Day 304, Uzes and surrounding towns
A little Uzes.
Paul and I left the girls to do online school stuff as we drove around to some of our favorite familiar towns. Actually, there are places in your life that are familiar, and a few that are deeply sentimental. These places are more the latter.
On our first trip to Europe in 2002, we hit a barrage of countries, since we weren’t sure when we would make it back, if ever. We rented a house in Southern France, in a town called St. Victor-la-Coste. Paul’s brother lived there for a semester while restoring the castle ruins, and suggested it.
This was in a pre-gps era. We had a huge Michelin atlas of France with a yellow cover. St. Victor didn’t make it on the map, so when we got to Chateauneuf du Pape, and started asking people if they knew how to get to this small village. Eventually, after asking for directions in many small towns, we made it to St. Vic, a sleepy town with a tiny center square. Even though it wasn’t much, it was adorable, and perfect.
This is the area around St. Vic.
The town is petite, only one place to buy your daily baguette, one tiny restaurant. But at the top of the wee mountain, in our backyard, was a castle ruin. The girls’ found it enchanted. It had a church chapel that was now intact, thanks to the work of volunteers like the girls’ Uncle Mike. But it was mostly just a large wall with stairs and other partial walls that used to make up the chateaux. To us, especially the girls, the place was magical, because it felt like it was ours. Cali was a newborn, so Paul usually carried her up. The rest of us would carry parts of our picnic, and we’d stay up there for hours. The girls created many imaginary worlds and scenarios up there.
Driving up to St. Vic from the Pouzilhac, this is what you see.
After traveling to many places now, when I ask Paul if Southern France is still his happy place, he doesn’t hesitate to answer yes. Part of his love of this area is obvious. The vineyards dot the lowlands of the rugged, stoney mountainous areas. The villages of beige homes with orange roofs dot the hillsides. The roads are windy single lane with no shoulders, which you carefully negotiate with oncoming traffic. Some roads are flanked with Plane trees that were planted in the mid 19th century. There is countryside patchwork of yellows, lavenders, greens, and squiggly black grapevines. The landscape is beautiful and varied around every curve. One can’t help but breathe deeper, feel calmer, and feel grateful to be alive witnessing such natural beauty.
This is where Paul got interested in red wine, by visiting small vineyards and cooperatives. At the local caves, people arrive with large plastic containers to fill with their favorite local table wine.
More than just the wine, the food, the scenery, the history, St. Vic holds a special nostalgia for us. As we walk through the town we see the banister the girls always slid down, where they sat to eat ice cream, where we would get Pizza Chris from the pizzeria van that came into town every Friday, where Paul played boules with the local men, where we pushed Cali around in the stroller after meals when she was a few months old.
Looking back on the last 14 years or so, this trip, this village, was a launching place, of sorts, for a lifelong interest in traveling for our family. On our first trip to Europe, and all the subsequent ones, we stayed in this small, relatively unknown village. It’s the one place that we come back to every time we are in Europe, and it always feels like coming home. To us, this town not only signifies the beginning of our love of travel, but specifically in our curiosity and fascination with places off the usual tourist track. We enjoy being the only visitors in town, to feel what it’s like to be a part of someone else’s neighborhood for a while.
We aren’t ones to snub key tourist attractions like the UNESCO sites, huge Buddhas, the tallest buildings in the world. We will definitely hit those. But our richest experiences have been when we are living in a different culture for a longer period of time. We’ve done this a few times, such as Guatemala (3 years), Costa Rica for 3 months, Paris (3 months), Tokyo (1 month), Thailand (1 month), St. Victor-la-Coste (a few months total). These longer periods of time is when we have experiences that are a bit more substantive and life changing.
In many ways, our love of travel started with our visits to St. Victor and its castle. At least sentimentally speaking, that’s the way it feels to us. This is where is all began, our love of travel and our curiosity to see the world. Thank you St. Vic, and as you know, we’ll be back.