Provence (France Part 15)

On our journey through Provence, we unfortunately haven't seen any blooming lavender fields yet, as it's still a bit early in May. If you want to see the flowers, you have to travel here in the summer from mid-June onwards - but also expect significantly more other tourists. So we only saw green plants where there will be purple flowers in a month. But the poppies were blooming and the meadows with red dots were also a beautiful sight.

Nevertheless, we still made our first stop at the lavender museum to learn about the cultivation and processing of lavender. There was an impressive collection of old distillation apparatuses used to extract the precious lavender oil. However, since it can also be used to make schnapps, they had been made unusable by customs with holes...

Another popular photo motif in blooming lavender fields is the Abbaye de Sénanque. The Cistercian monastery, founded in 1148, is located in a valley surrounded by lavender fields. We also made a short photo stop - of course without flowers.

Our stop in Roussillon was also about a beautiful landscape - without lavender. We walked through the small village to the well-known hiking trails through the ochre cliffs.

We still wanted to visit the former capital of Provence. Even today, Aix-en-Provence is not a small city, so we got stuck in traffic and took some time to find a supermarket and a gas station. In the city center, we took a break at Place du Général-de-Gaulle.

From there, we strolled along the city's grand avenue, Cours Mirabeau, which was already established as a plane tree alley in 1649.

We walked through the smaller alleys and many squares of the old town before it was time to continue to Marseille.