It’s July.
As you’ve already seen, we began the month with a heavy focus on Molli Malou’s twelfth birthday.
On the day before her birthday, we attended the 60th birthday of Trine’s cousin Per (Klaus’s son, full brother of Elisabeth and half-brother of cousin Trine). This is going to be a long post with a heavy emphasis on our vacation in France, so with no disrespect intended to Per, I’m going to simply provide some of the many lovely pictures we have from that very lovely event without much commentary.
For some reason it seems that all the big Kammer family events seem to involve at least one wig.
As seen on Facebook, I got a “last photo of 11-year-old Molli Malou” when she went to bed that night.
And it’s only natural that be followed up with the first photo of the 12-year-old:
Here’s Maddie proudly modeling the tee-shirt Nana & Pop Pop sent for her 7½-year-old birthday:
We had a small birthday dinner for Molli Malou: the four of us, Mormor & Jørgen, and Molli’s friend Sofie, whose parents and brother we also invited along.
She got a “Pennyboard” for her birthday. It’s not a skateboard. It’s a Pennyboard. There’s a difference. (Apparently.)
The day before our early flight to France, we had to drop Didi off at the kennel in Måløv. Had this been the main entrance (it was merely a gate into a side yard) I might have had second thoughts about leaving her there. Yes, that’s a human-sized door.
The following morning we climbed into a cab at 4:30 in the morning on our way to spend 12 days in southern France with a guy I had last seen 19 years ago, prior to which I had most recently seen him in 1983. Stéphane and I had always remained in touch, and our contact got even more frequent thanks to Facebook, but it was a little crazy to think I was bringing my whole family to spend such a long time at the home of someone to whom I’d been introduced just four visits ago by means of this “who are you” questionnaire filled out for his school.
(Oh: I took some shots of the yard to compare to whatever we’d be coming home to.)
Our chariot awaited us!
The next two pictures are silly ones from CDG airport: I just wanted to have at least some evidence of the girls having been in Paris.
It was a brief stopover, and we were quickly on our way toward Montpelier.
Stéphane was waiting at the airport with his son, Vivien. Complications arose when we learned it would cost a lot of extra money to have both Trine and me authorized to drive our rental car, which meant that I had to follow Stéphane’s car in the rental. The girls all rode with Stéphane. The drivers of southern France have a very relaxed sense of the road, and although he’s lived in the north all his life Stéphane certainly fit right in.
We had viewed the city of Carnas on Google Maps many times, but hadn’t really wrapped our heads around it. From the maps and Google Streetview and what we could find to read about it, it remained very enigmatic to us.
When we finally arrived, we parked in the city center: a little parking lot alongside the parish church.
(That central square also has the town’s monument to its war dead from 1914-1918.)
The house we’d be staying in was on the Rue Gaston Chatal. I think we all enjoyed staying on a street named for someone so especially good at expectorating!
Here are a couple of shots of the neighborhood.
And here are the girls by the front door:
I ought to mention up-front that although a lot of the pictures I posted on Facebook were in black and white, I chose to present most of the pictures for this blog in color. That’s because on Facebook I wanted to have nice photos, but in here I anticipate that you’d rather see how things actually looked. (But when I print some of these photos — and there are a bunch I plan to — I will probably be printing them all in black and white.)
Anyway.
Stéphane’s wife, Sovi, liked to cook every day with fresh vegetables, so she was kind of an authority on the local produce stands. One of them was right beside a vineyard, so I felt compelled to get pictures of the girls at a vineyard. (I hadn’t yet realized that everything down there was right next to a vineyard. Even the vineyards.)
Sovi also taught us a lot about selecting the most perfectly ripe melons. There are males and females, for one thing, and you want the males. And the little orange sphinctery thing on one pole of the melon should be just starting to crack — there should be little hairline fissures around it — because that means the sugar is expanding (or something), which is where you want it to be when you eat it. (The pressure within the melon changes, hence the cracks.) Either it’s very good advice for selecting melons or Sovi played a great prank on us, I’ll let you be the judge.
