming house run by Marie Henry that Gauguin stayed in with Meyer de Haan, a Dutch painter whose family paid a stipend that supported the two painters, Gauguin serving as teacher. Over the winter, the two painters decorated the dining room with paintings that were wallpapered over and only discovered years later.

 This beach appears in several of Gauguin's paintings. The area is windswept with most of the trees leaning inland from the severity of the ocean breezes. It was blowing a steady twenty five knots when we first arrived. The last white house on the lower right was the only structure when Gauguin painted here. It's pictured below, centered in the photograph, and painted from the side in Gauguin's work.

Most of the farms from Gauguin's time have disappeared, but this boarded up house sits just back in the fields behind the village. 

The little church in le Pouldu has been restored and still has the carvings both in stone and wood that inspired Gauguin's Yellow Christ and other works.

Figure at the corner of the roof.

Polychromed Christ hung from one of the beams in the church.