Trip To France

I’m now, after an unusually very long (24 hours door to door) trip in my top most favorite place on earth: Aix-en-Provence, with my children and all my family. This is where I was born and grew up, and it’s quite a treat for me to return once a year back home. There’s always something so special about the place where we spend our childhood, but I feel I’m even more fortunate to have it in this paradise on earth. The overwhelming happiness starts the moment the plane hits the ground. Of course there’s all the anticipation before the trip, packing last minute, but the plane ride is not much of a joy ride for me, as I’ve become a bit of a chicken, and fear for my life at the smallest jolt of air and boy, was this one a roller coaster! the stewardess fell down the rocking was so strong! The kids thought it was great entertainment, and secretly I was making all kinds of promises to God in exchange for getting us out of there alive.
So, really I’m invaded by the great joy of the return to home, after the landing of the last plane (it’s usually a 3 legged flight). It’s everything: everyone talking french around me with the jovial South of France accent, the pleasant heat (not the humid oven sensation you get in Pensacola), the forever famous fragrance of lavender, growing everywhere, the beautiful landscape, the blue of the sky, a perfect “bleu azur”… That’s just a small but so obvious part of it, then as soon as we near the house, there’s all my family that I so rarely get to see. My brother, Alain, his wife, Bibbi, and their 3 children, Jess, Paul & Elizabeth, my sister, Sylvie, her husband, Pierre, their daughter, Rose, my parents, and there’s always lots of my cousins, uncle and aunts staying a bit. I LOVE my family and spending time with them, and in France we do it around the table with the most delicious food…
I will try to post pictures of some of the wonderful details of my Provence that make this place so dear to my heart. It takes me a few days to just settle down, the excitement of it is just so grand, I always need a few trips into town walking around my favorite streets and stores to get calm enough to hold a camera. I think if I tried too soon, I might behave a bit ADD, and just shoot everything in my path without much thoughts.
Well I could write a novel when describing this heaven, but I’ll show you a few pictures I took the other day while at a family picnic in my family home. This is the place where my father was born and raised, then I was born and raised on that same beautiful propriety. It’s called: Val Fleuri, and the house was built in the 1500s, now my aunt lives there and it’s like one of these amazing houses you see in magazines so totally french, only it’s home to me. I just took a few details that day.
I’m fascinated by those white little snails invading plants. They’re not big enough to make a nice meal (yes, I eat them!), but they look beautiful in a field:

The propriety is full of little enclaves, pleasant spots to just enjoy life… it really is that way, suddenly here I have time to enjoy life, you just take the time to sit in a nice environment and drink a coffee, eat some olives, in nice company while the kids are playing outside…

Just some oak tree leaves, a different species than the ones we have in Pensacola,

This is a very very old tractor, that my grand father, and later my dad use to ride, to tame the wheat fields on Val Fleuri. It still works!

Of course, I had to post a picture of lavender, if only we could grow it in our humid weather.