Here’s Maddie, having found a ripe male melon:
The house was enormous. It belongs to Sovi’s adopted mother, Monique. (Her adopted father, Jean, passed away about a decade ago.) It’s essentially one whole big block in the heart of fabulous downtown Carnas, and had seven or eight bedrooms scattered over two primary buildings. The Chateau (it’s not a chateau, but that’s what I’m going to call it to keep things simple) had a cozy little courtyard, exquisitely Mediterranean in appearance, and one corner of this courtyward was set aside entirely for the purpose of feeding the local feral cats. Not a lie. Monique loves the local feral cats, and in the course of our visit we got to know at least six or seven of them.
Above is from the courtyard, below are three more shots of the “exterior” of the chateau as seen from the streets of downtown Carnas.
This was our rental car.
The car had a GPS that knew southern France pretty well, but not very well, which made for some entertaining diversions.
One final general note: I took 860 photos and videos on this trip. In selecting what to use in this blog, I decided for once to avoid as many unpeopled photos as possible. I have literally hundreds of fantastic pictures of some of the incredible things we saw, but this isn’t my travel blog. It’s the Molli & Maddie blog. So I really did focus more on people for once. (But not quite yet: there’s a little more exposition to get out of the way.)
Here’s Maddie having her first breakfast in France.
Here are some of the damn cats having their breakfast.
Jean, Sovi’s adopted father, was an archeologist — and apparently an accomplished one. There were rocks all over the house, which had surprised us at first, but made more sense when we learned they were mostly fossils or rocks that were in one way or another quite special. We got to touch a big dinosaur poo, swing a woolly mammoth leg bone like a club, and marvel over all sorts of wonders that were tens of millions of years old.
One of our first days there we took a forty-five minute drive out to a spot on the Heuralt river just a bit upstream from the Saint-Étienne d’Issensac bridge. It’s a 14th-century bridge that is believed to have replaced a wooden bridge dating to the 12th-century. In the little curve of the river where we did our swimming, there was nothing visible except the bridge, meaning what we saw as we bathed was the same thing people had been seeing for the last 700 years.
After the swim Stéphane and I walked out on the bridge and took a selfie.
The girls were nervous about walking onto the bridge, but were eager to be photographed near it. (Maddie told me why she had felt it was important to do her “OMG” face, but I no longer remember whether it was the height of the bridge, the age of the bridge, or the intensity of the heat.)
Here’s another angle of the chateau courtyard
Note to self: buy this cheese whenever you find it:
As seen on Family Group: I had brought Stéphane a bunch of pictures from my visit in 1997; this encouraged him to pull out a picture he had scanned from 1982:
The metropolis of Carnas at night (“city of light!”):
Everyone except for Maddie and I got quickly into a habit of sleeping in, so I had quite a few mornings alone with her. On one of them we took a skateboard trip way out into the hinterlands of Carnas — practically out in the provinces (our distance from the city proper can be gauged by the very remote tower of the church in the background):
Monique does watercolors. She showed us many of them — a lot from her time in the Middle East and North Africa (she spent much of her life working for the United Nations) — but this watercolor of Carnas seems to have been painted from even further out of town than Maddie and I were in the picture above!
The girls enjoyed playing badminton out in the municipal park of Carnas.
One of the region’s larger honey plants is just outside Carnas, and we took a little tour and tasting there one afternoon. I took a lot of photos, but none of them read very well, so I’m just including this one to say, “yes, we toured the local honey place.”
(We brought a whole lot of honey home and it is some of the best I have ever tasted.)
As impressive as Carnas may have been, it was necessary from time to time to escape its urban madness. At such moments, we enjoyed the leisurely pace of little nearby Sommières, a medieval village dating back to the 13th century. (“Nearby” in the southern French sense — that is, about 15 miles from downtown Carnas.)
…but the relaxed rhythms of Sommières wore quickly on the girls’ nerves. (Unless it was more a case of Daddy taking too many pictures.)
…and in any case, they always bounced right back.
In black and white the photo below is about as exquisitely French as any photo of Maddie from the whole trip, but like I said… you deserve to see it as it actually was. (That’s the Carnas church behind her: she’s standing in the Time’s Square of Carnas.)
Like all great cities, Carnas has a restaurant. Not all the time. Actually, just on Tuesdays. And technically only on most Tuesdays. The Carnas restaurant didn’t show up the Tuesday on which we were counting on it, so Stéphane and I had to drive to Sommières and place our order with their pizzeria. (Note the splendid wine list to his right.)
