Les Gorges du Verdon

After parting ways with Dick and Evelyn, we headed north for a side trip on our way to Avignon. To the north is the province of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and countryside even more rugged than where we had been. The Verdon river flows through this almost unihabitable region and has carved "the Grand Canyon of France", more precisely known as the Gorges du Verdon.

You can't capture the scale of mountains in a photograph. It's all too big. The following sequence of photographs gives a hint, but not the full measure, of the beauty.

The drive looked like it would take an hour or so on the map, but in reality it took almost four hours. The road ran for miles on the ragged edge of the gorge. I almost wore out the shifter in the car downshifting around the hairpin curves. And two feet from the edge of the road it often was a 1000 ft drop to the canyon below. Another example of something that American lawyers would have shut down years ago.

Now, I had always known that Theresa was a little bit afraid of heights. But in 24 years of marriage, I had never realized how much. She was absolutely petrified with terror whenever the gorge was on her side of the car. About half-way through our trip, we had to cross over the gorge on the bridge below - the pont de l'Arturby. It's 820 feet to from the road to the bottom and the bridge has become a favorite for bungee jumpers. It was not, however, a favorite for Theresa. She refused to cross it in the car and, instead, got out and walked down the middle of the bridge so she couldn't see over the sides. This is a trip that she will never allow us to take again.

The gorges end at Lac de Saint Crois, a big lake nestled up in the mountains. From here we drove west back into the upper reaches of Provence and toward the Rhone river and Avignon. As you drive west the terrain drops and softens and becomes more agricultural. In the last 50 km or so we drove through acres and acres of lavender farms. In July the countryside is supposedly purple as far as the eye can see. We hope to be back to check it out.