Provence

As stated in the last post, Dick and Evelyn Kurtzberg know how to vacation. They booked a week at the Four Seasons Resort in Provence. Now normally this place would be much too obscenely expensive for my wallet. But the Kurtzbergs put us on to the fact that the February rates were actually in the range of reality. Theresa and I book a reservation for a couple of nights and looked forward to a chance to get out of winter-besieged Strasbourg.

Provence is the south-eastern part of France that abuts Italy on the east and the Rhone river on the West. Neither of us had ever been there but we'd heard that the region has a mystic reputation for food, scenery, and...most importantly...warm weather.

If you go for a drive in France, don't forget your credit card. We left Strasbourg on a Thursday morning and the drive to the hotel in Tourrettes took about 7 hours. Along the way, we paid somewhere around 60 euros in tolls...which equates to something like $75 one way. Almost all of the Autoroutes (their equivalent of an Interstate Highway) are toll roads once you get a couple of miles outside of a city. Oddly enough, one of the few exceptions is in Alsace, where the A35 remains free due to some quirk of history or politics.

The hotel grounds were absolutely gorgeous, as you can see from the intro photo of the main building. And actually, the resort is not so much a hotel as it is a collection of little cottages that were built to look like the local farm houses. The photo below gives you a feel for the patio of our little villa. It would be exactly like an authentic provençal farmhouse if it weren't for the golf course in front of it.And the following would be the view from our patio. But of all local features, the one that Theresa was most impressed with is the one shown below....the bathroom.

Our apartment in Strasbourg is not so bad, but the building we are in was built around 1900 or so. Consequently, the layout was not made for indoor plumbing. We have a bathtub with a hand held shower and at the other end of the hall, in a room to small for a closet, we have a toilet. Our hotel, on the other hand, had a bathroom as big as our apartment (almost) with a big tub, a walk in shower, and his an her mirrors, and heated floors.

When I was little, my mom used to describe heaven as a place where you could do what ever you liked all the time. I think for Theresa heaven will be this bathroom.