I kept forgetting about the little Mediterranean lizards all over the place… the skittish bastards were everywhere, but you almost never noticed them until they were suddenly skittling madly away from you.
One thing I never understood was this display of ordinary rocks in one of the chateau hallways. I took a picture of it because I thought, “how peculiar.” They weren’t fossils or geodes or anything of any particular interest.
We’ll take a closer look at these rocks later.
We made two big day trips in the course of our vacation, the first of which was to the city of Nîmes, about 45 minutes east of Carnas.
The main thing I wanted to see there was the old Arena, the only complete Roman ampitheatre in existence anywhere in the world. Stéphane assured me there were other cool things to see: I didn’t care. So we set the GPS for the arena and drove straight in. And there it was.
(The arena pictures are spectacular in black and white.)
Sitting in the plebian section, Maddie has another OMG moment.
At the top of the arena:
Afterwards we stopped at a little street-side cafe for a snack: it was hot and the girls were wilting.
I’m keeping true to my pledge to focus on people pictures, but this picture of one cathedral (St. Paul’s) was too impressive to pass up. In black and white this is probably my favorite non-person photograph of the whole trip.
When we bought the tickets to enter the Arena, we were offered a slightly more expensive ticket that would also give us access to the Maison Carrée and the Tour Magne. We didn’t know what they were, but since we didn’t plan to spend all day at the Arena it seemed like a cheap insurance policy.
The Maison Carrée is a Roman temple, one of the best preserved within the entire are of the old (western) Roman Empire. It was built before the birth of Christ, and since we actually ended up using our ticket and going into it to see the little movie about the history of Nîmes, it is the only building I have ever set foot in that has a BC “built-in” date.
We were all impressed, and we actually found the movie very educational (although we kept having to remind Maddie that the bloody reenactments in the film weren’t actual documentary footage), so we figured we might as well press on and take advantage of the third item covered in our ticket: La Tour Magne in the Jardin de Fontaines. Stéphane had recommended the garden but hadn’t said anything about any tower, so even if the paid attraction panned out we figured the garden would justify the two kilometer walk in the by-now broiling heat.
The garden was gorgeous. I took dozens of pictures, many of them very good, very few of them with people in them — and of those, not many that came out well. But I would absolutely urge anyone going to Nîmes to spend time in that garden, which is all little ponds and canals at its base, then a vast slope of winding paths leading waaaay up to the Tour Magne.
It was a long, hot slog up that hill (there are no mountains in southern France, only hills), but the tower was fantastic.
The “Big Tower” dates from about 15 BC and was a kind of watchtower and fortification. It was also the second structure of the BC era in which I’d ever set foot.
Molli Malou, Maddie, and I climbed the whole damn thing and the view from the top made it all worthwhile.
As we’d trudged up the many, many circular stairs leading up the tower, we were all growing increasingly perturbed. It hadn’t seemed that tall from outside, but the winding staircase just went on and on and on.
Finally we had came to a little landing just below the interior ceiling. Molli Malou had gotten ahead of Maddie and me (I was holding Maddie’s hand), and now disappeared around the bend, pressumably to finally get outside. Maddie and I rounded the flat platform of the landing, sighing and panting with relief at finally having achieved the summit, but as we turned the last little corner we were suddenly confronted with a little chamber containing… more stairs. There stood a visibly exasperated Molli Malou, facing us, arms akimbo.
“Surprise,” she said, “more stairs!”
I don’t know, but that slew me. I was laughing intermittently for the next half hour.
Which is about how long it took us to get back down to the “surface” and nearly make it out of the garden when Maddie noticed there were Pony rides to be had.
Leaving the garden was postponed.
We had a nice late lunch at a little burger joint in the middle of town, then as we made our slow and leisurely way back to the parking garage I caught a picture of the rising moon through an arch in the Arena — I tried capturing it at two light settings, but neither comes close to matching how cool it looked in reality:
We were literally within yards of the parking garage entrance when Maddie and Molli Malou spotted some amusements that had been set up in the little park over the underground garage. That delayed us a little.
Back at the chateau that evening, it was Stéphane and Sovi’s 20th anniversary.
The next day was truly a red-letter day: the 14th of July, and the Tour de France would be passing through Sommières! We hurried down to a spot where we could watch.
This was the stage, by the way, where the leader ultimately ended up smashing into a cop bike and running up a hill and — well, either you follow that stuff or you don’t. I have a lot of video from the bikes whooshing past us (including the leaders, which I posted on FB), but the above is the only good photo.
After the bikers had come and gone, we wandered back into sleepy little Sommières, since there was no rush to get back to the relentless pace of Carnas. As we crossed the Roman Bridge, we noticed some unusual activity in the river below:
The town was all decked out for the Tour.
On the way back to the Chateau we stopped at a little “bouncy” park so Maddie could get her bounce on.
And, back at the chateau…
We had what we thought was a late dinner (but was probably the earliest we ate for the whole trip, with dinner hitting the table around 9:30 pm), then went back into Sommières for the Bastille Day fireworks.
They were very good — the girls loved it, and Maddie was actually so impressed she cried for the beauty of it all (and refused to watch Molli’s video of the fireworks in the car, because she was afraid it would make her cry again) — and it was only when we got back to the chateau that we realized it had been a hell of a long day and we were all hot and exhausted and ready for bed.
Then Stéphane turned on the television and we saw what had happened in Nice — and three or four of us acknowledged that it had also passed through our minds, standing there in that pressing crowd of thousands watching the fireworks on the riverbanks of Sommières — that we were all sitting ducks if anyone had wished to harm us.
We (the adults) watched the television numbly, stupidly, in that all-too-familiar way we all know.
The next day we got up early and set our GPS for Les Baux de Provence, hailed online as “the most beautiful village in France.” We hadn’t planned to go there, but John McConnico had texted me saying it was the only opportunity we’d have to see him and his family while down in southern France, so we leaped at the chance.
The GPS, Jane, played some nasty tricks on us along the way, costing us about half an hour in absurd detours (“take a left now,” Jane insisted, as we stared incredulously left at a narrow alley in a tiny little village that was blocked off with concrete barriers). We therefore resolved to fire Jane and hire her male assistant, Daniel, if we ever made it to Les Baux de Provence. (We did and we did, and although her replacement, Daniel, was just as mischievous, he never costs us any serious time.)
We crossed the Rhône along the way, through Arles, and I enjoyed that. It was just another bridge over just another river, but it felt significant to add it inwardly to the list of Great Rivers I’ve crossed. We made a big deal of it for the girls, but they didn’t real seem to see it as anything particularly interesting. Which I suppose was fine, because it wasn’t. Bridges and rivers are not that unusual in our little archipelago homeland. Why should the Rhône be special?
Despite Daniel’s morning misconduct, we made it to Les Baux de Provence about 20 minutes ahead of the McConnico clan. I’m in very regular contact with John via email, Facebook, chats, and fantasy football (where Pop Pop and Uncle Gene are also regularly in touch with him), but had not actually seen him, Sandie, or Liam since the day they left Copenhagen in 2008. Both Sandie and Trine were pregnant at the time, so each family had increased by one since we’d last seen each other.
Les Baux de Provence is a strange place. I’d never heard of it before. From Arles we’d driven up through a lot of open country and finally through a little town called Fontvielle that seemed to be built entirely along a single road sloping gently upward. At the city limits the gentle sloping became steeper, and the slope increased with each progressive kilometer until we suddenly found ourselves on a narrow, winding road taking us high, high up into a strange environment of rocky outcroppings. It looked like a cross between a set from the original Star Trek and a low-key Dr. Seuss background. (I use that low-brow metaphor advisedly; the high-brow, literary symbolism comes later.)
You don’t drive into the village itself: you park below and then climb a few hundred steps one way or another (there are many entrances) until you finally enter the walled village.
That about taps my expository patience, I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.
In the pic below, that’s Luka to Molli Malou’s left and Liam sitting directly across from her. John is taking a photo to my right, that’s why Molli and Liam are looking that way. (The other kids are Sandie’s nieces. We don’t care about them.)
As in Nîmes, there were three events one could purchase tickets for: entrance to the Chateau including performances of “Le Grand Duel” and the catapult; the Chagall-in-the-Mines exposition; and a modern gallery that was showing Chagall drawings. The last seemed a little strange to me until John explained that every tourist spot in southern France offers three exhibits, events, or entrance fees. The good people of Les Baux had probably just added a gallery to have three offerings: two would have been unacceptable.
So we started off by viewing the Grand Duel at the base of the Chateau.
It was some pretty awful theatre with some pretty awful actors doing some pretty lousy combat. Molli Malou’s expression pretty much says it all.
When the Grand Duel was finally over, we wandered around on our own. Here are Maddie and Luka ready for a duel by crossbow (they had samples of crossbows from four or five different centuries).
And erstwhile best friends Molli Malou and Liam:
(Whoa now, kids, someone’s gonna lose an eye!)
Interesting note about the background behind Maddie in this picture:
The weird landscape of all that white limestone jutting out of the severe hills made such an impression on Dante Alghieri that it inspired him for the description of Hell in the Divine Comedy, and that part of the Les Baux valley is therefore now known as Val d’Enfer, or the Valley of Hell. (I took a lot of pictures of it — but none with people, so the hell with them.)
This whole place screamed to be photographed in black and white, so I’ve sort of mixed it up in the pictures I’m posting here.
John was the one who chose the location and “mood” for these portraits of Molli Malou and Liam. His are spectacular, and he’ll be sending them to me later this summer. For now, here are my own feeble versions:
Ah!… but John did at least send me one of the pictures he took already, and it is now my favorite family picture of us :
I put a lot of effort into my role as Tortured Prisoner #3, so let’s zoom in on that.
The next shot was featured on Facebook in black and white. Here it is in the original.
Those little stalls set into the stone there are medieval workshops. The same half-assed entertainers who carried out Le Grand Duel doubled as cobblers, smiths, and tailors in the respective workshops. But as Aunt Deb observed on FB, none of that matters: we should just say it’s an Indiana Jones set and leave it at that.
(One thing I haven’t mentioned yet: the “La Mistral” winds were blowing up to 90 kmh in this part of southern France that week, which had caused some forest fires in the region to blow out of control and, just as seriously, was responsible for some of the crazy hair you’re seeing in these pictures.)
The mines of Les Baux de Provence were worked for centuries (millennia, maybe, I wasn’t always paying attention), but are no longer being worked. To make them more appealing to tourists, they exhibit art in the great antechambers of the mines. The exhibit while we were visiting was alternating between a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland (it was playing as we entered and it was pretty anodyne), the work of Marc Chagall, and some other thing I can’t remember (and that we did not see).
The Chagall portion was amazing: projections of his work, and his life, were displayed on the walls, floors, and ceiling, with a great eclectic soundtrack (including Ella & Louis, Janis Joplin, Mozart, and many others). The projections were very well done: the antechambers can best be visualized as a single massive and roughly rectangular chamber, of about 100 x 150 meters and maybe 25 meters high, with massive blocks of roughly hewn stown standing as columns throughout the space, most of them about ten meters on a side. The columns were of course part of the mountain hill itself: they were simply parts of the antechamber that had not been carved out. There were ledges carved into some of the exterior walls, and a lot of huge tunnels opening off the main space.
The projections were done, as you may be able to see in the photos, such that each planed surface was treated as a separate “screen,” and despite their wildly irregular shapes (remember, all of this was carved out of the side of a mountain big hill), the boundaries between walls (and floors and ceiling) were meticulously maintained.
It was a very immersive and engaging experience that’s hard to reproduce in words. I took about 50 pictures of the Chagall experience and include those that came out the best.
We said our teary goodbyes to the McConnico clan and made our way back to the Chateau du Carnas, stopping briefly in Fontvielle for ice cream and drinks… and a quick review of the local real estate market.
Besides the cats, the garden of the Chateau was often visited by a bold little hedgehog with a fondness for cat food.
Morning glories in Sommières:
On our way to La Petit Travers beach (just east of Monpelier’s famous “Palavas” beach, which we never got around to visiting), we stopped for a traditional French lunch.
And at last we were to splash ourselves in the Mediterranean!
The part of Languedoc-Rousillon we were staying in is best known for its wines, melons, Herbes de Provence, and Lavendar.
Also apparently this flower, which, whatever it is, is lovely.
Also there were a whole lot of these birds — hawks? Falcons?
Another swimming hole we experienced was in a nearby lake. The trip was kind of a fiasco, but it was a lovely setting.
The four of us went into Sommières that night to check out their Monday “L’Estivale,” a sort of night-time market of local merchants: local wines, local foods, local musicians… it finally gave me a chance to get the escargots I’d been hankering after.
(I posted Molli’s reaction shots on Facebook but for some reason apparently chose not to include them here. Desn’t really matter: she actually liked them. Maddie could barely even look at them.)
Sommières is very picturesque in the evening light.
We got home in time to play with the hedgehog.
We grilled every night, which was part of the reason dinners often didn’t get served until 10, 11, or even later. Sometimes we grilled in the afternoon as well. Often our lunches were so late that we assumed they were dinners.
One of the last days of our visit we went off to the greatest watering hole of them all: a beautiful little waterfall in the mountains big hills about 45 minutes northwest of Carnas.
Maddie does calisthenics to perk herself up when dinner is running late.
The most visible landmark of Sommières is the medieval tower looming over it. We finally decided to pay it a visit.
Molli Malou was getting more and more attached to her phone as the visit progressed. I love the juxtaposition of this thousand-year-old tower — awesome to behold — inspiring Molli Malou only as something to shade her iPhone screen.
The Collado family: Zoé, Stéphane, Sovi, and Vivien.
(We got along, by the way, fantastically — all of us. There was not a single moment of dischord. It’s hard to believe how infrequently Stéphane and I have seen each other, because we really do relate to each other as though we’ve been best friends all our lives. Which we kind of have, it just seems strange given how rarely we see each other.)
Boules!
Our penultimate night in France we wanted to have dinner out. We had a hard time finding a nice restaurant, the girls got impatient, and next thing you know we were eating at a burger and pizza café that didn’t serve alcohol.
But even burger and fries and no alcohol is a lovely dinner with such company as this!
We had a full, orange moon that night. (Don’t know why the color of the moon doesn’t play.)
One day in the first week of our visit a nestling fell out of its nest within the chateau courtyard. Zoé or Sovi (I forget) rescued it. They brought it into the house in a shoebox and tended it the duration of our visit. Molli and Maddie sometimes helped feed it from a syringe. I just saw today on Facebook that it has grown enough under their tender care that they now just need to decide whether to introduce it into the wild or keep it as a pet.
Here it is a day or two after the rescue:
Despite the vineyards all around us, we never did a real tour or tasting and only made to this one caveau.
Where we bought this:
…and although it was only a 12 euro bottle, we have been led to believe it may have been the best 12 euros we ever spent.
It’s too complicated, and a little beside the point, describing all the friends and family members that came and spent a few nights at the chateau while we were there. Tinton (I’m guessing at the spelling) here struck up a pretty good relationship with Maddie — they’re just two months apart in age — so I thought I ought to at least mention him.
Our last afternoon in France brought us back to La Petit Travers…
And then, on our very last night there, it was finally mentioned to us in passing that the shelves of “normal” rocks in the hallway weren’t normall at all… under a special lamp (I assume infrared or something), they glowed in wild fluourescent colors as if painted with day-glo spray paint:
So that’s why they had been collected.
Maddie’s friendship with Tinton was cute: having no common language, they communicated mostly through smiles, nods, and shakes of the head — and a whole lot of technology.
Running late on our way to the airport, we were fortunate enough to find that the only gas station in Sommières was backed up due to … the tourist train.
And that was that.
A few more pictures of the girls in “Paris:”
And our excited face as the plane takes off from CDG for Denmark! (Believe it or not, we were all actually very ready to be coming home.)
The Zoo has basically taken over the baggage claim area with some pretty cute promotions:
By the time we got home it was well after midnight. Trine and I got up early the next morning to bring the last missing resident home:
And we let Didi wake both the girls:
And we had a feast of a Danish breakfast!
My biggest and perhaps only complaint about our visit to France is that somehow, in some way, it got Maddie much too interested in make-up.
# # #
So that’s that. We’ve been home five days now and are all settled back into our happy home, using this week of staycation to take care of long-deferred little projects and household tasks we just haven’t had time to get around to. It’s not a ton of fun, but it’s very satisfying.
Sort of.
